COURSE OVERVIEW
The textbook in introductory and intermediate Moroccan Arabic is designed for the language and cultural training of Peace Corps volunteers in Morocco and is intended for both teacher and student use. The contents and design are based on a competency-based curriculum model. An introductory section presents general principles for use of Arabic script and for Moroccan Arabic phonology and transliteration, and contains 16 pronunciation drills. Each of the subsequent lesson outlines contains a topic, performance objective, cultural notes, vocabulary list with Arabic script and English transliteration, linguistic structures, and grammar notes. Lesson topics represent a variety of daily living skills and activities, including greetings and introductions, giving and getting personal information, money, travelling, discussing personal experiences, making plans, asking clarification, shopping, bargaining, using the telephone, using postal services, hotels, food and meals, making tea, dealing with local authorities, explaining Peace Corps work, personal interests, invitations, discussing acceptable behavior, and health and illness. Appended materials include cultural information about holidays and festivals, etiquette, idioms and social situations, notes on conjunctions, prepositions, and noun and adjective derivation, a verb list, and meaning and spelling of common names.
PROGRAMS THAT USED THIS LANGUAGE
Morocco: 1963-present
PROGRAM SECTORS
Morocco: Youth Development, English Education, Environment and Health
Modern Standard Arabic has developed out of Classical Arabic, the language of the Quran. During the era of the caliphate,Classical Arabic was the language used for all religious, cultural, administrative and scholarly purposes.
Modern Standard Arabic is the official Arabic language. It can be written and spoken, and there is no difference between the written and the spoken form.
In its written form, Modern Standard Arabic is the language of literature and the media. Books, newspapers, magazines, official documents, private and business correspondence, street signs and shop signs - all are written in Modern Standard Arabic.
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD. This includes both the literary language and varieties of Arabic spoken in a wide arc of territory stretching across the Middle East and North Africa. Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligible, both written and orally, and the varieties as a whole constitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that on purely linguistic grounds they would likely be considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly grouped together as a single language for political and/or ethnic reasons (see below). If considered multiple languages, it is unclear how many languages there would be, as the spoken varieties form a dialect chain with no clear boundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it perhaps is spoken by as many as 280 million first language speakers, making it one of the half dozen most populous languages in the world. If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety would most likely be Egyptian Arabic, with 54 million native speakers still greater than any other Semitic language.
Arabic Moroccan is spoken in: Morocco
Arabic Moroccan has no known alternate names.
