varieties of Arabic

See Arabic languages for the historical family of dialects. The Arabic language is a Semitic language with many varieties that diverge widely from one another -— both from country to country and within a single country. This entry looks at these varieties of Arabic, distinguishing them from Classical/Standard Arabic and from each other. In sociolinguistic terms, Arabic in its native environment typically occurs in a "diglossic" situation, meaning that native speakers learn and use two substantially different language forms in different aspects of their lives. In the case of Arabic, the regionally prevalent variety is learned as a speaker's mother tongue and is used for nearly all everyday speaking situations throughout life, including most films and plays, and (rarely) in some literature. A second, quite different variety, Standard Arabic, is learned in school and is used for most printed material, TV news reporting and interviews, sermons and other formal situations. The extent to which the local vernacular tends to interplay with the Standard variety in formal situations varies from country to country.
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