[6] While Modern Standard Arabic is used to varying degrees in formal situations such as religious sermons, books, newspapers, government communications, news broadcasts and political talk shows, Moroccan Arabic is the predominant spoken language of the country and has a strong presence in Moroccan television entertainment, cinema and commercial advertising.

Initially, short /a/ and /i/ were merged into a phoneme /ə/ (however, some speakers maintain a difference between /a/ and /ə/ when adjacent to pharyngeal /ʕ/ and /ħ/).

This deletion of short vowels can result in long strings of consonants (a feature shared with Amazigh and certainly derived from it).

Long /aː/, /iː/ and /uː/ also have many more allophones than in most other dialects; in particular, /aː/, /iː/, /uː/ appear as [ɑ], [e], [o] in the vicinity of emphatic consonants and [q], [χ], [ʁ], [r], but [æ], [i], [u] elsewhere.

Contrast, for example, Egyptian Arabic, where emphasis tends to spread forward and backward to both ends of a word, even through several syllables.

Emphasis is audible mostly through its effects on neighboring vowels or syllabic consonants, and through the differing pronunciation of /t/ [t͡s] and /tˤ/ [t].

[19]: 59  A risala on Semitic languages written in Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic by Judah ibn Quraish to the Jews of Fes dates back to the ninth-century.

[24] Moroccan Arabic is characterized by a strong Berber, as well as Latin (African Romance), substratum.

More recently, the influx of Andalusi people and Spanish-speaking–Moriscos (between the 15th and the 17th centuries) influenced urban dialects with Spanish substrate (and loanwords).

Note: All sentences are written according to the transcription used in Richard Harrell, A Short Reference Grammar of Moroccan Arabic (Examples with their pronunciation).

To form the future tense, the prefix ka-/ta- is removed and replaced with the prefix ġa-, ġad- or ġadi instead (e.g. ġa-ne-kteb "I will write", ġad-ketb-u (north) or ġadi t-ketb-u "You (plural) will write") It is worth noting that in northern Morocco, such as Tangier and Tetouan, they use "ha" instead of ""gha/ġa"" most of the time, and also "ʕa" (عا) to a lesser extent.

The imperative is conjugated with the suffixes of the present tense but without any prefixes or preverbs: kteb Write!

(plural) One characteristic of Moroccan Arabic syntax, which it shares with other North African varieties as well as some southern Levantine dialect areas, is in the two-part negative verbal circumfix /ma-...-ʃi/.

Also, unlike in Egyptian Arabic, there are no phonological changes to the verbal cluster as a result of adding the circumfix.

However, they do not occur in Moroccan Arabic (MA): Negative pronouns such as walu "nothing", ḥta ḥaja "nothing" and ḥta waḥed "nobody" can be added to the sentence without ši as a suffix: Note that wellah ma-ne-kteb could be a response to a command to write kteb while wellah ma-ġa-ne-kteb could be an answer to a question like waš ġa-te-kteb?

In some regions like the east (Oujda), most speakers use no preverb: Verbs in Moroccan Arabic are based on a consonantal root composed of three or four consonants.

is used to specify grammatical concepts such as causative, intensive, passive or reflexive and mostly involves varying the consonants of a stem form.

The forms involving a vowel-initial suffix and corresponding stem PAv or NPv are highlighted in silver.

The forms involving a consonant-initial suffix and corresponding stem PAc are highlighted in gold.

The primary differences are: Verbs other than form I behave as follows in the non-past: Examples: Hollow have a W or Y as the middle root consonant.

Like all verbs whose stem begins with a single consonant, the prefixes differ in the following way from those of regular and weak form I verbs: In addition, the past tense has two stems: beʕ- before consonant-initial suffixes (first and second person) and baʕ- elsewhere (third person).

Note that /i-/ was borrowed from the weak verbs; the Classical Arabic equivalent form would be *ħabáb-, e.g. *ħabáb-t.

Some Moroccan Arabic speakers, in the parts of the country formerly ruled by France, practice code-switching with French.

In parts of northern Morocco, such as in Tetouan and Tangier, it is common for code-switching to occur between Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and Spanish, as Spain had previously controlled part of the region and continues to possess the territories of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa bordering only Morocco.

In the troubled and autocratic Morocco of the 1970s, Years of Lead, the Nass El Ghiwane band wrote lyrics in Moroccan Arabic that were very appealing to the youth even in other Maghreb countries.

Another interesting movement is the development of an original rap music scene, which explores new and innovative usages of the language.

The later additionally wrote a novel trilogy in Moroccan Darija, a unique creation in this language, with the titles تاعروروت "Ta'arurut", عكاز الريح (the Wind's Crutch), and سعد البلدة (The Town's Luck).

From 2002 to 2006 there was also a free weekly newspaper that was entirely written in "standard" Moroccan Arabic: Khbar Bladna ('News of Our Country').

In Salé, the regional newspaper Al Amal, directed by Latifa Akherbach, started in 2005.

Its name "Goud" and its slogan "dima nishan" (ديما نيشان) are Moroccan Arabic expressions that mean almost the same thing "straightforward".