Chatting in Morocco: three languages, and the hours they arrive in
Explanation, not guide: what catches people out here is linguistic and nobody warns them about it.
Three languages, and which one arrives
Darija first, which is the everyday spoken language and is not the Arabic anybody learns from a course. French second, carried by school and by work, and often better than the speaker will admit. Standard Arabic third, which is written and formal and rarely what a stranger uses with another stranger.
So a caller reaching for a shared language usually reaches for French, and somebody with school French from twenty years ago does far better here than they expect. Announce the level in the first line and the pace drops immediately.
The hours, which run late
Evenings start late and run later, and the pattern shifts again during Ramadan, when the useful window moves well past midnight and the population changes character entirely. That is worth knowing rather than guessing at, because a thin evening at the usual hour means you picked the hour badly, not that the place is dead.
Weekday afternoons are students and people between shifts. Late evening is the busiest and the shallowest. Past one in the morning the head-count drops while the calls stretch, which is the same pattern as everywhere and is sharper here than in most places.
What people are likely to be doing
A great many of these calls come from a phone in a café or on a street, which alters what a conversation is able to become. There is something to point the camera at, the noise is real, and the call ends when the person has to move rather than when the conversation does.
Which is a good thing and worth adapting to. Ask about what's around them within the first minute; it is the only question that works reliably when both of you are operating in a third language.
The corresponding warning is dull and applies everywhere: a street in shot is a street, and a street with a sign in it is an address. That is the caller's decision to make, not yours, and repeating a place name back into the call is the one thing worth not doing.
Worth adding what the noise does, since nobody mentions it. A café behind somebody carries other people's conversation, and other people did not agree to be on a call. It costs nothing to notice and it is the part of the etiquette that has not been written down anywhere.
The practical consequence for a visitor is the pleasant one. A call made from a pavement arrives with a subject already attached to it, and finding a subject is the part of this format that defeats people everywhere else.
What not to expect
Not a filter that delivers a country. On a free service a country switch shaves a sliver off the crowd and takes most of the remainder with it, while the hour rearranges who is present far more.
Not a conversation that continues tomorrow, since nobody is identified here and no record is written. And not a single culture behind the flag: Casablanca, Fès and a town in the Rif are three different evenings, and the only way to tell which you are in is to ask about the window.