Managing Morocco’s linguistic market

Morocco’s language politics demonstrates how the mismanagement of linguistic diversity in the political arena and educational sphere leads to language confusion instead of a consistent homogeneous language policy. The outcome is top-down decisions about the status, usage and promotion of national and foreign languages. Consequently, the official national languages and the English language are used as subordinate languages of instruction. The complex multilingual context made of Arabic, Berber and European languages is reduced to French monolingualism. This paper discusses the absence of a multilingual policy that reflects the sociolinguistic reality in Morocco. In the framework of linguistic citizenship, we put forward an alternative trilingual proposal where Standard Arabic is the primary language of instruction, regional languages (viz. Berber varieties and Hassani Arabic) are taught in the regions where they are in use, and either English or French is taught as a supporting foreign language. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ .