The harmonies and diversities of the Middle East

posted on: Mar 31, 2015

Even though Arabic is the official language of the Middle East, and it is the fifth most commonly spoken language worldwide, each Arabic country has its own unique dialect and style of pronouncing the language.

There are 26 countries worldwide which have Arabic as the main language, with 10 of these speaking the language alongside another, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, French is fluently spoken alongside Arabic. In Iraq, people speak Kurdish as fluently as Arabic.

Although the Arabic language consists of the same alphabets and words, the way it is used in forming sentences in each region might be hard to understand from one dialect to another, even a small word such as “Hello” differs from the Gulf countries to the Levant than Morocco and Tunisia.

Yet, there are a few dialects that are understood by most people living in the Arab region including Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese accents, due to the popularity of TV shows in these languages.

The differences in languages are often not mainly in the words themselves, but in the grammatical inflections used before or after words.

After the Arab expansion and spread of Islam in the Middle East, which started in the seventh century, Arabic spread across the region. Egyptians were aware of the Arabic language and spoke it even before it was an Islamic country due to trade with Arabs, but it started to be spoken fluently and became the country’s official language during the time of having the ”Fustat” period, the first capital of the country in the same century.

Source: www.the-newshub.com