As I delve into the vocabulary tonight I notice something quite different about Darija. They do not really like to use vowels. Now for those of you who do not know, vowels are what connect the letters together to form a word. In English, they are needed otherwise the word doesn’t make sense. It’s not like ct is the same as cat. The concept is the same in French as well.
Even Arabic a language completely different from English and French uses the fathah, kasrah, and dammah as vowel equivalents to help form the words. However, Darija doesn’t seem to need it. My first reaction as an English only speaker is that the word is impossible to be pronounced. For example, the word for breakfast in Darija is ftoor. After seeing this word my automatic reaction as an English speaker is to put a vowel in between the F and the T, but which vowel do I put in there?
The word is originally from Arabic and in Arabic it is pronounced future, should I pronounce it like this? But then why not spell it like this instead of ftoor. I do have an assumption as to the answer but I’m not sure if it is correct. I assumed as Darija was formed because the speakers wanted a faster way to pronounce the words. So, the solution was to drop the vowels out of most of the words and just use the sound of first letter and join it to rest of the letters. With a bit of practice I was able to pronounce the word but I also noticed this method also made the word come out of mouth a lot quicker. It sort of explains the reason why when listening to Darija it seems that the people speaking are racing each other trying to see who can speak the fastest. Its natural for them to speak fast since the there are less vowels to worry about.
I’ve also noticed that some of the words that have French origins are cut short. From todays list of words I found tonobil which means car comes from the French word automobile. Also tobus which means bus comes from the French word autobus (tobus isn’t a word from today’s list but I wanted to show another example). I’m assuming the same concept applied to Darija when they incorporated a lot of the French words, they just wanted to speak easily and quickly so a lot of the words were shortened to accomplish this.
This concept of trying to speak quickly isn’t foreign to the English language either. Sure we do not remove vowels from our words but a lot of phrases have shortened over the years. For example the phrase “I will see you later” evolved into “See you later” which evolved to “Later”. In high school I even heard some guys saying “Lates” which shows an even further evolution to the phrase. It would be interesting to see how language is spoken in 50 years from now.
Word list
Lyoom – Today
Ghadda – Tomorrow
Fhemt – I understood
Ftoor – Breakfast
Leghda – Lunch
La’sha – dinner
Tonobil – car
Tran – train
Tiyyara – plane
Batto – boat
Magana – watch
Blasa – place
Wrqa – paper
Khdam – working
Wilaya – state
Welakin – but
Mkhtuba – engaged
Phrase list
Labas? – How are you?
Labas – I’m fine
Mnin nta – where are you from? (male)
Mnin nti – where are you from? (female)
Sm7 li – excuse me (to a male)
Sm7i li – excuse me (to a female)
Ana mashi – I am not