Denis
Do you consider Fus'ha to be your native or second language?

That's my question :D

Jul 31, 2014 12:01 PM
Comments · 24
2

I totally agree with you michael, on the last part at least: I don't know why some people think fus7a should replace dialects nor why some people think fus7a is useless, the variaty within the Arabic language is to me what makes it fascinating, and it reflects the nature of the Arab world, that is a world, not a country or whatever but a whole world, so this "true Arabic" thing is a bit of a fantasy I think. 

August 4, 2014
2

Actually, not all 3amiyah is informal...one can speak Lebanese Arabic, for one example, while including formal elements within it (which may or may not be part of commonly used MSA but may be attested in it somewhere).  This formal version may be something like some people call Educated Spoken Arabic (which of course <em>can</em> also be written, it just isn't too commonly yet)

 

Also, it's not exactly true that Arabs in the past only spoke fusHa; fusHa was the codification of the Quraishi dialect (and was kind of a koine), there were other dialects present at the time.  Modern day Arabic variants are a product of very natural evolution from the classical form plus the local languages/dialects (kind of like how Spanish and Italian and French and Romanian, for example, branched out from Latin and were influenced by local latinate and other languages to become what they became).  They may have degrees of difference from MSA or from each other and that's what makes them part of a language family or dialect continuum.

 

Again, MSA (which is slightly different from Quranic/Classical Arabic) can certainly be a lingua franca, and a language of identity for religious or political reasons, but that's different than being a native language, or being formal, or anything like that.

 

Personally, and this is just my feeling as a linguist, there are very few <em>shoulds</em> about language.  To me Palestinian Arabic is just as beautiful as Tunisian which is just beautiful as Hijazi which is just as beautiful as MSA, and they all have structures that can make them expressive and eloquent (some of those structures will be from MSA and some will be brilliant inventions of the variant).  That's what makes language great; it changes and evolves to take what's useful from its environment and meet the needs of the people who speak it.

August 4, 2014
2

If it's not our native language ( Arabic countries ) , so Arabic is for who ?

 

But we don't use it in our daily speech that's not positive , the cause maybe historical reasons , colonialism ...etc ..

 

For me , Arabic MSA and any dialect derived from it , is our native language of course .

August 3, 2014
2

i like Fosha it's my native language

July 31, 2014
2

My native language is Arabic[MSA], and I do speak other accents on. It's something normal even accents stay Arabic. Example of Mandarin Chinese, even the many dialects there in China, they say Mandarin Chinese is my native language, and local language is something we use between us in our daily life with no respect of rules. French too - such pronunciation, and expressions which are incorrectly to say in the Standard French ( français courant)-

July 31, 2014
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