French versus English: A sociolinguistic study of Moroccans’ foreign language attitudinal tendencies

Abstract

The complexity of the Moroccan language landscape sparks off a power struggle between languages. The focus in this chapter is on the apparent French/English language contest over supremacy. Here comes the current investigation that aims at gauging Moroccan’s perceptions of French and English through a language questionnaire. Responses were subjected to statistical analyses to support or reject the hypothesis that gender, age and language proficiency affect Moroccans’ evaluations of French and English. The study reveals that Moroccans’ attitudes towards English are significantly more favorable than those towards the French language. Age, but not gender, has turned out to have a statistically significant difference in the overall evaluation of French and English. These evaluations have also been shown to correlate with the respondents’ French and English language proficiency. The result of this study is an indication that Moroccans’ attitudes toward French and English are undergoing a change from a conventional preference for French to a recent favor of English whose phenomenal growth globally may have affected language attitudes locally.