Whatever language we speak, people in other parts of the world who say they speak the same language are not necessarily doing so. A German speaker from the Belgian border might have to cock their ears in order to understand their counterpart from South Tyrol, just as a speaker of Indian English would sometimes struggle to follow Nigerian English.
Such is the case in the Arab world. Those who identify themselves as Arabic speakers are spread from the coast of West Africa across thousands of miles to the eastern reaches of Oman, just across the Arabian sea from India, and from the perilous Syrian-Turkish border in the north to the southern tip of Somalia just below the equator, so dialects have a lot of space to diverge. In fact, using their local dialects that they'd both call Arabic, a man from Marrakesh might have trouble asking a taxi driver in Dubai for a tissue.
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| The diverging dialects collectively known as Arabic. Graphic © 2012 Wikipedia user Moester101 |
The definition of Arabic gets even more complicated, as the language also varies on another level. These dialects of the Arab world can be considered, quite patronisingly, as 'low' varieties, spoken in the shadow of a 'high' variety known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Wherever a regional dialect of Arabic is spoken, MSA will be used in other contexts too, and this constant presence of two varieties is known as diglossia.
Unlike the spoken dialects, MSA is pretty much uniform across the Arab world, and it has a standardised written form. Also unlike the dialects, MSA is nobody's mother tongue, has to be learnt at school, and is only really used for formal writing and prepared speech. The distinction between MSA and the spoken dialects of Arabic are much more essential than that between spoken and written English, for example. See how this basic sentence, for example, translates into the two:
| English | Why won't you let me blow my nose? |
| Egyptian Colloquial Arabic | miš hatxallinī ʔatmaxxiṭ lēh |
| Modern Standard Arabic | limāḏā lan tasmuḥa liyya ʔan ʔuniffa |
If our friend from Marrakesh was lucky enough to go to school, he might try using MSA as a lingua franca to ask for tissues, but it would sound a bit pompous. At least it'll stop him sniffing.
Follow this link for a fairly good illustration of the variations between Arabic dialects in Johnson, the language blog of The Economist.
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