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Arabic

Arabic is a Diglossic language referring to a situation where two distinct language varieties are used by a single group of population. Besides the primary dialects, a very different language, learned largely by formal education, is used for most written and formal spoken purposes instead of ordinary conversation by any sector of the community.

Spoken Arabic

Colloquial Dialects
Colloquial Arabic is the spoken Arabic used by Arabs in daily lives. Unlike modern standard Arabic, the uniform in all Arab countries, it is subject to regional variation, not only between different countries, but also within regions in the same country.

There are over 30 different varieties of colloquial Arabic which include:

Egyptian, spoken by about 46 million people in Egypt, is likely to be the most widely understood variety, thanks to the popularity of Egyptian-made films and TV shows.
Algerian - spoken by about 22 million people in Algeria
Moroccan/Maghrebi - spoken in Morocco by about 19.5 million people
Sudanese - spoken in Sudan by about 19 million people
Saidi - spoken by about 19 million people in Egpyt
North Levantine - spoken in Lebanon and Syria by about 15 million people
Mesopotamian - spoken by about 14 million people in Iraq, Iran and Syria
Najdi - spoken in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and Syria by about 10 million people

Dialects in colloquial Arabic are so diversified that even native speakers of Arabic may have difficulty in understanding Arabs of neighboring countries, or in extreme cases: neighboring villages. The further away the countries, the greater the variation between the dialects. However, despite of the differences between all Arabic dialects, their underlying syntactic structures are quite similar.

Two coexisting varieties of written Arabic

1. Classical Arabic
The language of poetry, classical literature and the Qur'an. The classical Arabic is regarded as an important part of the culture by Arabs. Throughout the, Islamic history, it has been the language of royal and princely courts, the bureaucracy and the educated.

2. Modern Standard Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), as the name shows, is the modern counterpart of Classical Arabic. It servers as a tool, with which individual Arabs from different countries can communicate with each another. MSA is also the language of Islamic worship, contemporary literature, journalism, television and scientific writing, learned through formal education and not acquired as a native language by any Arabs. Almost without exception, it is MSA that one can hear on Arabic news broadcasts and other television programs, in school and speeches given by presidents and ministers or discussions by intellectuals.

Significantly, MSA and Classical Arabic differs on aspects of the vocabulary and stylistic features, only the morphology and the basic syntactic norms remain unchanged, wherein MSA reflects the needs of contemporary expression and the Classical Arabic reflects the needs of older styles.

Modern Standard Arabic versus colloquial Dialects
At the beginning, an Arabic speaker learns her/his own regional colloquial language (i.e. Egyptian, Moroccan or Levantine Arabic). But an Arabic speaker is required to learn Modern Standard Arabic (as the teaching language in school) if she/he goes to school and expects to be educated.

How much MSA versus colloquial is used depends on the speaker, the topic and the situation. In another extreme, public education and exposure to mass media have introduced MSA elements into the least educated so that it would be rather difficult to find an Arab speaker whose speech is totally unaffected by MSA.

Though MSA is indeed the standard written language of most Arabic countries, it is necessary to identify the Arabic-speaking country or community for which a translation is provided.

Arabic and the internet

While many Arabs take English or French as their preferred language on the internet, the majority, especially in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Syria prefer the Arabic that can be presented in different forms-formats-encoding techniques on the internet. One of the major problems lies in conveying the Arabic text by internet and results from the multiplicity of character sets.

Arabic text is cursive, of which the shapes of characters depend on position in a word.
The Arabic text is peculiar in directionality, with the text written right-to-left but numbers left-to-right.

Solutions are under construction with browsers and mail programs built on a basis of new internet standards, where GIF, most popular and less practical, is a graphics form readable for any operating system, whatever the browser is. However, the text conveyed as a picture instead of itself is far from being acceptable. It brings too many issues relating to searching, loading time, insufficient editing functions and tools as well as other serious factors. Consequently, these problems drive Arabic site owners to construct new web sites that support Arabic text. The text format is now the natural and practical alternative for reading Arabic text over the internet.

Regarding the Arabic script, the most commonly used type of font is called Nasekh, and also the clearest one (used in printing books, newspapers and documents). But other types of font, quite different from Nasekh, are used in some Arabic writings. When it comes to the Desktop Publishing al-Nashir, it is the industry standard software applied to Arabic publishing in combination with both Macintosh and Windows.

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