Judeo-Moroccan Arabic
Judeo-Moroccan Arabic is the variety or the varieties of the Moroccan vernacular Arabic spoken by Moroccan Jews living or formerly living in Morocco. Historically, the majority of Moroccan Jews spoke Moroccan vernacular Arabic, or Darija, as their first language, even in Amazigh areas, which was facilitated by their literacy in Hebrew script. The Darija spoken by Moroccan Jews, which they referred to as al-‘arabiya diyalna as opposed to ‘arabiya diyal l-məslimīn, typically had distinct features, for example, they would pronounce s as š and z as ž, some lexical borrowings from Hebrew, and in some regions Hispanic features from the migration of Sephardi Jews following the Alhambra Decree. The Jewish dialects of Darija spoken in different parts of Morocco had more in common with the local Moroccan Arabic dialects than they did with each other.
Nowadays, speakers of the language are usually older adults. The young generation of the Jews of Morocco who studied at schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle under the French protectorate made French their mother tongue.
After 1948, the vast majority of Moroccan Jews migrated to Israel and have switched to using Hebrew as their native language. Those who immigrated to metropolitan France typically use French as their first language, while the few still left in Morocco tend to use either French, Moroccan or Judeo-Moroccan Arabic in their everyday lives.
History and composition
Historically
Widely used in the Jewish community during History of [the Jews in Morocco|its long history there], the Moroccan dialect of Judeo-Arabic has many influences from languages other than Arabic, including Spanish, Haketia or Moroccan Judeo-Spanish, due to the influx of Sephardic refugees from Spain after the 1492 expulsion, and French, and, of course, the inclusion of many Hebrew loanwords and phrases. The dialect has considerable mutual intelligibility with Judeo-Tunisian Arabic, and some with Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, but almost none with Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.Most literate Muslims in Morocco would write, not in vernacular Arabic, but in Standard Arabic, but Moroccan Jews, who typically did not learn Standard Arabic as it was taught in Islamic religious contexts, wrote in Darija using Hebrew script. For them, Darija was a literary language: Judah ibn Quraish wrote a risala on Semitic languages in Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic to the Jews of Fes already in the ninth-century.
In 1905, a group of Sephardic Jews of Fes sent a letter in vernacular Moroccan Arabic written in Hebrew letters to Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, asking him to establish a Spanish school in the mellah of Fes and to protect their community, which they described as descendants of Spain and therefore his subjects.