Explanation: Arabic has maintained a great literary continuity through the centuries, in part due to the importance of the Quran as the literal written word of the Divine. A translation of the Quran is only a commentary - nothing more - meaning that written Arabic has had a sort of 'hard standard' that has bound together diverse locales with a common written form of the tongue.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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TIL. That's cool
Depends, it also means that written and spoken arabic diverges strongly in some places, which is not a good feature for a language.
Native Arabic speaker here. Can confirm.
Although it’s not always as easy as it sounds because many words and expressions from back then aren’t relevant/in-use. Also, reading poetry from the pre-Islamic era is significantly more difficult. We still have volumes of literature (specifically poetry) that predates Islam.
The reason the language is so resilient is the use of the Quran as a reference (all translations of it aren’t considered Quran, but commentaries), and the fact we have institutes dedicated to maintaining and standardising the language as part of the Arab League (ALECSO and its subsidiaries, etc). Also, all nations of the Arab League enforce a rule that stipulates that the governments, newspapers, media/TV, and academia are required to use Modern Standard Arabic for official business across all member countries.
Regional dialects are kind of hard to understand at first, but generally speaking, we do understand each other regardless of the dialect if the two parties communicating work at it long enough. The hardest dialects to understand are from them pesky Moroccans/Tunisians with their French-every-other-word bastardisation of the language, but we figure it out eventually.
Edit: and I’m not bashing Moroccans/Tunisians/Algerians. We love you guys! ❤️
Edit: spelling, grammar
I wouldn't hold the French influence against them tbf
Neither do I. We have the same problem with English and German here in Egypt (especially in the recent decades and with the advent of the internet)
Edit: also in sciences and tech, it’s becoming near impossible for the regulatory bodies involved to keep up and we have to use loan words to refer to things even in official documents.
institutes dedicated to maintaining and standardising the language as part of the Arab League (ALECSO and its subsidiaries, etc)
With successes like Arabic, French, Korean and Turkish I don't understand how the "Descriptivism vs. Prescriptivism" debate in the anglosphere is "Descriptivism : signature look of superiority", especially since their linguistic rules are filled with more exceptions than rules, and their spelling is atrocious (although I blame the Latin roots for that, since germanic languages manage just fine)
Depends on what you consider "success". English is the number one second language, after all. And besides, French, while highly regulated, is full of insanity like 420+2 you would expect a prescription would iron out, meanwhile the parts of English that were prescribed, like is*land or not ending on prepositions, are notably more weird than they would be normally.
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Quran is a little archaic becaues of some words, but fucking hell i understand the quran better than somebody from Morocco. They speak their own language
You know it's bad when you can't tell whether the words they're saying are Arabic or French.
A month ago i was on a plane and there were lots of moroccans. They fucking spoke arabic + french in the same sentence. Just straight up interrupting the french sentence and continuing in arabic/vice versa.
I thought we had a problem with loan words from english here, but magrebis are on a whole other level lmao
Why is this surprising to you?
Everyone living abroad that i have met so far ended up mixing words of their native plus the local language, sometimes some lingua franca (haha) usually English mixed in between.
I had funny conversations about German bureaucracy with Syrian refugees. "So i got a letter from the Ausländerbehörde and they said that my Antrag got rejected curses in Arabic"
Makes sense if its people living abroad, but these people in particular were normal magrebis just on vacation lol. I've also never heard one speak in two different languages in the same sentence, not even loanwords, just going back and forth completely from both. Yet then again it's not everyday i meet one anyway, so i could just be clueless about this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Latvia is funny one, like speaking in Latvian with some English sparkles, greeting in Italian and cursing in Russian
Oh, and there's the infamous "ok labi davai čau" that manages to cram 4 languages into a goodbye when closing a phone call
The western Mediterranean is a huge mix anyways. Spanish has many words of Arabic origin. Darija has many word of Spanish origin. Spanish ojalá for instance is just inshallah. Italians and Spanish usually can speak with each other in their respective language. I had a conversation once with a Moroccan living in Italy using my poor level of Spanish. Southern French youth is increasingly using Arabic words learned from the Diaspora.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mix ends up with a new common language being formed in a few centuries.
It's called code switching and is extremely normal in bilingual communities.
It's called code switching, and apparently it's common in bilingual communities. On the topic of Arab code switching, rich Egyptian do it too but with English. Now that I think about it rich people not code switching is probably only an Arabian Peninsula thing.
I'm fortunate enough to [mostly] not meet any rich snobs, so i can't confirm or deny this 😆
Philippines with their English and Tagalog meshup is similar, and for extra fun they added some Spanish in it as well.
A lot of north African Arabic dialect words are straight up french words transliterated to Arabic. That's in addition to the lebanese dialect having some, and also many Lebanese people knowing French as a secondary language
Also hello buddy!
That's interesting, checking a moroccan arabic dictionary from french loanwrods i understand almost nothing xd. Though we do have some basic loanwords like cafe and telfizion
And hi! Always good to see you :D
My work focuses on digitally processing texts from between 15th and 17th century in German. It's a pain and i look with envy to my colleagues working in English and French (around the same time). On the other hand, i like the challenge. :-)
I feel like 15th and 17th century German isn't that hard??
Like yeah, archaic words here and there. Lack of standardized grammar so you have to pronounce some words first.
Still, I can understand most of what Walther von der Vogelweide wrote in the 12th/13th century without too much difficulty. I think it'd take me a month to read fluently.
You probably missed the "digitally processing" part. Reading it isn't that difficult (still much more than french or english) but due to spelling variance and some other challenges it is mich more difficult to adapt existing models and architectures designed for modern German to premodern German.
In my case, working with administrative documents, there is also a problem concerning gerne-specific words (old terms for legal xoncepts basically) which for example are not well understood by systems created for modern German.
Oh right, I thought of digitally processing as just digitalizing which isn't quite the same.
Yeah, that sounds painful to attempt. I can imagine it's like trying to process German text today written in dialect (like the Bavarian Wikipedia).
I know nothing about arabic, but in my opinion it's the prettiest script.
Persian look of signature superiority
Watch me read a 900 year old text for fun
Still can't watch a movie that old without subtitles. Gotcha
"understanding it all" eh~
I think I read somewhere that Chinese readers are able to read 2000 year old texts with relatively little difficulty.
Chinese speaker here: No, we are not. Classical Chinese is a very different language but generally the basics are taught in school. It definitely takes significant effort because the grammar and vocabulary are completely different.
Written Chinese was reformed in the beginning of 20^th^ century to be closer to the spoken language.
Before that, it would have been true except written language was so distant from spoken, I would call them almost different languages (but that's because I'm no linguist, and someone here already told me that writing is not a language at all anyway), so the only literate people were able to read literature of the old
Yeah that's apparently a thing. Same principle too, except with logograms rather than an abjad.
Read it all, maybe. But understand?
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