On Talking Like A Teenager

I love learning languages. Every time I try out a new word or phrase and someone understands me, it feels a little bit like magic.

Last time I was here in Fez I studied Modern Standard Arabic (MSA, or FUSHA) for 9 months. This is the brand of Arabic that is used in news and politics and is at least understood, if not spoken, by literate people across the Arab world. It falls somewhere between Quranic Arabic and the spoken dialects. I focused on Fusha last time because of the breadth of its usefulness. This time around, however, I have the pleasure of learning DARIJA, the Moroccan dialect.

Each country, and sometimes even different cities within the same country have their own dialects of Arabic. The dialects of the Gulf region and the actual Middle East tend to be closest to Fusha while those of North Africa tend to be quite different. The Moroccan dialect is very very different. The difference between them seems to be similar to the difference between Castillian Spanish and Catalan, although I don’t know enough Catalan to say that with any confidence.

I’m very happy to have received a language grant. Because Moroccan Arabic is so different from the standard, many Moroccans – especially the illiterate – do not speak or understand Fusha. Even when people understand, it takes quite a bit of patience for them to speak it. More often than not, my friends start out speaking to me in Fusha, but they get bored quickly. They switch to their mother tongue of Darija, and it’s much more of a struggle for me to understand.

As a linguistics nerd, I love Fusha. It is a beautiful, rich language. But Darija has a beauty of its own. My host family watches soap operas from all over the world, dubbed into Arabic. Most of the time they’re in Egyptian, Syrian or Lebanese Arabic, and occasionally in Moroccan. But MARA MARA (from time to time), we’ll get a soap in Fusha. I was really excited to watch these, since I understand them. But I hate it. Not only because they’re really dumb shows that rot my brains out aside from the linguistic benefits, but because soap operas just don’t work in Fusha. Because it’s not a mother tongue, it’s unnatural and so hard to convey any sort of real emotion

SOUKAINA, my 16 year-old host sister, is a feisty little thing. Everything she says in Darija is dripping with passion. Whether she’s happy or sad or angry doesn’t matter. Every word that comes out of her mouth is beautiful. I want to talk like her.

SHWIA BI SHWIA (little by little) I’m learning to speak Arabic like a teenager with an attitude.