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The combination of multilingualism and diglossia in a postcolonial context has made language one of the most recurring polemical topics in the Maghreb's public sphere since the independence of Morocco and Tunisia in 1956 and Algeria in 1962. As decolonisation carried dreams of modernity and progress, postcolonial language policy was viewed as the vehicle of a cultural renaissance. A major element of Maghrebi states' decolonial nation-building was Arabisation, the policy replacing French with Standard Arabic in the public space after independence. Once a largely consensual – or at least not contested – policy, Arabisation has nevertheless grown increasingly controversial, especially in education, as claims of its 'failure' poured from across the political spectrum. While the discourse bracketing Arabisation with 'failure' has entrenched itself in the public sphere, no formal evaluation of the policy has been ever conducted. In 2019, the Moroccan Ministry of Education reverted to French in the teaching of scientific subjects. How has the discourse on the 'failure' of Arabisation become dominant in Morocco and what implications does it have for nation-building? Kaoutar Ghilani argues that the discourse on the ‘failure’ of Arabisation is an ideal object of study through which to approach post-colonial nation-building in Morocco where conceptions of the future and aspirations for modernity and cultural renaissance have been entangled with illiteracy, neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and the global market of political ideologies. Based on her PhD thesis and her current book project, her talk will present the general framework of her research, its interdisciplinary methodology, and its relevance for post-colonial societies.