Fus'ha/Darija

Warning: this post is going to be really linguistics-y so sorry in advance, it’s just something I was thinking about today.

So, background on Arabic is that there is one dialect, Modern Standard Arabic (Fus’ha), that is taught is schools and is considered the official Arabic language. No one actually speaks this language as a first language, though. They all speak their own dialects of Arabic. Darija is spoken in most of North Africa, the Egyptian dialect in Egypt, and the Levantine dialect in most of the Middle East. Everyone learns Fus’ha in school, and all formal schooling is done in Fus’ha. This creates a really big divide between the literate Moroccans, who know Fus’ha and use a lot of those words in their everyday life, and the lower class Moroccans who only speak Darija. The divide in languages only gets bigger the more schooling you have. Thus, by only teaching reading and writing in Fus’ha, you’re essentially creating a culture divide between literate people and illiterate.

It’s also interesting to think about how this all came about. In English, our language evolved pretty much with the writing – there was no formal register of English that was a different dialect from the colloquial dialects. Some formal terms that you may not use in everyday conversation of course, but not anything that could be termed two different dialects. I think it may have something to do with Arabic schooling being so tightly tied to reading the Koran, which is written in an older form of Fus’ha. As the various dialects developed over time, but people still studied the Koran to learn to read and write, the divide between colloquial speech and formal speech got wider and wider. It’s very strange how it is today, though, where all the books and news stations are in a language that is barely mutually intelligible with what everyone in the country speaks. I asked my Arabic professor if any books are written in Darija, and she said one famous author has written some things in Darija, but it’s not popular at all yet. It seems to me like if you’re writing a book in what is essentially a second language, your creativity would be a bit stunted. I think it would be cool for the Moroccans to start producing official things in Darija so they could share more personal stories and share the culture more directly, instead of translating it into a formal register.

Another thing about the languages is that each person speaks their own mix of Fus’ha and Darija, just depending on how much schooling they have or perhaps their socioeconomic background and how much of each they’re exposed to. My Arabic teacher explained to us that some people, the most educated, speak like 70% Fus’ha and the rest Darija in every day life, while some may speak no Fus’ha at all. It’s so weird to me to think of a society sort of stratified by language. It’s sort of like a sociolinguistics thing, where the language you speak is directly linked to your schooling or your socioeconomic background.

It’s all just fascinating to me. Especially coming from America where we basically only speak English. For an entire country to speak a different language at home than the one they speak in school seems so weird.

I have to qualify that, though. The Egyptian and Levantine dialects are both mutually intelligible with Fus’ha for the most part. It’s just the Moroccan dialect that is barely mutually intelligible at all, so it basically is like a second language for them.