Regional Varieties - Spoken Arabic

Arabic Voices 1 & 2: A Review

Every learner of Arabic eventually meets the same wall: the language of the textbook is not the language of the taxi driver. Lingualism's two-volume Arabic Voices refuses to choose between them. On the books that take Modern Standard Arabic and the spoken dialects equally seriously.

Reviews Listening Resources Diglossia Regional Varieties Language Learning Egyptian Arabic Iraqi Arabic Levantine Arabic

The DLI Arabic Phone Conversations: A Review

Three hundred unscripted recordings in Egyptian, Iraqi, and Levantine Arabic, free, and one of the more honest listening resources for the dialect learner on the open internet.

Regional Varieties Cultural Insight Language Learning

The Egyptian Question

In a Casablanca café, a Moroccan listens to Umm Kulthum sing in Egyptian and understands every word — though spoken Egyptian and Moroccan darija are often mutually unintelligible. On how twentieth-century cultural reach made one regional variety the lingua franca of the Arab world.

Regional Varieties Foundational

Spoken Arabic Is Not One Language

There is a convenient fiction at the center of most Arabic instruction: that Arabic is one language, learnable from one book, the same in Cairo as in Casablanca. It is a useful fiction — and not quite true. On diglossia, the dialects, and the choice every learner has to make.