*modified sentence order   **obtained from Google Translator

Among Romance languages, certain items are less diverse lexically, and there is more rigidity in the syntax. Conversely, colloquial Arabic departs from the “Verb-Subject-Object” pattern of classical Arabic.

The rifts between sibling languages are becoming wider over time, leaving us with “skeletons,” “dry cocoons,” or “idealistic examples” that allow comparisons and general understandings but below the living reality of creation and transgression.

Others have stated (such as Reem Bassiouney, in Arabic Sociolinguistics, Edimburg University Press, 2009) that the differences between the “Arabic languages” are akin to the differences between “Romance languages.”

However, Latin had a stronger influence over people colonized by Rome for at least seven centuries longer than Standard Arabic had over Arabized countries. Thus, the transformations and tensions between the classical language and the variants occur in different material, technological, social, and educational contexts.

Religion, armies, or laws are not the primary sources of standard languages, but rather the media.

In the Latin world, the press contributed to the nationalization of certain dialects and consolidation of orthographic and grammatical standards since the 16th century. It was only later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, under the Ottoman empire, that Arab lands were subjected to this phenomenon, mostly in Syria and Egypt. It was in this context that colloquial dialects and unwritten dialects flourished alongside MSA. Radio, film, and television helped spread Egyptian and Lebanese dialects and oral MSA during the 20th century.

Standard Arabic is not imposed in all situations, but it is used during religious readings, school instruction, and academic and bureaucratic activities. Therefore, it can be seen as the “lingua franca” of the Arab peoples, while the dialects represent the codes of intimacy and nationality.

Colloquial communication deviates from the standard because of simplifications, a lack of verbal flexions and declensions, word fusions, etc., to save time and energy, as well as a limited number of phonemes that are necessary to understand the spoken word.

Formal spoken Arabic is more like a written message read aloud. The spoken news usually consists of a series of denotative and grammatically correct sentences, but with some pauses, gaps, or improvised lines over text that has been written beforehand.

When listening to oral discussions or watching more relaxed television shows, we witness some speakers using diglossia, injecting colloquial constructions into the Classical Arabic structure, or mixing colloquial speech with fragments of literary language.

The formal and colloquial dimensions do not live in total apartheid, and now we see the internet bringing new “standardizations” of the colloquial language and “colloquializations” of MSA, whether by the traditional media institutions, whether by Youtube and other platforms, where creators make unprecedented mixes of colloquial and literate usages.

Because of its absence of visual context, written text requires more precision and fidelity to the standard, but is still open to creative transformation, as in poetry, literature, or theoretical innovation. Many works of literature in the Arab world bring different and interesting blends of dialects and MSA, which is reflective of the national patterns and styles.

For my conclusion, I would like to reiterate the idea that the Latin world provides a good key to understanding the pulsating events taking place in the Arabic world, a truly open-air laboratory, for someone to wonder how things happened within the Latin world. All of this takes place in highly innovative circumstances, in which TV and the internet are just two examples, accelerating and producing many manifestations of “standardization” and “differentiation” entwined over the long term.