Is it Jooj or Zhuuzh?

In all languages, there are going to be sounds that differ from each other. Darija is no exception. Although Darija is mostly derived from Arabic there are some sounds that are derived from french and i’m sure some sounds may even come from berber(the language of the native people from morocco) although I am not aware of any at this point of my journey. Let’s take a look at word Jooj or Zhuuzh.

The pronounciation of this word is definitely French, prounounced as J. Just in case you wanted to know this word means two. However I have seen it spelt in 2 different ways. So is the correct spelling Jooj or Zhuuzh?

At the end it doesn’t matter. Darija is a spoken language and writing the language (especially in latin script) doesn’t make a difference. What is more important are the sounds. Since the words in Darija come from an Arabic script. Let’s just go discuss the arabic letter starting Jooj or Zhuuzh.

In arabic this letter has a “J” sound which is relatively simple, however in darija the sound changes. I believe they use the French “J” which is not the same as English. When I hear this spoken in darija it’s a mixed between “J” and “Z”. If you are learning this online (like me) you will encounter two different ways of spelling the words. I found that they represent the letter with either “J” or “zh”. As Darija is mostly a spoken language the spelling is not really important, however for people like myself who learn through reading material, this can be very difficult. Like with everything else in darija, the best way to learn this sound is to listen and repeat. Let us look at some of the more difficult letters/sounds derived from Arabic.

These are the most difficult to pronounce. When learning to pronounce these I was told that these are glotteral sounds. To this day I still don’t know what glotteral means. Listening to people speak I found that these sounds were produced deep in the throat. The first letter sort of had an “A” sound but from deep in the throat and the second letter had a “G” sound from deep in the throat.

This letter is almost like a “K” sound but with sort of a scraping of the top of your mouth sound. I always imagined this being the way a lizard would pronounce “K”. I still find myself mistaking this sound with the regular “K” and although I think this is not a big deal, my arab friends will tell me that it’s completely wrong and I thave to try to pronounce this sound correctly

I realized as I am writing this post right now that I could go on for a long time describing the different sounds but really I wanted to focus on one letter. I can write another post another day to go into details with the letters. 

Word list