Just like in the Quran, classical Arabic speeches are rich in stylistic tools, figurative speech, rhyming sentences and word order not typically found in MSA. Most non-native learners of Arabic are interested in classical Arabic either because they want to understand the Quran or are scholars of theology and experts in comparative religious studies.
Arabic is the liturgical language of around one billion Muslims across the world who need to recite Quranic verses verbatim during the five daily prayers. It is commonly used in contexts such as writing, TV and radio broadcasts, formal interviews, and speeches and official letters. Native Arabic speakers typically do not make an explicit distinction between the two types of Arabic, but very few master the latter. Modern Standard Arabic was deliberately developed in the early part of the 19th century as a modernized version of Classical Arabic.
It was pushed by the then-emerging pan-Arabist , anti-colonial movement as a communication medium that unifies all Arabs regardless of their national origin or religion. Arabs often use a mixture of both colloquial and MSA. For instance, interviewers generally use MSA in asking prepared questions or making prepared remarks, then switch to a colloquial variety to add a spontaneous comment or respond to a question.
Arab leaders give speeches in MSA and resort to colloquial Arabic to drive a point home or simplify an idea to the illiterate citizens. In the Maghreb region, it is called Darija. Colloquial Arabic can be divided into roughly six main varieties representing the geographic clusters across the Arab world. It can be divided into even more language subsets but we will keep at the rough number of six at the moment:. Now, to appreciate the differences between these dialects, take a look at this hilarious video.
They put several Arab students from different nationalities and asked them to say a specific sentence in their own dialects.
These countries can be lumped under the Maghrebi, Egyptian, Levantine and Gulf dialects. What ensues is quite funny, but also educational since it helps us really appreciate he differences that make many of these dialects mutually unintelligible. It is spoken in the Western Arab countries Maghreb means west or where the sun sets].
Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians, who together total about 80 million speakers, have their own distinct Maghrebi varieties but are easily and mutually intelligible. Even the locals a vast majority of them do not speak it. They do indeed understand it , but you'd have to seriously and unrealistically restrict your interactions if you wanted a reply in MSA. They ONLY speak their dialect. MSA's use is for reading , for understanding religious texts, and for following very formal procedures or watching the news.
Although I've listened to some radio news in dialect. The biggest myth that a lot of conversations with natives themselves has shown me to not be true, is that even Arabic speakers themselves do not use MSA when travelling to other countries. Nearly all Egyptians I've talked with have told me that they simply speak in their dialect, and muddle through such as a Spanish speaker in Italy or Brazil would or try to learn the local dialect, when travelling in other Arabic countries.
It's a far cry from dialects as we know them in Europe, such as between my Irish dialect and other ones in English, or Rio Portuguese , or Colombian Spanish compared to other ones.
Generally speaking, these European style dialects are split offs that occurred in the last years or less and sometimes they incorporate features of a second language. Modern Standard Arabic though, despite the name, is based entirely on Arabic from the Koran written in the 7th century. The only major difference is vocabulary, since MSA incorporates new words to fit into the modern world.
Grammatically and for most common words though, it's essentially Arabic that existed over 1, years ago, preserved to this day because of the importance of understanding the Koran in its original form. It's the same way that Latin, which would have been in use formally 2, years ago as we see it written even to this day, actually gave rise to vulgar Latin, which itself evolved into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc.
Effectively, what you are doing when learning MSA with hopes of travelling in the country, is almost as if you were studying Latin to travel in France or Italy. One key example is how different the grammar is, such as the use of cases nominative, accusative etc.
In MSA you add an -u to subjects of sentences, an -i if it's affected by some prepositions and so on. Latin also has such grammatical cases, whereas modern Romance languages pretty much never do. So in MSA you have to constantly think whether a word is the subject, the object, or acted on by a preposition, or you will say it wrong.
This simply doesn't apply in the Egyptian dialect and other dialects from what I'm told. Then there is a host of completely different vocabulary. Many other basic words are totally different, or if they are similar or even written the same , the differences in vowel pronunciation, and use of particular consonants makes them almost seem like different words.
Raag-il and Raajil man are pretty different! Then like many languages, dialects are way more flexible in accepting loan words. You'll hear that in the video above; this is not for my benefit, but how I've heard young Egyptians talking amongst one another. At times I've asked them for what the Arabic equivalent is of a very English word they just dropped into an Arabic sentence, and they don't know!
One of the biggest surprises is that Arabic script itself which like any phonetic script, can be learned in an afternoon no hassle is NOT used to represent Egyptian Arabic by many young people. Text messages, emails, and sometimes even informal speeches are written using the same letters we use in European languages.
The numbers you see are used to express Arabic letters that don't have a clear English equivalent, but the shape of the number resembles an Arabic letter. Vowel sounds change, and sometimes a word may be pronounced the classical way, and sometimes it's pronounced a more Egyptian way.
You can show this much more efficiently in Latinized script. As stated in the video, to replace certain sounds that don't exist in European languages, you see numbers used a lot. Unfortunately, there is no standardization to this, so you will see it vary a lot depending on who is writing.
But a good overall view of how most people use it is described in this Wikipedia article. I hope I've emphasised that you really are dealing with different languages here.
They are called dialects and not given any kind of official recognition as real languages mainly because each country prefers to have its official language as the one and only Arabic used in the Koran itself.
Most language learning material focuses on MSA. These numbers, while reflecting populations of the countries where MSA is official, are actually complete and utter rubbish. Sign in here.
Sign In. Start Your Free Trial. January 18, Which One is Best to Learn? Conclusion 1. Dialects and Their Status To put it briefly, Arabic speakers from different countries will often have a hard time understanding each other.
Dialects will be much easier. You can read and be understood wherever you go. Conclusion So what do you think? Posted by ArabicPod Create Your Free Lifetime Account. By clicking Join Now, you agree to our Terms of Use , Privacy Policy , and to receive our email communications, which you may opt out at any time. In most cultures, it is custom to express gratitude in some way or another. The dictionary defines gratitude as foll Do you often feel lonely and sad? Do you long for romance and are willing to do whatever it takes to meet that specia What word passes between native speakers a dozen times a day without a second thought, but leaves a learner tongue-t You may have encountered the statistic that more than 90 percent of our communication is based on body language Remember back when you had to grab a giant dictionary every time you wanted to find or translate one word?
Imagine if people were like programmed robots. No typos. No slips of the tongue. No blemishes. Saying Hello in Arabic: What You Need to Know What word passes between native speakers a dozen times a day without a second thought, but leaves a learner tongue-t The dictionary defines gratitude as f
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