A review of the
various Moroccan academic approaches to understanding the Vernacular of
Moroccan Arabic, that is Moroccan spoken Arabic, is provided in this paper. El
Hanchi attempts to elucidate the foundations on which an academic understanding
of Moroccan Spoken Arabic is built, in a bid to understand efforts which seek
to replace Modern Standard Arabic with Moroccan Spoken Arabic across official
channels throughout the country. To this end, the author examines the
dominating Euro-American attitudes to language in Morocco, to better understand
how Western scholars theorized Moroccan Spoken Arabic. Rhetoric in the
Euro-American academe sets off from the supposition that there is an
irreconcilable chasm between Modern Standard and Moroccan Spoken varieties of
Arabic, demanding also that Moroccan dialect replace Modern Standard Arabic in
official correspondence. Western academics, presenting ostensibly scholarly defenses
for the promotion of Moroccan Spoken Arabic are joined by a less luminary,
diatribe-based approach which is promoted by their lesser counterparts outside
of the academe.