*ذَرْوَكْت (*ḏarwakt) < ذَا اَلوَقْت (ḏā al-waqt) *أشكون (*ʔaškōn) < أَيُّ شَيْء كَوْن (*ʔēš *kōn < ʔayy šayʔ kawn) Proto-Maghrebi had already lost all nunation and most of the i'rāb, with the exception of the adverbial accusative, which was unproductive.
[12][13][14] As Arab-led forces established settlements in a triangle encompassing Roman towns and cities such as Tangier, Salé and Walili, Moroccan Arabic began to take form.
Conversely, Moroccan Darija and particularly Algerian Derja cannot be easily understood by Eastern Arabic speakers (from Egypt, Sudan, Levant, Iraq, and Arabian peninsula) in general.
Maghrebi Arabic is mainly a spoken and vernacular dialect, although it occasionally appears in entertainment and advertising in urban areas of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
In Algeria, where Maghrebi Arabic was taught as a separate subject under French colonization, some textbooks in the dialect exist but they are no longer officially endorsed by the Algerian authorities.
[18] Additionally, Maghrebi Arabic has a Latin substratum, which may have been derived from the African Romance that was used as an urban lingua franca during the Byzantine Empire period.
[21] The lexicon contains many loanwords from Latin, e.g. Moroccan/Algerian/Tunisian شَاقُور, shāqūr, 'hatchet' from secūris (this could also be borrowed from Spanish segur);[22] ببوش, 'snail' from babōsus and فلوس, 'chick' from pullus through Berber afullus.
[23] Maghrebi Arabic speakers frequently borrow words from French (in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), Spanish (in northern Morocco and northwestern Algerian) and Italian (in Libya and Tunisia) and conjugate them according to the rules of their dialects with some exceptions (like passive voice for example).
As it is not always written, there is no standard and it is free to change quickly and to pick up new vocabulary from neighboring languages.