How many dialects of Arabic are there?
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On the other hand, Arabic is divided into over 27 dialects. Almost every Arab state has at least one local dialect of its own. they can be divided into 5 major branches, the Peninsula Arabic, which is the Arabic used in the Arabian peninsula, with around 9 main dialects, Arabic of the Nile Valley, which includes the Masri, Saedi, Sudanese and Chadic Arabic, the Arabic of the Fertile Crescent, which includes the Bedawi, Levant Arabic, Iraqi Arabic and North Mesopotamian Arabic, the Magharbi Arabic, which includes the Dialects used in Mauritania, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, also another category of Arabic is the other isolated dialects of Arabic, like the Judeo-Arabic, Mediterranean Arabic, Nubi Arabic, and the juba Arabic, which have greatly been affected by these communities' own pronunciation, culture and native tongue.
Demographics of the Arab League
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There are many varieties of Arabic (also called dialects of Arabic or vernacular languages) in existence. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated on the Arabian Peninsula. It is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. Some varieties of Arabic in North Africa, for example, are not easily comprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant or the Persian Gulf. Within these broad regions further and considerable geographic distinctions exist, within countries, across country borders, even between cities and villages.
Varieties of Arabic
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Sanʽani syntax differs from other Arabic dialects in a number of ways. It is one of few remaining Arabic dialects to retain the "mā af‘al" exclamatory sentence type with the meaning "how (adjective)". For instance, "mā ajmal", is used to mean "how beautiful", from the adjective "jamīl", meaning "beautiful"; a construction it shares with Libyan Arabic and Levantine Arabic.
Sanʽani Arabic
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The case of Iraq also illustrates how there can be significant differences in how Arabic is spoken on the basis of religion. (Note that the study referred to here was conducted before the Iraq War.) In Baghdad, there are significant linguistic differences between Arabic Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the city. The Christians of Baghdad are a well-established community, and their dialect has evolved from the sedentary vernacular of urban medieval Iraq. The typical Muslim dialect of Baghdad is a more recent arrival in the city and comes from Bedouin speech instead. In Baghdad, as elsewhere in the Arab world, the various communities share MSA as a prestige dialect, but the Muslim colloquial dialect is associated with power and money, given that that community is the more dominant. Therefore, the Christian population of the city learns to use the Muslim dialect in more formal situations, for example, when a Christian school teacher is trying to call students in the class to order.
Varieties of Arabic
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An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect. This refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities, depending on the context. This is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a prestige variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the prestige dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities, especially including the capital Amman. Moreover, in certain contexts, a dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language—this is the case in Bahrain, for example.
Varieties of Arabic
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The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native, mutually unintelligible "dialects"; these dialects linguistically constitute separate languages which may have dialects of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. Arabic speakers often improve their familiarity with other dialects via music or film.
Arabic
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Bareqi Arabic has many aspects that differentiate it from all other dialects in the Arab world. Phonologically, Bareqi Arabic is similar to the majority of Yemeni dialects and Himyaritic language. All Bareqi dialects also share the unusual feature of replacing the definite article "al-" with the prefix "am-". The dialects of many towns and villages in the wadi and the coastal region are characterized by having changed ج () to a palatal approximant ي (called yodization).
Bareqi Arabic
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According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are some of the characteristic features of the koiné that underlies all of the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine:Of the 29 Proto-Semitic consonants, only one has been lost: , which merged with . But the consonant is still found in many colloquial Arabic dialects. Various other consonants have changed their sound too, but have remained distinct. An original lenited to , and – consistently attested in pre-Islamic Greek transcription of Arabic languages – became palatalized to or by the time of the Quran and , , or after early Muslim conquests and in MSA (see Arabic phonology#Local variations for more detail). An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative became . Its emphatic counterpart was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic (Hence the Classical Arabic's appellation ' or "language of the '"); for most modern dialects, it has become an emphatic stop with loss of the laterality or with complete loss of any pharyngealization or velarization, . (The classical "" pronunciation of pharyngealization still occurs in the Mehri language and the similar sound without velarization, , exists in other Modern South Arabian languages.)
Arabic
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Moroccan Arabic has many regional dialects and accents as well. Its mainstream dialect is the one used in Casablanca, Rabat and Fas and therefore it dominates the media eclipsing the other regional dialects like the ones spoken in Tangiers and Oujda.
Moroccan Arabic
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The phoneme represented by the Arabic letter "" () has many standard pronunciations: in most of the Arabian Peninsula and as the predominant pronunciation of Literary Arabic outside the Arab world, in most of Egypt and some regions in southern Yemen and southwestern Oman. This is also a characteristic of colloquial Egyptian and southern Yemeni dialects. In Morocco and western Algeria, it is pronounced as in some words, especially colloquially. In most north Africa and most of the Levant, the standard is pronounced , and in certain regions of the Persian Gulf colloquially with . In some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either or as it used to be in Classical Arabic.
Arabic phonology
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The phoneme is represented by the Arabic letter ' () and has many standard pronunciations. is characteristic of north Algeria, Iraq, also in most of the Arabian peninsula but with an allophonic in some positions; occurs in most of the Levant and most North Africa; and is used in most of Egypt and some regions in Yemen and Oman. Generally this corresponds with the pronunciation in the colloquial dialects. In some regions in Sudan and Yemen, as well as in some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either or , representing the original pronunciation of Classical Arabic. Foreign words containing may be transcribed with , , , , , or , mainly depending on the regional spoken variety of Arabic or the commonly diacriticized Arabic letter. Note also that in northern Egypt, where the Arabic letter ' () is normally pronounced , a separate phoneme , which may be transcribed with , occurs in a small number of mostly non-Arabic loanwords, e.g., 'jacket'.
Arabic