I recently listened to a podcast about teaching Arabic as a foreign language. The guest, who was an Arabic linguist, made a point that really struck me. He said that non-native speakers have the right to speak a dialect just as every Arab does. Preventing them from doing so, and instead getting them to learn fusHa only, holds them hostage to a purist ideology about what we think Arabic should be. Non-native speakers have the right to enter a convenience store and talk to the shopkeeper in the natural language of the people. You can’t use them as pawns in your linguistic ideology, because it socially isolates them.

A student once told me the same thing. He said that when an Arabic teacher insists on teaching fusHa, it feels like they’re saying you’re not welcome into the local culture.

I think learners often aren’t aware of the ideology that pushes these claims that “everyone speaks fusHa” and “if you want to speak to as many people as possible, learn fusHa” and “fusHa is the correct way of speaking Arabic and all dialects are improper Arabic”. These are ideological statements rooted in a belief in the sanctity and eternality of Arabic.

If you’re an Arab who’s convinced that all Arabs speak fusHa, I invite you to go to a convenience store and try to carry a conversation in fusHa. I’ve had many experiences of Arabs struggling with elementary aspects of fusHa. Many Arabs have a passive knowledge of fusHa, which is to say that they can understand it but can’t produce correct output. Because that’s how most Arabs use it: to listen and read. If you can speak it, that’s probably because you’re a teacher or someone enthusiastic about it enough to be on a language-learning platform to help learners.

My advice as a teacher is always to learn fusHa if you want to read and write in Arabic. If you want to carry conversations and engage with the local culture, learn the dialect of said culture. If you want to be able to talk with as many Arabs as possible, learn a dialect that many people understand. I once came across a comment by a learner who said that Moroccans were more receptive when said learner was speaking in the Egyptian dialect than when speaking in fusHa. I do not find this shocking at all.

To reiterate: You have the right to learn an Arabic dialect. If a teacher insists on teaching you fusHa, you’d be better off finding another teacher. Not only is this line of thinking ideologically motivated, but it’s also rooted in an outdated approach to teaching Arabic. Arabic is such a conservative language that not only do people pretend that we still speak the language as it was spoken hundreds of years ago, but they even pretend that the method of teaching it shouldn’t be updated, that somehow updating the method is a form of defeat, and “there is nothing wrong with how we teach the language”—which, ironically, is what has gotten us to the level we’re at regarding how poorly Arabs speak fusHa. If a teacher believes in one aspect of the ideology, they likely also believe in the other.

I know this system because I’m a product of it. I’ve had to put in a lot of effort to improve my fusHa by myself. And I’ve been doing research to develop a method of teaching Arabic (both fusHa and vernacular) that’s more in line with what we know in the 21st century about second-language acquisition. This is incredibly lacking in the way Arabic is taught.

PS: The podcast is in Arabic, but if you’re interested in it, here it is: <a href="https://youtu.be/lTp8hIJKGTo" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/lTp8hIJKGTo</a>;