Types of Arabic.

Sorry about the late post. I had some major coursework deadlines this weekend, and didn't have time to do anything else.

I surprised by the number of people who don't know about the different types of Arabic. So I will explain it to you.

Arabic is essentially broken down into two pieces.

Written Arabic, and Spoken Arabic.

Written Arabic.

Pretty much everything you see that is written in Arabic, is called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is what 80-90% of Arabic books are written in, pretty much all the newspapers, almost every street sign, most of the Arabic websites etc etc etc.

Basically, if you see something written in Arabic, then it's almost certainly MSA.

The Quran is mostly written in MSA now as well, because the old style (Classical Arabic) is quite complicated and they want people to understand it.

Spoken Arabic.

There is NO standard spoken Arabic. MSA is the same everywhere you go, but there is no standard way of speaking Arabic. No matter what Arabic you learn to speak, there will always be Arabic speakers who don't understand you.

So choosing the dialect to learn is obviously very important. And the choice is huge. Wikipedia lists 16 main dialects.

The most widely spoken dialect of Arabic is Egyptian. This is because Egypt has 54 million native speakers, and Egyptian films are very prolific. So you will be able to communicate much more widely than many other dialects.

The next most popular dialect is Levantine Arabic, which spans speakers in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. Strangely, this is the dialect most favoured by Arabic teaching resources. If your book doesn't specify which Arabic it is teaching you, then it is probably Levantine. E.g. Teach Yourself books.


I am learning Egyptian Arabic right now, but I want to learn to read MSA eventually as well. I would also like to learn another dialect. Apparently Lebanese Arabic is the sexiest, so it will probably be that one. Although Gulf and Sudanese are both very interesting to me.