Beginning in the early 2000s, the Kingdom of Morocco witnessed a surge of texts published in colloquial Moroccan Arabic, or Darija. The texts were highly eclectic, ranging from news magazines to translations of Rainer Maria Rilke, and they used a wide variety of scripts and orthographic conventions. Equally eclectic were their authors and publishers, ranging from psychoanalysts and linguists, to journalists and painters. Yet a common thread ran through these diverse publications: their producers all espoused a similar desire to promote Darija as a language of literacy and of literature, with a broader ambition for ordinary Moroccans to recognize Darija--not classical Arabic (Fusha)--as their “mother tongue.” While the idea of a mother tongue may seem natural to many, scholars have argued that mother tongues do not simply exist as such. Rather, they are made. This paper attempts to build on these arguments through an investigation of the particular case of Darija activism in contemporary Morocco. In contrast to the historical bent that characterizes much of the literature on mother tongues, the case of Darija activism provides a unique opportunity to ethnographically examine the labor that goes into making a mother tongue precisely because the project of vernacular standardization in Morocco is ongoing and has yet to fully succeed. In this paper, I draw on interviews with a diverse set of language activists (writers, translators, and publishers) in Rabat, Morocco. My interview data shows a strong insistence by activists that Moroccans have an intrinsic connection to Darija. Yet this insistence, I argue, belies the difficulties that the activists themselves experience when adopting Darija as a language of reading and writing. In contrast to activists’ belief that mother tongue texts powerfully confront readers with “linguistic reality,” I argue that reading and writing in the language that one speaks is less a “trigger” than a practice of self-cultivation through which readers develop the capacity for reexperiencing their spoken language as their “mother tongue”--and for reimagining themselves as properly “modern” linguistic subjects.