Variety of Arabic 

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See Arabic languages for the historical family of dialects.

The Arabic language is a Semitic language with many varieties that diverge widely from one another -— both from country to country and within a single country. This entry looks at these varieties of Arabic dialects, distinguishing them from Classical (CA) /Standard Arabic (often called Modern Standard Arabic or MSA) and from each other. In sociolinguistic terms, Arabic in its native environment typically occurs in a "diglossic" situation, meaning that native speakers learn and use two substantially different language forms in different aspects of their lives. In the case of Arabic, the regionally prevalent variety is learned as a speaker's mother tongue and is used for nearly all everyday speaking situations throughout life, including most films and plays, and (rarely) in some literature. These varieties (or dialects) are called العامية (al-)`āmmiyya (East) or الدارجة (ad-)dārija (West) in Arabic. A second, quite different variety, Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى (al-)fuṣ-ḥā) in Arabic for both CA and MSA), is learned in school and is used for most printed material, TV news reporting and interviews, sermons and other formal situations. The extent to which the local vernacular tends to interplay with the Standard variety in formal situations varies from country to country.

Different Dialects of Arabic in the Arab World

Contents

Overview

Descended from Old North Arabian dialects of pre-Islamic Arabia, early Arabic had noticeable dialect distinctions — in particular between Qahtanite, Adnan, and Himyar. With the spread of Islam in the 7th century, Qur'anic Arabic became the most prevalent dialect.

Vernacular Arabic was first recognized as a written language in contrast to Classical Arabic the 17th century Ottoman Egypt, as the Cairo elite formed a trend towards colloquial writing. A record of the Cairo vernacular of the time is found in the dictionary compiled by Yusuf al-Maghribi.

In modern times, the spoken dialects of people throughout the Arab world differ notably from the Literary Arabic and from each other.

General varieties

The main division between varieties of spoken Arabic is between the Maghrebi (North African) varieties (characterized by a first person singular in n- and use of "sh" at the end of a verb for negation) and those of the Middle East, followed by that between sedentary varieties and the much more conservative Bedouin varieties. "Peripheral" varieties located in countries where Arabic is not a dominant language (e.g., Turkey, Iran, Cyprus, Chad, and Nigeria) are particularly divergent in some respects, especially vocabulary, being less influenced by classical Arabic; however, historically they fall within the same dialect classifications as better-known varieties. In some areas, different religious communities spoke slightly different varieties — thus in Baghdad the Christians and Jews spoke a qeltu-variety while the Muslims spoke a gilit-variety. (Both words mean "I said". For further discussion, see Judeo-Arabic languages.)

Maltese is genetically descended from Siculo-Arabic, but over time acquired highly pervasive Romance influences.1 Due to the large impact of these influences, Maltese is sometimes referred to as a "mixed language"23 (although that term is then attributed a vaguer meaning than the strict definitions current in more recent studies2) and it has been proposed to classify it as a "creoloid belonging to the group of Araboid languages"4, or as being located on a continuum between a "mixed language" and a "language with massive borrowing".254 Maltese also uses a Latin-based alphabet.

Probably the most divergent of non-creole Arabic varieties is Cypriot Maronite Arabic, a nearly extinct variety heavily influenced by Greek. Some of these varieties are mutually unintelligible from other forms of Arabic. Middle Eastern and North African varieties (excluding those spoken in Egypt which are closer to the Middle Eastern forms) are particularly disparate with the speakers of the latter only being capable to comprehend the former due to the popularity of Egyptian films and other media.

One factor in the differentiation of the varieties is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided a significant number of new words, and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order; however, a much more significant factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine and Egyptian fiih, and Maghrebi kayen all mean "there is", and come from Arabic yakuun, fiihi, kaa'in respectively.

The spoken varieties of Arabic have occasionally been written, usually in the Arabic alphabet. Notably, many plays and poems, as well as a few other works (even translations of Plato) exist in Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian Arabic; books of poetry, at least, exist for most varieties. In Algeria, colloquial Maghrebi Arabic was taught as a separate subject under French colonization, and some textbooks exist. Mizrahi Jews throughout the Arab world who spoke Judeo-Arabic dialects rendered newspapers, letters, accounts, stories, and translations of some parts of their liturgy in the Hebrew alphabet, adding diacritics and other conventions for letters that exist in Judeo-Arabic but not Hebrew. The Latin alphabet was advocated for Lebanese Arabic by Said Aql, whose supporters published several books in his transcription. Later, in 1994, Abdelaziz Pasha Fahmi, a member of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Egypt proposed the replacement of the Arabic alphabet with the Latin alphabet. His proposal was discussed in two sessions in the communion but was rejected, and was faced with strong opposition in cultural circles.

Arabic-based pidgins, with a small largely Arabic vocabulary lacking most Arabic morphological features, are or have been widespread along the southern edge of the Sahara; the medieval geographer al-Bakri records a text in one (in a place probably corresponding to modern Mauritania) in the 11th century. In some areas, especially around the southern Sudan, these have creolized; see the list below.

Classification of varieties

Classification of varieties, with some info from Versteegh [1]:

Pre-Islamic

Islamic Golden Age

Pre-Modern

Western varieties:

Central varieties:

Northern varieties:

Southern varieties:

Peripheries:

Sectarian varieties:

Diglossic variety:

Creoles:

Country-based dialects:

Sedentary vs. Bedouin

A basic dialectal distinction that cuts across the entire geography of the Arabic-speaking world is between sedentary and Bedouin varieties. Across the Levant and North Africa (i.e. the areas of post-Islamic settlement), this is mostly reflected as an urban (sedentary) vs. rural (Bedouin) split, but the situation is more complicated in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. The distinction stems from the settlement patterns in the wake of the Arab conquests. As regions were conquered, army camps were set up that eventually grew into cities, and settlement of the rural areas by Bedouins gradually followed thereafter. In some areas, sedentary dialects are divided further into urban and rural variants.

The most obvious phonetic difference between the two dialect groups is the pronunciation of the letter ق qaaf, which is voiced in the Bedouin dialects (usually /g/, but sometimes a palatalized variation /ʤ/ or /ʒ/), but voiceless in the sedentary dialects (/q/ or /ʔ/) (the former realisation being mostly associated with the countryside, the latter being considered typically urban). The other major phonetic difference is that the Bedouin dialects preserve the Classical Arabic (CA) interdentals /θ/ ث and /ð/ ذ, and merge the CA emphatic sounds /dˤ/ ض and /ðˤ/ ظ into /ðˤ/ rather than sedentary /dˤ/.

However, the most significant differences are in syntax. The sedentary dialects, in particular, share a number of common innovations from CA. This has led to the suggestion, first articulated by Charles Ferguson, that a simplified koine developed in the army staging camps in Iraq, from where the remaining parts of the modern Arab world were conquered.

In general, the Bedouin dialects are more conservative than the sedentary dialects, and the Bedouin dialects within the Arabic peninsula are even more conservative than those elsewhere. Within the sedentary dialects, the western varieties (particularly, Moroccan Arabic) are less conservative than the eastern varieties.

Morphological and syntactic variation

All dialects, sedentary and Bedouin, differ in the following ways from Classical Arabic (CA):

All dialects except some Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula share the following innovations from CA:

All sedentary dialects share the following additional innovations:

  • ramâ "he threw it"
  • maramahûsh "he didn't throw it"

In addition, the following innovations are characteristic of many or most sedentary dialects:

  • /ma-bi-t-gib-u-ha-lnā-ʃ/
  • [negation]-[indicative]-[2nd.person.subject]-bring-[plural.subject]-her-to.us-[negation]
  • "You (plural) aren't bringing her to us."

Other notable innovations:

Phonetic variation

  • The result is that there is no more distinction between short and long vowels; borrowings from CA have "long" vowels (now pronounced half-long) uniformly substituted for original short and long vowels.
  • This also results in consonant clusters of great length, which are (more or less) syllabified according to a sonority hierarchy. (For some subdialects, in practice, it is very difficult to tell where, if anywhere, there are syllabic peaks in long consonant clusters in a phrase such as /xsˤsˤk tktbi/ "you (fem.) must write". Other dialects, in the North, make a clear distinction; they say /xəssək təktəb/ "you want to write", but */xəssk ətkətb/ just won't do).
  • To a large extent, Eastern Arabic dialects reflect this, while the situation is rather more complicated in Egyptian Arabic. (The allophonic distribution still exists to a large extent, although not in any predictable fashion; nor is one or the other variety used consistently in different words derived from the same root. Furthermore, although derivational suffixes (in particular, relational /-i/ and /-iyya/) affect a preceding /r/ in the expected fashion, inflectional suffixes do not.)
  • In Moroccan Arabic, short /a/ and /i/ have merged, obscuring the original distribution. In this dialect, the two varieties have completely split into separate phonemes, with one or the other used consistently across all words derived from a particular root except in a few situations.
  • Full /a/ is affected as above, but /i/ and /u/ are also affected, and are lowered to [e] and [o], respectively.
  • In some varieties, such as in Marrakesh, the effects are even more extreme (and complex), where both high-mid and low-mid allophones exist ([e] and [ɛ], [o] and [ɔ]), in addition to front-rounded allophones of original /u/ ([y], [ø], [œ]), all depending on adjacent phonemes.
  • On the other hand, emphasis spreading in Moroccan Arabic is less pronounced than elsewhere; usually it only spreads to the nearest full vowel on either side, although with some additional complications.
  • Interestingly, emphasis spreading does not affect the affrication of non-emphatic /t/ in Moroccan Arabic, with the result that these two phonemes are always distinguishable regardless of the nearly presence of other emphatic phonemes.
  • The uvular consonants /x/ and /q/ often cause partial backing of adjacent /a/ (and lowering of /u/ and /i/ in Moroccan Arabic). For Egyptian Arabic and Moroccan Arabic, the effect is sometimes described as half as powerful as an emphatic consonant, as a vowel with uvular consonants on both sides is affected similarly to having an emphatic consonant on one side.
  • Interestingly, the pharyngeal consonants /ħ/ and /ʕ/ cause no emphasis spreading and may have little or no effect on adjacent vowels. In Egyptian Arabic, for example, an /a/ adjacent to either sound is a fully front [æ]. In other dialects, /ʕ/ is more likely to have an effect than /ħ/.
  • In some Gulf Arabic dialects, /w/ and/or /l/ causes backing.
  • In all dialects, the word الله /alˤlˤāh/ Allāh has backed [ɑ]'s and strongly pharyngealized /l/.
  • In CA and MSA, stress cannot occur on a final long vowel; however, this does not result in different stress patterns on any words, because CA final long vowels are shortened in all modern dialects, and any current final long vowels are secondary developments from words containing a long vowel followed by a consonant.

See also

Further reading

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