On the formal Arabic of my childhood Quran lessons and the spoken dialects I have come to know as an adult.
There is an Arabic that I learned as a child, and there is an Arabic that I am still learning. They are not the same Arabic, and the difference between them is one of the most important things any learner of Arabic can understand.
The Arabic I learned as a child was fuṣḥā — the formal register of the holy book, the broadcasts, the literature, the speeches at international conferences. I learned to read this Arabic at five years old, through the Quran, in the way that millions of Muslim children across the world have learned for centuries. I did not understand the words I was reading. I was reading them for their sound and their reverence, and the script went into me, and the rhythm of the sentences went into me, and the foundation was laid before I had any words for what was being laid.
The Arabic I am still learning is the Arabic that people actually speak — the ʿāmmiyya, the spoken vernaculars, which sit below fuṣḥā in a relationship that linguists call diglossia. There is no single Arabic that anyone speaks at home. There are many. The Arabic of Cairo is not the Arabic of Beirut, which is not the Arabic of Casablanca, which is not the Arabic of Baghdad. Each region has its own pronunciation, its own vocabulary, its own characteristic rhythms, and the differences are large enough that speakers from different regions sometimes cannot understand each other in their own dialects.
What I want to think about in this essay is the moment when I first understood that fuṣḥā and ʿāmmiyya were two different languages held together by the same script — and what that understanding has meant for me as a learner, and as a son of an Arabic-reading childhood, and as someone whose ear was eventually trained to hear the difference.
The Quranic Arabic I learned was fuṣḥā and only fuṣḥā. There were no spoken dialects in my early experience of the language. There were the long verses recited in measured cadence, the precise vowels, the particular elongations and pauses that Quranic recitation requires. I memorized passages by their sound. I associated the script with reverence, with mornings, with the careful attention an adult gave to my struggling pronunciation when I was young.
I did not, at the time, know that this was unusual. I did not know that the Arabic I was reading was a register that no Arab child anywhere actually spoke at home. I did not know that the language of the Quran sat above the languages of daily life as a kind of sky — present everywhere, audible everywhere, but not where life actually happened. I would not have known what to do with that information if I had been told. Fuṣḥā was Arabic to me. It was the only Arabic I knew existed.
The discovery that there was another Arabic — many other Arabics — came much later, and it came through music.
The first singer who showed me that Arabic was not what I had thought it was was Fairuz.
Fairuz is the most beloved singer in the modern Arabic-speaking world, the voice that wakes Lebanese cafés in the morning, the soundtrack to a generation of Arab childhoods across many countries. Her songs are in Lebanese Arabic — not in fuṣḥā. The first time I sat with one of her recordings as an adult, I was not prepared for what I heard. The Arabic was Arabic, unmistakably. The rhythm of the consonants and the shape of the vowels were Arabic in a way no other language is. But the register was different from anything I had encountered. Words I knew from fuṣḥā were softened, modified, wrapped in a different intonation. Words I did not know appeared and made sense from context. The qāf I was used to had become a glottal stop. The whole language was running on a slightly different track.
I did not, on first listening, understand what I was hearing. I understood only that it was Arabic and not Arabic — that something had moved while I was not paying attention.
Then I encountered Abdel Halim Hafez, and the same thing happened again, in a different direction.
Abdel Halim was Egyptian, the most important Egyptian singer of the twentieth century. His songs are in Egyptian Arabic — not in fuṣḥā, and not in the Lebanese Arabic that Fairuz sang. The Egyptian jīm was pronounced as a hard /g/, where the fuṣḥā I had grown up with would have used a softer sound. The intonation moved in patterns that were unmistakably different from Fairuz's. The vocabulary drew on Egyptian-specific words that I had not encountered in classical study. And again: it was Arabic. It was unmistakably Arabic. But it was not the same Arabic as Fairuz's. And neither of them was the Arabic I had grown up reading from the Quran.
I sat with these recordings for a long time. The two singers were doing the same thing — singing in their own region's spoken Arabic, the way singers everywhere sing in their own native registers — but I had not understood, until then, that the spoken Arabic of the Levant and the spoken Arabic of Egypt and the formal Arabic of the Quran were three different things, all called Arabic, all related, none of them substitutable for the others.
The discovery was a kind of vertigo. The foundation I had been laid as a child was, it turned out, not the whole building. The whole building was something much larger and stranger than I had been prepared to expect.
What followed, slowly, was a long apprenticeship in the spoken varieties.
I started seeking out tutors who came from different countries — Lebanese tutors when I wanted Lebanese Arabic, Syrian tutors for the close cousin to the north, Egyptian tutors for the most-broadcast variety, Moroccan tutors when I wanted to be humbled by Maghrebi Arabic, which is so different from the eastern dialects that speakers of one often cannot understand speakers of the other without effort. The italki platform made this possible across continents and time zones in a way that no in-person tutoring could have.
Each tutor taught me a different version of the language. A Lebanese tutor and a Syrian tutor would, between them, draw something very close to a continuous Levantine — the differences between their two countries' speech were small enough that, after working with both, I came to think of Shāmī (the linguistic name for greater Levantine) as a single coherent variety with internal variation rather than as two separate things. Egyptian Arabic, by contrast, was a different country. Maghrebi Arabic was a different planet. The differences I had glimpsed through Fairuz and Abdel Halim were confirmed and deepened and made operational by months of patient work with tutors whose mother tongues were different versions of the same language.
The diglossia of Arabic — fuṣḥā sitting above the dialects, the dialects branching beneath it like rivers from a single source — is the subject of an ongoing project I keep at learnspokenarabic.com. The work there is patient and specific, taking one dialect or one feature at a time. The present essay can only sketch the territory.
Of all the spoken varieties of Arabic I have encountered, Levantine — the Lebanese and Syrian versions in particular — is the one I find myself returning to when given the choice.
The reason, like the reason for my Bogotá Spanish, is partly aesthetic. There is a softness to Lebanese and Syrian Arabic that I find more pleasant to listen to than the harder consonants of Maghrebi varieties or the faster rhythms of Egyptian. The vowels open more, the consonants are gentler, the music of the language sits closer to the part of me that was prepared, by long listening to Fairuz and the Lebanese musical tradition, to hear it as song.
The reason is also partly historical. The Levantine I have been drawn to is the Levantine I first encountered through music — Fairuz above all. The first version of spoken Arabic that I heard as music rather than as text was Lebanese, and the formative associations have stayed. Lebanese Arabic is, for me, the variety that introduced me to spoken Arabic as a category. The introduction matters. First impressions in language, as in much else, are sticky in ways that later impressions are not.
There is also a quieter reason that has nothing to do with dialect choice and everything to do with the continuing presence of fuṣḥā in my life. In our household, the Arabic of the sky has never gone quiet. We perform the five daily prayers in Arabic, as Muslims everywhere do, and the words of the prayers are fuṣḥā — the same register I learned to read at age five, the same register the Quran is recited in, the same register that sits above all the spoken dialects as their common ancestor and their unifying sky. To pray five times a day is to speak fuṣḥā five times a day, regardless of whether one is actively studying Arabic.
My wife has been attending Quran reading classes for many years, and the rhythm of her practice — the regular returning to the script and the recitation — has kept the language audible in our home in a way my own intermittent study could not. Between her Quran reading and our shared daily prayers, fuṣḥā has remained continuously present in our household. The Arabic of the sky has never left. The Arabic of the streets — the Lebanese, the Syrian, the others I have studied with tutors — is the Arabic I have had to seek out actively, in the evenings, between obligations. The sky has been with me without my asking. The streets I have had to walk into.
I do not mean that Levantine Arabic is better than other dialects, or that other varieties are deficient. None of these claims are true. What I mean is that, for the specific shape of my ear — formed by years of Fairuz and Abdel Halim, by tutors from different countries, by the daily continuing presence of Quranic Arabic in my home — Levantine reaches me in a way that other varieties do not. It is the variety in which I find myself most fully understanding rather than processing. The distinction is subtle but real.
This is one of the things plurality teaches you: that the love of variation is compatible with a particular affection. You can hold the whole map in your mind and still have a specific country where the language feels closest to your own. I love that Arabic is not one thing. I love that within the not one thing there is a Lebanon-and-Syria that, for me, is something like the inside of the spoken language — and a fuṣḥā that has remained the inside of the read and prayed language throughout my life. Two homes inside one Arabic. The two are not in tension. They are different rooms of the same house.
I have thought about why Arabic has held me, and the answer reaches back to the particular kind of Muslim I was raised to be.
I am Indonesian. Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world by population, and Indonesian Muslims have a specific relationship with Quranic Arabic that is not quite the same as the relationship of Arab Muslims, who grow up speaking a dialect of Arabic at home and learn fuṣḥā as a register layered over their native variety. For Indonesian Muslims, Quranic Arabic is not the formal register of any spoken Arabic — it is, more simply, the language of the Quran, encountered without the surrounding context of any ʿāmmiyya. We learn it the way the early generations of converts to Islam outside the Arab world learned it: as a sacred language, separate from any daily speech, holding its meaning through its sound and its script and its association with revelation.
This is a specific relationship. An Egyptian or Lebanese or Saudi child grows up understanding that Quranic Arabic is the elevated register of their own language — that the words they hear in the mosque are formal cousins of the words they use at home. An Indonesian Muslim child does not have this cousin. The Quran is, for an Indonesian, a language unto itself, separate from Bahasa Indonesia, separate from Javanese, separate from any language one might use in any other context. It does not have a daily-life register; it has only the Quranic register.
This is the relationship I grew up inside. Fuṣḥā came to me, in childhood, as a fully separate language from anything I spoke or heard around me. The script went into me as a sacred script. The sound of recitation went into me as a sacred sound. The vocabulary went into me — to the extent it did — as the vocabulary of the holy book and nothing else.
When I encountered, much later, the spoken dialects of Arabic, I encountered something I had not been prepared for: that Arabic was also a daily-life language, that the same script could record both prayer and the argument with one's brother, that fuṣḥā was the elevated register of vernaculars that were themselves languages of life rather than only of worship. This was, for me, a real expansion. The Arabic I had grown up with had been one thing — the language of the sky. The Arabic I encountered as a learner of dialects was a much larger thing — the sky and the streets, both at once.
Other Indonesian Muslims who study Arabic seriously, I have come to understand, often have the same experience. The dialects are a discovery. The fact that Arabic lives in homes and shops and conversations — and not only in mosques and books — is news, even to those of us who grew up reciting the Quran. The diglossia of Arabic is something we learn about; it is not something we grew up inside.
This is, I think, why my fascination with the spoken varieties has felt so continuous and so alive. I am not returning to a language I once knew in full. I am discovering an entire dimension of a language whose other dimension I have known since I was a child. The two dimensions enrich each other. The sky has been with me my whole life. The streets I am still walking into, slowly, one at a time.
The longer I have spent with Arabic, the more I have come to think of it not as a language but as a sky and a set of streets.
The sky is fuṣḥā — the formal register that sits above all the spoken varieties, that is read in mosques across continents and broadcast on news programs everywhere, that is studied by every Arabic learner who wants to read books or follow the news or recite the Quran. The streets are the dialects — Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Maghrebi, Iraqi, Sudanese, Yemeni, and the smaller varieties that fill in the spaces between. The sky is one. The streets are many. They are connected, but they are not the same. Walking along the streets is what daily life is. Looking up at the sky is what formal occasions are. In our household, we look up at the sky five times a day, in prayer; the streets I walk in the evenings, with tutors and recordings and patient work.
I have spent most of my adult life learning to walk those streets — slowly, patiently, with one tutor at a time, in the specific Lebanese-and-Syrian neighborhood where I have come to feel most at home. The sky has been with me without asking, through prayer and through my wife's continuing practice. Both the sky and the streets are mine, in different ways and to different degrees, and the having of both is what makes Arabic the kind of country it is.
The relationship I have with Arabic is not the relationship of someone who hopes to finish. There is no version of finishing available, and I have stopped wanting one. What I have instead is something I find harder to name — a daily inhabitance of two registers that do not collapse into each other, a presence in the sky through prayer and a presence on the streets through study, with the two practices feeding each other in ways I did not anticipate when I began either of them. The prayers steady the dialect work. The dialect work gives the prayers a wider context. Both together produce a relationship with Arabic that is wider than anything I had imagined when I was a child reciting verses I did not understand.
What I cannot stop looking at — what I keep returning to without being asked, what I find myself listening to in the evening when I should be doing something else, what I recite five times a day without thinking of it as study — is the Arabic that lives in my house through prayer and the Arabic I am still walking into through the dialects. These are the two Arabics I have come to know, and they belong to me in different ways, and the difference is the most truthful thing I can say about my relationship with the language.
A parallel essay on the regional varieties of Latin American Spanish appears separately in this archive. The two languages share a specific kind of plurality that has shaped the way I think about all the languages I have studied.
— A.C. Maas