The Arabic Language

partly as a result of the export of Egyptian movies and television soaps, which 
are broadcast almost everywhere, and partly as the result of the fact that in many 
countries Egyptian teachers were hired to help in setting up an education system. 
In most countries, almost everybody understands some Egyptian Arabic, and 
sometimes the speakers are even able to adapt their speech to Egyptian if need be. 
In Yemen, for instance, foreigners who speak Arabic are automatically classified 
as Egyptians, and in communicating with them Yemenis will tend to use Egyptian 
words and even take over Egyptian morphology. The Yemenite continuous verbal 
particle 
bayn-
(first person)/
bi-
(second and third person) is sometimes used for 
habitual meaning as well under the influence of the Egyptian use of 
bi-
. Often 
the Egyptian verbal particle 
raḥ-
/
ḥa-
is used for the future instead of Yemeni 
ša-
. 
Many typically Egyptian words have become 
de rigueur
even in normal everyday 
conversation, for example, 
kwayyis
‘ok’, 
muš
‘not’ and 
kida
‘like this, so’, sometimes 
Yemenised as 
kiḏa
.

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The Arabic Language
Within the confines of national states, the net result of processes of koineisa-
tion and convergence is such that one might almost conclude that a classification 
of dialects country by country, although not linguistic in nature, may not even 
be the worst alternative. Especially after the Arabic-speaking countries gained 
their independence, the linguistic pull from one centre, mostly the capital, led to 
a considerable amount of convergence. In Morocco, it was not the dialect of the 
capital, Rabat, that became the linguistic centre, but that of Casablanca. But the 
principle remains the same: one city becomes the centre for a nationwide koine. 
In this sense, one may speak of the Egyptian dialect, the Syrian dialect, or the 
Yemeni dialect in the sense of the prestige dialect of the capital. Obviously, the 
influence of the dialect of the capital has its limits, and in each country deviant 
regional dialects have remained in use. Dialect enclaves within the boundaries of 
the national states are not necessarily doomed to disappear: factors of local pride 
may effectively promote the survival of the dialect, as, for instance, the dialect 
of Dēr iz-Zōr in northern Syria, which is of a Mesopotamian type amid a Syro-
Lebanese dialect area.
In some regions, dialect loyalty takes place along denominational lines. In 
North Africa, special varieties of Jewish Arabic have been recorded in some of 
the large cities such as Fes and Tunis, which go back to the earliest period of 
Arabicisation and have not followed later developments. Likewise in the east, the 
dialects of heterodox minorities, such as the Christians and the Jews in Baghdad 
and the Shiʿites in Bahrain, were not affected by secondary Bedouinisation, but 
preserved their original urban features, whereas the language of the Muslim 
(Sunnite) majority took over a number of Bedouin traits.