Moroccan Arabic podcast fills a niche for language learners
The Mazyan Bizaf Show aims to fill a niche by teaching the Moroccan dialect of Arabic to English speakers.
by KASEY LEE on DEC. 7, 2015
“I love Morocco for the people, geography, art, architecture and history,” Chad Ratashak, host and co-creator of the Mazyan Bizaf Show, told an audience of about ten Arabic language learners at the University of Maryland. “These are people worth talking to and a place worth talking about. That’s ultimately why I do Mazyan Bizaf Show.”
Ratashak, an American from a Polish-German family, studied in Meknes, Morocco after graduating from the University of Oklahoma.
His podcast, which focuses on the culture and Arabic dialect of Morocco, taped its 15th episode Dec. 4 live at the University of Maryland campus with guest Mourad Benboussetta, an Algerian graduate student in the university’s translation and interpretation program.
The Darija dialect of Arabic is spoken by locals in several Northwest African countries including Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. This episode focused on some of the differences between Moroccan Arabic and Algerian Arabic.
“Darjia has a reputation of being more difficult than other dialects,” said Lianne Berne, the Program Coordinator for the Arabic Flagship Program. “Naturally, because the Arab world is so vast and encompasses many different groups and cultures, these dialects can vary from each other quite a lot, to the point that even some native speakers have trouble understanding each other if their dialects are very different.”
When Ratashak was studying in Meknes, he was disappointed by the lack of English-language resources to learn the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. Most of them transliterated to French, Morocco’s second most used language.
“There’s a lot of stuff you can Google in Modern Standard Arabic, like ‘desert sky,’” said Ratashak. “In Darija, there’s one thing, it’s in French and it’s probably wrong. So you do all this work to find the word and it’s not even right.”
But as study abroad programs are increasingly looking to Morocco as a safer place for students to learn Arabic, the shift to study of Darija — as opposed to Egyptian and Levantine dialects and the formal Modern Standard Arabic — is inevitable.
In March, alongside his Arabic literature professor Abdessamad Mbarki, Rarashak created Mazyan Bizaf and released the first episode in both English and Arabic.
In each episode, the hosts discuss the origins of Moroccan Darija words and explain new expressions in everyday contexts. The show also covers lifestyle and culture, like Moroccan hospitality and traditions like Eid al-Adha, a Muslim holiday.
“We wanted to be that other source for students who have put in the work to learn Arabic and now is connecting it to those ideas they learned in classes,” said Ratashak.
The university’s Arabic Flagship Program offers undergraduate students domestic and study abroad programs to learn both Modern Standard Arabic and dialects, including language partners where native speakers meet with students weekly.
“In recent years, we have seen many programs created or moved to Morocco, which has been more politically stable and safer for students. There can be a lack of resources to learn Darija in the US, since this is a relatively new location for students studying abroad,” said Berne.
After the show, students reflected on their own trips to Morocco and their experiences learning Darija in a Q&A session.
“I thought the podcast was really cool because I have a language partner in Morocco and we use dialect in Darija,” said Shaakira Jackson, a senior Arabic major.
“It’s really interesting because I had the same experience as Ratashak when he talked about how you have break down each word and think about how to say it.”
The podcast will be available for free on iTunes and at MizyanBizaf.com.
Kasey Lee is a contributing writer at Plex. She studies multiplatform journalism and Asian American affairs at the University of Maryland.
