The Arabic Language

fī ʾakbar magalla nisāʾiyya fī ʾurubba ʾarēt dirāsa ʿan il-marʾa; dirāsa ġarība wi-mufīda, 
wa-ʾayḍan musīra; li-ʾannáha tikallim ʿan is-sirr ʾallaḏī yagʿal il-marʾa šaḫṣiyya lā tunsa, 
šaḫṣiyya mā ḥaddiš ʾabadan yiʾdar yinsāha
‘In the largest women’s weekly in Europe I 
read an article about women; a strange and useful article, and also touching; because 
it speaks about the secret that makes a woman into an unforgettable personality, a 
personality that nobody can ever forget’ (Diem 1974: 71)
In this example, the speaker tries to use dialect – and apparently feels that she 
is actually speaking dialect – but at the same time it is clear that the original 
version of her speech is in Standard Arabic: the construction with 
ʾakbar
, the use 
of 
ʾayḍan
, the use of the conjunction 
li-ʾannahā
, and the phrase with an internal 
passive (
lā tunsa
), which is paraphrased in its entirety. This example shows the 
strength of the standard model in formal settings: even when speakers make 
a deliberate effort to speak dialect, they will always unconsciously revert to 
Classical patterns.
An interesting parallel may be found in official Dutch brochures for the 
Moroccan minority. For ideological reasons, the policy in the Netherlands was 
to use the Moroccan dialect. In actual practice, this led to the insertion of a few 
markers, whereas the structure of the text remained decidedly Standard Arabic. 
As an example, we quote the following sentence from a brochure about taxes in 
the Netherlands from the 1980s:
kamā taʿrifūna ʾinna l-ʾajnabī ka-yitlaqqā kaṯīr aṣ-ṣuʿūbāt wa-t-taġayyurāt fī l-ḥayāt 
dyālo wa-bi-l-ḫuṣūṣ maʿa l-ʾawlād ʾillī ka-yimšiw li-l-madrasa; wa-li-hāḏā fa-min al-wājib 
ʿalaykum bāš taʿrifū n-niḏ̣ām wa-kayfiyyat at-taʿlīm fī hūlandā
‘As you know, a foreigner 
encounters many difficulties and changes in his life and in particular with the 
children that go to school; therefore, it is necessary for you to know the system and 
the nature of education in Holland.’
In spite of the obvious attempts at writing Moroccan dialect (aspectual prefix 
ka-
; 
genitive exponent 
dyāl
; conjunction 
bāš
; the verbal form 
ka-yimšiw
, spelled <
k-y-m-
š-i-w
>), the translator of this originally Dutch text obviously could not escape 
Standard Arabic phraseology and structure of the sentence (although, of course, 
the transcription used here masks some of the dialectal features that would come 
out in pronouncing the text). In the rest of the text, there is a constant vacillation 
between dialectal and standard forms that shows the inability of the translator 
to avoid classicisms.

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168
The Arabic Language
It is certainly not current usage to call a text such as the one just quoted 
‘Middle Arabic’. Yet there is an unmistakable similarity between these contem
-
porary examples and the texts discussed in the preceding sections of this chapter. 
The common denominator in all instances of mixed language and at all levels of 
written production is the centripetal force of the standard language. Whether 
authors deliberately use colloquial features or simply fail to attain the level of 
grammatically correct speech, they always remain within the framework of the 
standard language. Mejdell (2012a) compares the linguistic features commonly 
occurring in Middle Arabic with the ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ style that is becoming 
increasingly popular in formal spoken Arabic (see Chapter 13, p. 248). Mejdell 
believes that in some respects Middle Arabic and ‘mixed style’ are similar, but 
points out a number of significant differences. The degree of variation within 
spoken speech produced in mixed style is the same as in Middle Arabic texts, even 
when speakers explicitly aim for such a style as target. The inventory of variants 
is, however, much smaller than in Middle Arabic. Moreover, in ‘mixed style’, 
pseudo-corrections occur much less frequently than in written texts. The most 
likely explanation for this difference is that speakers of such public discourses are 
educated and perfectly aware of both the standard and the vernacular register, 
which they skilfully manipulate. The writers of Middle Arabic texts, on the other 
hand, are very often semi-literate and lack knowledge of the grammar of the 
prestige variety.
The classification of contemporary written dialect as Middle Arabic is tanta-
mount to rejecting these literary products as evidence of ‘genuine’ dialect 
literature. This label represents them as attempts to use vernacular elements 
while remaining within the sphere of influence of the standard language. Such 
attempts at using the vernacular might still be viewed within the perspective 
taken in this chapter, that is, viewing dialect features as a means to enliven the 
dialogue. However, when writing in the vernacular becomes a really ideological 
issue, that is, when people are convinced that dialect may be used in written 
production on the same footing as Standard Arabic, or perhaps even as a replace
-
ment, a paradigm shift might take place. In Lebanon, the short-lived experiment 
in writing Lebanese Arabic with Latin characters by Saʿīd ʿAql (b. 1912) might 
still be seen as part of the sectarian conflict in Lebanon. But there can be no 
doubt that written dialect is gaining a much wider visibility, not only in Egypt, 
but also in other countries. In Egypt, after the first experiments at the end of the 
nineteenth century and the vivid discussions in the 1960s about the use of dialect 
in literature and especially in the theatre, the acceptability of dialect as a medium 
for literature seems to be taken more or less for granted. At least two journals, 
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