Alphabet

Special Characters

Here is the list of letters which do not exist in latin alphabet and are used in Darija, with the adopted transliteration for each one of them:

Arabic	Transliteration	Example	Pronounciation
ح	7	7anut (shop)	It’s the aspired sound of (H); a voiceless fricative sound made deep in the throat
ع	3	3yn (eye)	It’s the sound produced when you pull the back of your tongue back into your throat a bit.
ق	q	qamar (moon)	It’s the hard throatish equivalent of (K)
خ	kh	khaf (to be afraid)	Like Spanish(J)
غ	gh	ghnna (to sing)	Hard version of (KH) being voiced, it's like the French (R).
س	s	salam (hello/peace)	s like in (sweet)
ص	S	Sba7 (morning)	S emphatic sound of "s" like in (sour)
ت	t	telefon(phone)	t like in (team)
ط	T	Tbla (table)	Emphatic sound of (T), like in (Tall)
د	d	dar (To do)	d like in (dream)
ض	D	Dar (house)	D emphatic sound of "d" like in (door)

General Indications

• The rest of Moroccan Arabic consonants are exactly the same as those in English.


• All consonants must be pronounced.


• In classical Arabic there are two types of vowels, short and long ones but in Moroccan darija there's not much difference between both of them in term of length.


• We often omit vowels in the beggining of words.


• It’s very frequent to have words without any vowels at all.


• When you see a doubled letter in a word, it should mean that there is more stress on it.


• We might use an apostrophe(') or a dash (-) to avoid confusion when a letter belonging to two different sounds is repeated twice.Ex : sh-hr (month) or we can type sh'hr.


• This "code" is not universal, other people might use different characters for some of letters the above.