"[10] Ennaji also concluded "This survey confirms the idea that multilingualism in Morocco is a vivid sociolinguistic phenomenon, which is favored by many people.

[12] Spanish is spoken by many Moroccans, particularly in the northern regions around Tetouan and Tangier, as well as in parts of the south, due to historic ties and business interactions with Spain.

[19] Under the Almohads, the khuṭbas (from خطبة, the Friday sermon) had to be delivered in Arabic and Berber, or as the Andalusi historian Ibn Ṣāḥib aṣ-Ṣalāt [ar] described it: "al-lisān al-gharbī" (اللسان الغربي 'the western tongue').

[21] The first recorded work in Darija or Moroccan Arabic is Al-Kafif az-Zarhuni's epic zajal poem "al-Mala'ba," dating back to the reign of Marinid Sultan Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman.

[25] An editorial in Lamalif in 1973 argued that, although French unified the elite and major sections of the economy, national unity could only be achieved based on Arabic—though Lamalif called for a new incarnation of the language, describing Standard Arabic as untenably prescriptive and Moroccan vernacular Arabic (Darija) as too poor to become in and of itself a language of culture and knowledge.

MSA is practically foreign to Moroccan schoolchildren, and this creates problems with reading and writing, consequently leading to a high level of illiteracy in Morocco.

That is despite the government decision to implement a language policy of ignoring French after gaining independence, for the sake of creating a monolingual country.

[27] By 2020, the country ended its policy of Arabization, with French reimplemented as the medium of instruction in core subjects such as science and math.

From then on, Morocco has adopted a clear perpetual educational language policy with three main cores: improving and reinforcing the teaching of Arabic, using a variety of languages, such as English and French in teaching the fields of technology and science and acceptance of Berber.

In the early twenty-first century the different minority languages are acknowledged in Morocco although Arabic is still dominant and is being promoted by the government.

[30] The government hired civil servants able to speak the three main dialects (Tachalhit, Tamazight and Tarifet) to help citizens in courts, hospitals, and other public services.

[13] Framework Law 17:51 allowed scientific subjects to be taught in foreign languages—especially French—in public elementary schools.

[35][36][37] According to Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, about 2,000 schools taught Amazigh in 2022 and the government was training more teachers to accelerate the roll out of Berber teaching.

[39] In July 2023, the gradual generalization of learning English from secondary school was decided by the Ministry of Education.

traditionally, Arabs established centers of power in only a few cities and ports in the region, with the effect that the other areas remained Berber-speaking.

[45] According to Rouchdy, within Morocco Classical Arabic is still only used in literary and cultural aspects, formal traditional speeches, and discussions about religion.

speakers Hassānīya, is spoken by about 0.8% of the population, mainly in the territory of Western Sahara, claimed by both Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

The Ethnologue provides a useful academic starting point; however, its bibliographic references are inadequate, and it rates its own accuracy at only B-C for the area.

[46] In his 2000–2002 research, Ennaji found that 52% of the interviewees placed Berber as a language inferior to Arabic because it did not have a prestigious status and because its domain was restricted.

[5] The below table presents statistical figures of speakers of Berber languages, based on the 2024 population census.

Population shifts in location and number, effects of urbanization and education in other languages, etc., make estimates difficult.

8-) In 1952, André Basset ("La langue berbère", Handbook of African Languages, Part I, Oxford) estimated that a "small majority" of Morocco's population spoke Berber.

Within Morocco, French, one of the country's two prestige languages,[43] is often used for business, diplomacy, and government;[53] and serves as a lingua franca.

[56] In a survey from 2005 by the CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs), 21.9% of respondents from Morocco claimed to speak Spanish, with higher percentages in the northern regions.

After Morocco declared independence in 1956, French and Arabic became the main languages of administration and education, causing the role of Spanish to decline.

[43] Today, Spanish is still offered as one of the foreign languages in the educational system but has fallen well behind French and English.

Mixing in Morocco and influenced by local Arabic, their language became Haketia (with an offshoot in Oran, now part of Algeria).

Unlike other Judeo-Spanish dialects, Haketia did not develop a literature and, during colonization, North African Sephardim adopted Spanish and French.