The Handbook of Informal Language Learning

20Informal English Learning Among Moroccan Youth

MARK DRESSMAN

Introduction

The Kingdom of Morocco, located in the far‐northwest corner of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, is well‐known for many things internationally: for its cuisine, for its tourism and historic cities, for its dunes and oases in the south, and for the cinematic fantasy of the movie, Casablanca. But what is less well‐known but equally noteworthy is that Morocco is a nation of linguists and language‐lovers, where every schooled child learns to speak three or four languages with remarkable proficiency and those who complete secondary school learn a fourth or fifth, which is usually English (Ennaji 2013). In the eighth century CE, Arabs from the East settled in northern Morocco and brought the Arabic language to the region, teaching it as part of the conversion of the Amazigh (Berber) inhabitants to Islam. Varieties of the Amazigh language remain to this day among people who retained their original culture and customs, but a creolized version of Arabic took hold among the Arabized population, and Morocco became a multilingual nation, with Classical, and later Standard Arabic as the official, literate language of the state and of education. For the next thousand years, varieties of Amazigh, Darija (Moroccan Arabic), and Classical/Standard Arabic occupied clear, demarcated roles within Moroccan society, until 1912, when the French and Spanish, with the support of other European powers, imposed ...