Arabic 101 Lesson 1

I decided to start my Arabic language posts. This is just for fun (and some knowledge) so if you see anything wrong in my posts, please let me know.

What I want to start with is Arabic Diglossia. Diglossia is a linguistics term that refers to a situation where two or more varieties of a language are used in one community. They are basically dialects but in linguistics we like to refer to them as ‘varieties’ because some of the dialects are incomprehensible to some speakers of the same language. There are two language varieties in Diglossia: the High ‘H’ variety which is used in formal written papers, public speeches… etc and the Low ‘L’ variety which is basically the vernacular variety (in the case of Arabic it’s varieties). In Arabic we have Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as H variety and the colloquial (regional) varieties as L variety. It’s also important to know that MSA is not Classical Arabic but rather a derived modern version of it. Think of Classical Arabic  like Old English except that it is still preserved since it’s the Quran form. So simply we have:

• Classical Arabic (Quranic Arabic)
• Modern Standard Arabic (Literary Arabic)
• Colloquial varieties of Arabic (Regional dialects)

So if you want to learn Arabic, which one should you aim for? I discussed this with my brother and we both agree that you need to learn the MSA + a colloquial variety of your choice. The reason is that we usually use the colloquial forms for communication and everyday talk but will never use them in formal written forms. So you need to learn the MSA for written discourse and a colloquial variety for communication. I know it sounds hard –almost like learning two languages but once you have learned one you already learned the basics, you just need to adjust them for the new form. Out of the many colloquial varieties of Arabic, I would personally recommend Egyptian Arabic or “Masri” as Egyptians call it. Reason is that not only many non-Arabic speakers find it to be the easiest out of most varieties but also because Egyptian linguists wrote many books about it, so you shouldn’t have problems learning it. In addition, it’s one of the most recognized varieties across the Arabic countries/speakers due to media.

In future posts I’ll start with the basics of Arabic (maybe Alphabet and simple notes about the grammar) Stay tuned :P