French broadcasting to be drastically reduced in Morocco

From here in French:

The other area where the minister (Communications Minister Mustafa Khalfi) is implementing a major reform is in the linguistic component.

Half of the programming of the channel 2M will be in Arabic, 30% in Amazigh (subtitled) and 20% in foreign languages (that is, mostly French and Spanish).

In addition, national radio will have to dedicate 70% of their programming to Moroccan music, followed by Arabic and foreign music.

The news in French broadcast every night at 8:45 pm will now be shifted to after 11 pm.

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Berber might become an official language in Morocco

Find this interesting tidbit in an article in French here on possible constitutional reform in Morocco limiting the king's powers:

Selon le préambule du nouveau projet, la langue amazighe, à savoir le berbère, sera désormais considérée comme seconde langue officielle avec l'arabe.

Une grande partie des 32 millions de Marocains s'expriment dans l'un des trois dialectes berbères.

According to the preamble of the new bill, the Amazigh language, also known as Berber, would be considered the second official language along with Arabic. A large part of the 32 million Moroccans use one of the three dialects of the Berber language.

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Association to begin teaching Turkish in Morocco, Jordan and Sudan

TASCA (Türk-Arap Bilim, Kültür ve Sanat Derneği or Turk-Arab Science, Culture and Art Association) is an association set up last year, that now plans on teaching Turkish to countries in the Arabic world, beginning with Morocco, Jordan and Sudan in its goal of making Turkish a world language. They seem to have chosen these three countries due to a scarcity of Turkish teachers vs. demand; one can only assume that nearby countries like Syria have more ample resources for those that want to learn the language.

On a related note, groups like this are why I scoff at the suggestion that minority languages like Welsh and Basque only survive due to government support - major languages receive much, much more support from governments and educational institutions to promulgate themselves in other countries whereas minority languages are busy simply maintaining their own languages in their areas of origin.

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