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On Tuesday, Rabat’s mayor announced on his Facebook page that the capital will have its new bus fleet delivered by Wednesday. The new buses, operated by the Spanish subsidiary of the UK company National Express, were indeed operational by the 22nd of August, but a spelling mistake featured on them did not go unnoticed.
Spotted by the inhabitants of the city and shared online, the bus which features the name of the city in both Arabic and French misspelled the word Rabat in Tamazight, one of the official languages of the country.
La langue Amazigh a peine lisible et surtout une traduction fausse . ربات عوض رباط toujours du mépris . #amazigh. #maroc #rif pic.twitter.com/QUoTLS1Qdk
— Azahoum boualam (@AzahoumBoualam) 22 août 2019
Instead of writing Rabat, in the Amazigh language, with a «T» that refers to the sixteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet (ط), the letter was mistakenly replaced with the third letter of the Arabic alphabet (ت). This mistake completely changed the name of the city, when pronounced in both Arabic and Amazigh.
When checking the Amazigh alphabet and the way letters are represented in Latin and Arabic, the mistake looks very obvious. Taking a look at the transliteration, provided by the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM), the Tifinagh letter used to replace the «T» in Rabat is referred to as (ⵜ), which stands for (ت) as in Tiznit (ⵜⵉⵣⵏⵉⵜ), a city in Morocco. The word Rabat, instead has to contain another Tifinagh version of (T), which is (ⵟ) as in the word Tata (ⵟⴰⵟⴰ), another Moroccan city.
For the record, the Moroccan capital is equipped with 150 Alsa buses and is expected to get that number to 430 by the fourth year of its contract with the city.
