The purpose of this document is to inform you in general on the issues
of studying the Arabic language in the Arab world. It is presented in two
sections both of which are on this page.
Arabic has incredible expressive capabilities and has been of critical
importance to many of the events in recent and distant history. If all
variants of Arabic are counted together as a single language, it is one
of the top 10 languages in numbers of speakers in the world, and its area
of geographic coverage is very large covering large areas of Africa, Asia
and of course the Middle East.
The most important thing to understand about Arabic is that it is not
one language, but several. These include Classical Arabic, a modern derivative
of it called Modern Standard Arabic, and the many colloquial languages
spoken in the different Arabic countries.
The first decision you must make when you decide to study Arabic is
which Arabic to study. Most Universities focus their studies on Modern
Standard Arabic. Students interested in religion or history might be
interested in Classical Arabic. People who want to live in the Arabic
World would be interested in studying the colloquial language of the
area they will live in and might also study Modern Standard Arabic to
be able to read and understand television, cinema and news broadcasts.
It is important to understand the differences between these three
categories of Arabic.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is called "Fusha" in Arabic. It
is used in literature, the media, and educational institutions. You
will need to read Fusha in order to read a newspaper or a novel. You
will need to understand Fusha in order to understand news broadcasts,
and most (but not all) cinema and television entertainment. An Arab
who finished high school should theoretically understand spoken Fusha,
but in practice this is often not the case, and when it comes to
conversing in Fusha many Arabs even at the University level have
difficulties holding a conversation in Fusha for more than a few
minutes. However, educated Arabs would certainly write a personal
letter in a very grammatically correct Fusha.
Classical Arabic is also sometimes referred to as "Fusha" in
Arabic. It is the language of the Qu'ran first and foremost, and
would be of importance to students of religion. It would also be
important for historians expecting to read manuscripts prior to this
century. While being able to read Classical Arabic would be useful to
any Arabic student, speaking it would be relatively useless, though
certainly most Arabs would find this quite humourous in a restaurant
or cafe.
Colloquial Arabic, sometimes referred to in Arabic as the
"lahja", or "`amiya" is a collection of languages all of which share
some of their features with Classical Arabic and Modern Standard
Arabic. These are sometimes referred to as dialects, but under some
analyses are considered languages in and of themselves. They have
different grammatical rules, vocabulary, and pronunciations from one
another and MSA. There are two major categories of colloquial
languages. These are sometimes referred to as "Western Colloquial
Arabic" and "Eastern Colloquial Arabic" in University programs. The
first category corresponds loosely to the Arabic countries to the West
of Egypt and the second category includes Egypt and the Arabic
countries to the East of Egypt.
Eastern Colloquial Arabic could be further broken down in
many ways. Two of the more important sub-categories of Eastern
Colloquial Arabic include Egyptian and Levantine. Levantine Colloquial
Arabic is spoken in various versions in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and
Syria. Egyptian is of particular interest as much of the cinema and
television that is not in MSA is in this language, and it is widely
understood for this reason. The natives of every country in the
Eastern region claim that their colloquial language is closest to
MSA. While it is difficult to determine which Eastern variant is
closest to MSA, it is the author's experience that foreign students
trained in MSA understand the Eastern Colloquial Arabic variants
more easily than any of the Western Colloquial Arabic variants.
Western Colloquial Arabic has many influences from the local
languages in North Africa and French. Apparently the variants differ
more widely from language to language than the Eastern
variants. Western Colloquial Arabic variants appear to be fairly far
removed from Eastern Colloquial Arabic, see below.
Most students will wish to acquire a decent base of MSA and also to be
able to communicate in at least one dialect. This is difficult, and resembles
in some ways the problem of learning two closely related languages like
Spanish and Portuguese at the same time. The author recommends study in
an Eastern region in this case.
If the student is only interested in communicating with the natives
of a country in the region orally, clearly he/she should go to that
country and study the colloquial language. This will not be a
difficult task in comparison with learning MSA.
If the student only wishes to acquire a reasonable knowledge of MSA
it will still be a difficult task, but easier than studying colloquial
and MSA at once. However it will be frustrating in many ways because
of the inability to communicate in the actual spoken language of the
country. The same applies for Classical Arabic.
It is also important to note that, contrary to a widely held myth,
Arabs do not speak MSA with one another when they travel to other
Arabic countries; they generally tend to try to learn the local
colloquial language which they pick up with little difficulty. One
exception to this is when Arabs from the Western region travel for a
brief time to the Eastern region or vice versa. The author has seen
people in this situation speak MSA, Egyptian Colloquial, their own
colloquial languages, and even in English and French to communicate.
The author recommends Syria and Yemen to students interested in
studying Arabic. The reasons are that they are inexpensive, English
and other foreign languages are not widely spoken, and there is not a
large presence of foreigners. See the Syria and Yemen pages for
details on programs in these countries. There is an additional page
listing a few programs which were recommended to the author located in
other countries, but it is strongly recommended that you study in
Syria or Yemen. In particular, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon have large
numbers of foreigners and a higher number of locals who speak English
and/or French.
See Syria, Yemen,
Other,
or go to the main Arabic page.
Comments or additions? Please email arabic@xand.net.