The drawback comes when you get a Moroccan person and a Qatari person who don’t understand each other in their native dialects. But then again, they can probably both understand and produce Egyptian Arabic well enough for that to not be a huge problem most of the time.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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When Arabs can't understand each other they fall on Standard Arabic to varying degrees, not Egyptian Arabic I think.
If I remember it correctly from my professor, there is Modern Standard Arabic, which translates into a formal Arabic version for every region Arabic is spoken, which then has its regional colloquialisms.
So while Egypt has its own colloquial, the 'formal' Misr Arabic is the 'most' like Standard so they're often considered to be similar or referred to interchangeably because no one really speaks MSA, except maybe in academia.
But I am not a native speaker so my professor may have woven an explanation that works for your average American college student.
I think what your teacher was talking about is that sometimes speakers of less well-understood dialects will replace certain words with better-known Egyptian Arabic translations, but no they don't straight up start speaking like an Egyptian; that honor goes to standard Arabic if all else fails. Usually though what you see is Standard Arabic (occasionally Egyptian Arabic) words and structures replacing dialectal ones as necessary. Think of a Spanish and an Italian speaking each in their own language but sometimes substituting Latin to make themselves better understood (imagine Latin is still widely taught in Europe in this analogy).
That sounds pretty accurate to what I remember being explained.
A Qatari and a Moroccan will probably opt for a white (or intellectual) dialect instead of Egyptian; where they will start to swap out words of their dialect with ones from MSA and apply their accent to it.
If a Moroccan was talking to me I would ask them to swap to French (I don't speak French, but I have a better chance)
The number of new books published in Arabic is much smaller than those published in languages that are are far less widespread.
Arabic is stuck on the Quran including the cultures that speak it.
Intellectual stagnation fueled by poverty, authoritarianism and colonialism is what you're thinking of.
Other poor and colonized countries don’t have that issue. Large powers of the Muslim world were not meaningfully colonized or for long. Of course if you include the Ottoman Empire, sure.
I have a lot I could say about this, but first where are you getting your numbers?
So. The US? Lmao
Nah, bro. Most Arabic speakers could read the quran because pronunciation is explicitly directed in the modern copies, but hardly anybody understands it. You have to read the tafsirs, hadith, and writings of scholars if you want to understand anything according to most every Muslim I know.
That would make sense. It's one of those "languages" that really might be more of a language family, like "Chinese".
Languages evolve along with cultures. Rather sad if your language is stuck in time.
"Arabic" is not really a single language. it's regarded as such because of the pan-arabic movement but you can find many instances in which speakers of two Arabic "dialects" can barely understand each other. realistically treating Arabic as one language and all Arab languages as dialects is like treating latin languages as one and portuguese, spanish, italian and french as dialects.
however Arab countries found a way to agree on a common language, mostly to be used in media. this would be the closest to language used in the Quran, and the language used by the gulf countries. this isn't really a language any of them use as is but it is a good way to ensure they have a common way to understand each other. this is similar to western countries teaching Latin, only on a wider scale, and technically the language isn't dead because it is used in media like newspapers or some TV programming (although most tv programming would still use the local language)
so while each of these languages are evolving (in different directions even) they can still largely read and understand old books because they're taught as part of literacy. this is essentially the "formal language" which is different from the language people would use while speaking or texting for example.
Small correction: Most speakers or Arabic dialects understand each other, but there's a pretty strong divide between Maghrebi (everything East of Egypt) and Middle Eastern (everything West of Libya) dialects. So a Libyan and a Moroccan will be generally able to understand each other, and same for an Egyptian and an Iraqi, but put an Egyptian and a Libyan in a room together and Standard Arabic will start showing up.
I think it's pretty hard to generalize but it's kinda of like degrees of separation. you can have something like dialect A and B understand each other, and so do B and C, and C and D, but A and D would have difficulty.
imo Egyptian is very different from Iraqi, but they're likely to understand each other because Iraqi is similar to the Standard Arabic, and Egypt has exported their culture to the Arab world through theater, tv and music.
Probably like romance languages 600 years ago.
that's what happens when you go all-in on scripture. the Quran, and I'm paraphrasing here, states that one should never paraphrase the Quran, because when it comes to the holy word you either say it exactly or not at all.
so resisting linguistic change is pretty damn important for Muslims. Arabic is deliberately weighed down by its own importance in the culture
sucks for them tbh!
laughs in the belief that scriptures are blasphemy
@PugJesus
Hebrew speakers: Hold my beer.
Hey that's gotta be cheating.
tbf, biblical Hebrew is a pain to understand compared to modern Hebrew