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Arabic

Arabic is a "Diglossic" language referring to a situation where two distinct language varieties are in use by a single population. In addition to the primary dialects, there is a very different language, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation.

Spoken Arabic

Colloquial Dialects
Colloquial Arabic is the spoken Arabic used by Arabs in their everyday lives. Unlike modern standard Arabic, which is uniform in all Arab countries, colloquial Arabic 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 and perhaps 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

The dialects in colloquial Arabic are so diverse that even native speakers of Arabic may have difficulty understanding Arabs from neighbouring countries, or in extreme cases: neighbouring villages. The further away the countries, the greater the variation between the dialects. However, in spite 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. Arabs consider Classical Arabic as an important part of their culture. Throughout Islamic history Classical Arabic has been the language of royal and princely courts, the bureaucracy and the educated

2. Modern Standard Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), as its name indicates, is the modern counterpart of Classical Arabic. It has become a means by which individual Arabs from different countries can converse with one another. MSA is the language of Islamic worship, contemporary literature, journalism, television and scientific writing. It is learned through formal education and is not acquired as a native language by any Arabs. Almost without exception, it is MSA which one hears on Arabic news broadcasts and other television programmes, in school and speeches by presidents and ministers or discussions by intellectuals.

The main difference between MSA and Classical Arabic lies in the vocabulary and stylistic features; the morphology and the basic syntactic norms have remained unchanged. MSA reflects the needs of contemporary expression whereas Classical Arabic reflects the needs of older styles.

Modern Standard Arabic versus colloquial Dialects
An Arabic speaker will first learn her/his own regional colloquial language (such as Egyptian, Moroccan or Levantine Arabic). But an Arabic speaker will also, if s/he goes to school and wishes to be considered educated, have to learn (in school, as a learned language) Modern Standard Arabic.

How much MSA versus colloquial is used depends on the speaker, the topic and the situation. At the other end of the spectrum, public education as well as exposure to mass media, has introduced MSA elements amongst the least educated so that it would be equally 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 intended.

Arabic and the internet

While many Arabs use English or French as their preferred language on the internet, the majority of Arabs, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Syria use Arabic. Arabic language on the internet is presented in different forms-formats-encoding techniques. One of the major problems is transporting Arabic text over the internet is due to the multiplicity of character sets.

.Arabic text is cursive, and the shapes of its characters depend on their position in the word.
.The directionality of Arabic text is peculiar: While Arabic text is written right-to-left, Arabic numbers are written left-to-right.

Solutions have started to emerge with browsers and mail programmes building on new internet standards. The most "popular", and less practical, is the GIF, which is a graphics form that can be read on any operating system, whatever the browser. Nevertheless, this way of representing text as a "picture" of the text, rather than the actual text itself, is far from being acceptable. Such pictures of text are not searchable, and there are are also problems associated with loading time, lack of editing features and tools, and other serious factors. These problems have encouraged Arabic site owners to construct new web sites that support Arabic text. The text format is now the natural and practical choice for reading Arabic text over the internet.

The most common type of font used for the Arabic script is called Nasekh, which is also the clearest (used in printing books, newspapers and documents). But some Arabic writings are written using other fonts which can differ considerably from Nasekh. In terms of Desktop Publishing al-Nashir al-Sahafi is the industry standard software for Arabic publishing, working with both Macintosh and Windows.

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