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Rabat – Movies in Darija or Hindi make up approximately 96 percent of movies shown on Channel 1, while 78 percent of films that aired on 2M had been performed in French, according to a new study by the High Commission for Audiovisual Communication.
To get these statistics, the commission analyzed the origins of movies broadcast on Al Oula channel, 2M and Medi 1 TV during the month of October 2015. On Wednesday, the agency published the results of the study.
Channel 1 – owned by the government broadcasting agency SNRT – aired 74 percent of its films in Darija – the Moroccan dialect of Arabic – and 22 percent of movie airtime featured Arabic-subtitled Bollywood hits.
More than a third (37 percent) of al Oula’s television series or approximately 85 episodes from five series used Arabic dialects from outside Morocco, including Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese.
Viewers watched a majority (61 percent) of the rest of the shows – 210 episodes from 30 different fictional series – in Darija.
The pattern continued on 2M, where characters in a solid 87 percent of TV series dialogued in Darija. Many of the shows had originally been recorded in Spanish (from Mexico) or Turkish, but had been dubbed to the local dialect before reaching Moroccan audiences. 2M dubbed a total of 199 episodes from six series into Darija from non-Arabic languages last October.
An Indian daily, titled “My Lover, Always,” was the only TV series aired on 2M that had been dubbed in an “eastern” dialect of Arabic. Shows espousing non-Moroccan dialects of Arabic on 2M took up around 10 percent of the channel’s programming.
2M is reported to be the most watched channel in Morocco, capturing an almost 30 share of total viewing.
