Writing dialect in Morocco

Abstract

This article analyzes how Moroccan authors write today in their own dialect. Publications in Moroccan Arabic are rare: however, it seems that in the last years the situation is changing and Moroccan writers are beginning to pay more attention to their mother tongue, a language which allows them to reach better expressivity and more realism. In this article, an outline is given of the mean orthographic features used byMoroccans when writing in dialect (particularly those diverging from the orthography of Classical Arabic).In order to assure a representative sample,the research published here is basedon data collected from several Moroccan sources of very different kind and printed along a gap of almost forty years.