Maghrebi Arabic
Sign in to saveAlso known as Darija, North African Arabic, Western Arabic
family of Arabic dialects spoken in the Maghreb
In the Vinony graph
Vinony's link graph records 477 inbound references to Maghrebi Arabic, and connects out to Hilalian dialects, Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects and Arabic.
It sits within the topics Arabic languages, ISO language articles citing sources other than Ethnologue and Language articles citing Ethnologue 27.
Vinony links it to 30 Wikipedia language editions.
Key facts
- Region
- Maghreb
- Ethnicity
- Maghrebi Arabs , also used as a second language by other ethnic groups in the Maghreb
- Native speakers
- 88 million (2020–2022)
- Language family
- Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Maghrebi Arabic
- Dialects
- Algerian Arabic Moroccan Arabic Libyan Arabic Tunisian Arabic Hassaniya Arabic Saharan Arabic Siculo-Arabic (survives as Maltese ) Andalusi Arabic † Dialectal continuums: Hilalian dialects Pre-Hilalian dialects
- Writing system
- Arabic alphabet ( Maghrebi script ), Latin alphabet
- Iso 639 3
- Variously:, arq – Algerian Arabic , xaa – Andalusi Arabic , mey – Hassaniya Arabic , ayl – Libyan Arabic , mlt – Maltese , ary – Moroccan Arabic , aao – Saharan Arabic , sqr – Siculo-Arabic , aeb – Tunisian Arabic
- Glottolog
- nort3191
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- Arabic
- Has part
- Algerian Saharan Arabic
- Country
- Western Sahara
Show 3 more facts
- number of speakers, writers, or signers
- 73212000
- topic's main category
- Category:Maghrebi Arabic
- linguistic typology
- verb–subject–object
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Maghrebi Arabic, often known as ad-Dārija to differentiate it from Literary Arabic, is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken in the Maghreb. It includes the Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, Hassaniya and Saharan Arabic dialects.
Maghrebi Arabic has a predominantly Semitic and Arabic vocabulary, although it contains a significant number of Berber loanwords, which represent 10–15% of the vocabulary of Moroccan Arabic, 8–9% of Algerian and Tunisian Arabic, and 2–3% of Libyan Arabic. Maghrebi Arabic was formerly spoken in Sicily and Al-Andalus until the 13th and 17th centuries, respectively, in the extinct forms of Siculo-Arabic and Andalusi Arabic. The Maltese language is believed to have its source in a language spoken in Muslim Sicily that ultimately originates from Tunisia, as it contains some typical Maghrebi Arabic areal characteristics.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Maghrebi Arabic” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.