Study: Colloquial North African Arabic Emerges as France’s Second Most Spoken Language

Arabic follows French, which is the official language of France, the study published by the magazine Science et vie indicates, noting that the country has 75 regional and so-called non-territorial languages. According to the Atlantico website cited by TSA Algérie, it is the colloquial Arabic from North African countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and not the literary Arabic of Lebanese, Egyptian or Syrian origin.

"The distance between the dialects of the Arabian Peninsula and those of Morocco would be equivalent to that separating Portuguese from Romanian," explains Jean Sellier in "A History of Languages." "We cannot say that there is a single Maghreb Arabic," argues Alexandrine Barontini, professor of Moroccan Arabic at Inalco, adding that "it seems difficult to claim that there is a French variety of Arabic."

According to the study, about 6% of the French population, or 3 to 4 million people, speak colloquial Arabic. As the second most spoken language in France, Arabic ranks ahead of the "languages of France," namely Creoles, Berber, Alsatian, Occitan, Breton, Oïl languages, Franconian, Corsican and Basque.