Darija for travel: what to say in Morocco, situation by situation

You can travel Morocco on French and English. Plenty of people do and have a perfectly good trip. What they never get to see is what happens in the first three seconds of a conversation when the other person hears Darija coming back at them. The register changes. Prices soften, directions get more honest, and you stop being handled as a tourist. Almost no visitor arrives with any Darija at all, which is exactly why a small amount of it travels so far.

And you do not need much. A greeting, a way to ask the price, the numbers, a thank you, and enough vocabulary for the four or five situations that repeat every single day of a trip. That is a weekend of preparation, not a course.

The taxi is where most trips go wrong, and it goes wrong before the door shuts: settle the fare or insist on the meter at the start, because the negotiation after you arrive is one you cannot win. The souk is a scripted exchange rather than a fight, and bsh7al, “how much?”, is what opens it. Cafés have a menu that has barely changed in decades, so three orders cover you: atay b na3na3, the mint tea that is the default and that refusing reads as almost rude; 9ahwa kihla, a black espresso; and noss noss, half espresso and half steamed milk. Restaurants, hotel check-in and the moment you need medical help each have their own short script, and there is a full guide below for every one of them.

Three things, in this order. The greeting, because in Morocco it is a conversation in its own right and skipping it costs you goodwill before you have said anything else. The numbers, because every price, room and departure is a number. And 3afak, “please”, which does a surprising amount of work on its own. Everything else you can look up on the page you need, standing in front of the person you need it with.

Not everyone reading this is a tourist. If you are Moroccan and flying home for the summer, the gap is a different shape: you follow the family fine, but you have never had the vocabulary of the souk, the beach and the cousins your own age. The summer guide below was written for that trip specifically.

Every guide here is a full article, and most of them carry a dialogue you can read straight through. If you would rather hear the phrases than read them, lesson 1 is free and opens without an account.