Liya and Li

Personal pronouns are fundamental in any language. I can’t really see anyone speaking in any language without words like I, you, him, her, he, she, us, and me. In Darija to speak about yourself you would use the word liya. For example the sentence “werri liya t-tman 3fak”, translates to “show me the price please”. I was perfectly ok with this but then I heard someone say Gul li (tell me). Why didn’t they say Gul liya? From what I gather they are both the same word and can be used interchangeably. The question is between Liya and Li, which one would you rather use? For me I think I would rather stick with regular Li for a few reasons.

First of all Li is shorter than “Liya”, with languages (especially Darija), you want to convey your message as quickly as possible.

The second reason I would rather use Li is because it is the same word used in Arabic. Since Darija is mostly Arabic based and I have some basic understanding of Arabic, I don’t have to memorize another word. There is another word that used for speaking of yourself besides Liya and Li which is fiya. The interesting thing about this word is that, I have only seen it used in two sentences: “fiya jou3” (i’m hungry)  and “fiya l3tesh” (i’m thirsty). What’s the difference? Well from my observation, it seems like the word fiya and a merging of the word fee and liya which would mean inside me or in me. If i’m on the right track then the sentence “fiya jou3” would literally mean “inside me is hunger”. So then fiya would refer to expressing emotions or feelings whereas Liya and Li would refer to possession or used with verbs? Realistically at this point of my journey this is all guess work. As I continue learning I will probably write some update posts with clearer definitions as it comes to these subtle grammatical points.

Word list