Egyptian Arabic ('aammiyya)

Introduction

Spyhnx

Egyptian Arabic, or Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, is the national language of Egypt. It also serves as a second language in many countries of the Middle East.

Prior to the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century AD, the Egyptians spoke Coptic, a later phase of ancient Egyptian. Following the Arab conquest, there was a prolonged period when Egypt Map both Coptic and Arabic were spoken in Egypt. Egyptian Arabic, as distinct from Classical Arabic and the variety spoken by the Arab invaders, is thought to have developed in the first Islamic capital of Egypt, that is now part of Cairo, the capital of present-day Egypt. With increased Islamization and Arabization of the country, Egyptian Arabic slowly replaced Coptic. However, there is evidence that Coptic Egyptian continued to be spoken until the 17th century AD. Coptic is still the liturgical language of the Egyptian Coptic Church.

It is estimated that Egyptian Arabic is spoken by over 44 million people in Egypt, the most populous Arabic-speaking country of 77 million people. It is also spoken in Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen (Ethnologue). The total number of speakers of Egyptian Arabic is estimated to be over 46 million.

Although Egyptian Arabic is for the most part a spoken dialect, it is also used in vernacular literature, including novels, plays, and poems, as popular media, such as in comics, advertising, some newspapers, and in transcriptions of popular songs. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is used In most other written media and in TV broadcasts. MSA is spoken on all formal occasions and for all formal purposes.

Egyptian Arabic is widely understood throughout the Arab world because Egypt has been a dominant force in film and in the media. Egypt developed the first Arab-speaking local film industry, and Egyptian films are widely distributed throughout the Arab world. The Egyptian film industry has created some 3,000 full-length films since 1924 and has earned the name of 'Hollywood on the Nile.' As a result, Egyptian Arabic is usually chosen as the spoken dialect taught to students of Arabic as a foreign language.

Egyptian Temple

Dialects

There are several dialects of Egyptian Arabic that tend to be mutually intelligible. Traditionally, however, they are divided into Lower Egyptian (Northern) and Upper Egyptian (Southern, also called Sa`idi). Cairene Arabic, the prestige dialect spoken in Cairo, is a Lower Egyptian dialect. Below are two distinguishing features of Lower vs. Upper Egyptian Arabic.

The letter (jiim) is pronounced as [g] instead of [j] in Upper Egyptian, e.g., [gamiil] instead of [jamiil], 'beautiful.'
The letter (qaaf) is pronounced as a glottal stop in Lower Egyptian, but as [g] in Upper Egyptian.

Structure

Sound System

Sound system

Vowels
Egyptian Arabic has more vowels than MSA. Its vowel inventory includes four short vowels (plus aschwa //) and six long vowels, as compared to three short and three long vowels in MSA. Other specifics of Egyptian Arabic vowels include the following:

All long vowels become shortened in unstressed positions and before consonant clusters.
Short /i/ and /u/ are often dropped when another vowel is added to a word, e.g., kaatib, 'having written' (masculine) becomes katba, 'having written' (feminine).
MSA diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ have become long vowels in Egyptian Arabic.

Consonants
The consonant system of Egyptian Arabic is similar to that of Modern Standard Arabic. Among the distinguishing characteristics of the consonants are the following:

There is an opposition between voiceless, voiced, and emphatic stops and fricatives. Emphatic consonants are typically realized as pharyngealized consonants. Pharyngealization refers to a secondary articulation by which the pharynx is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
Interdental fricatives // and // (th as in thin and th as in those respectively) have been lost in Egyptian Arabic.
Many consonants are pronounced in the back of the mouth, i.e., velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal sounds.
All consonants may be geminated, or doubled.
In general, few consonant clusters are tolerated.

x	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Emphatic	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
Stops	b	x	t-d	-	xx	k	q	x	?
Fricatives	x	f	s-z	-		x	-	-	h
Affricates		x	x	x	d	x	x	x	x
Nasals	m	x	n	xx	x	x	x	xx	x
Laterals	x	xx	l		x	x	x	x	x
Trill			r	xx	x		xx		x
Approximants	w	/w/	xx	xx	y	x	x	x	x

, , ,	emphatic consonants pronounced with a retracted mid-body of the tongue. They have no equivalents in English.
?	similar to the sound between the vowels in the English uh-oh.
q, , , ,	pronounced in the back of the mouth, there are no equivalents in English
	sh as in shop
d	j as in jay

Stress
Only stressed vowels can be long. Unstressed long vowels are shortened, and stressed short vowels are lengthened.

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Grammar

Egyptian sculpture

Like all spoken Arabic dialects, Egyptian Arabic has simplified some features of the grammar of Classical Arabic. These simplifications involve:

loss of case endings in nouns and adjectives;
loss of the dual number in nouns, adjectives, and pronouns;
loss of mood distinctions in the verb.

Noun phrase

MSA nouns have three cases: nominative, genitive and accusative. In addition to the direct object clitics in MSA, Egyptian Arabic has indirect object clitics which follow direct object clitics and precede the negative marker -s. .
Egyptian Arabic nouns are marked for definiteness, as in MSA..
MSA has three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. The dual number is used for objects that are normally paired.The dual number is lost in Egyptian Arabic.The plural is usually formed by adding a suffix to the end of a word. In some instances, the plural is expressed by changing the vowel structure of a word. This is called a broken plural. Broken plurals can even occur in loanwords, e.g., siksin, 'section' (singular) — sakaasin, 'sections' (plural).
As in MSA, nouns are either masculine or feminine.

Verb phrase
The verb system of Arabic is difficult to describe from the perspective of Indo-European languages. Some of its most salient features are listed below.

Person, mood, and aspect are marked by prefixes and suffixes.
There is one basic stem (Form I) plus nine derived stems, each with a range of meanings, such as reflexivity, and causativity. Each form has its own set of active and passive participles and verbal nouns.
Arabic perfective suffixed conjugation and an imperfective prefixed conjugation. The perfective can refer to present, pluperfect, or future. The imperfective can refer to present, past, or future. Colloquial Egyptian Arabic has also developed a future tense marker a-, e.g., ayiktib, 'he will write.'
The imperfective can be used as an infinitive, e.g., biyibb, 'he likes to write.'
The imperative is formed by taking the prefix off the imperfective verb.
Verbs are negated by using the particles ma- and -s.

Word order
The usual word order in Egyptian Arabic is Subject-Verb-Object.

Vocabulary

Like other varieties of Arabic, Egyptian Arabic derives most of its vocabulary by applying various vowel insertion patterns and templates to consonant roots. For instance, the root G-W-Z 'pair' underlies such words as gawaaz, 'marriage' and yiggawwiz, 'to get married.'

Egyptian Arabic tends to be more open to borrowing words from other languages than MSA. Throughout history, it has borrowed words from diverse sources. Earlier borrowings came from Coptic, the dominant language of Egypt prior to the arrival of the Arabs. These loan words dealt primarily with rural matters such as agriculture and traditional trades. A few Coptic expressions, such as 'fat on honey' have survived in modern Egyptian Arabic. Later loanwords came from Greek, Italian, French, and English. At present, the primary source of borrowing is English.

Writing

Petra

Naskh

Egyptian Arabic is rarely written, since Modern Standard Arabic is normally used for written communication. However, Egyptian Arabic is occasionally used for writing novels, plays, poems as well as in comics, captions in cartoons, transcriptions of spoken language, advertising, and in some newspapers.

Like other varieties of Arabic, the Egyptian dialect is written in the Arabic alphabet. The Arabic script is based on the Nabataean alphabet which was used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic. The Nabataean alphabet, in turn, descended from the Phoenician. Nabateans added 6 symbols to the Aramaic alphabet to represent sounds that did not occur in Aramaic. The Nabataean alphabet contained only symbols for consonants. The Arabs added dots above and below the consonants to represent vowels.

The earliest Arabic inscription dates to 512 AD. The script has undergone several modifications. Its present form (Naskh) first appeared in the 11th century AD, and has been used ever since, especially for print.

The Arabic alphabet is a fairly accurate representation of the sound system of the language. It contains 28 symbols with additional letters for loanwords that contain sounds which do not occur in Arabic, e.g., /p/ and /g/.

Arabic Alphabet

The basic features of the Arabic script are summarized below.

The Arabic script is consonant-based.
Words are written in horizontal lines from right to left.
Most letters change their shape depending on their position in a word.
The shape of some letters allows them to be joined, while the shape of others does not. Letters that can be joined are always joined in both hand-written and printed Arabic.
All but six letters can be attached to the preceding ones.
There are no capital letters.
The letters are simplified in handwritten form.
Vowel diacritics representing short vowels are only used in the Qur'an, religious texts, classical poetry, children's books, and textbooks for learners of Arabic.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Arabic.

Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Click here to learn about Arabic calligraphy.

Resources

Click here to find out where Egyptian Arabic is taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying Egyptian Arabic.

Online resources for the study of Arabic language and culture
Handbook for students of Arabic
Yamada Language Center Arabic Guide
Wikipedia article on Arabic
UCLA Language Profile for Arabic
Ethnologue report on Arabic
Omniglot Guide to Arabic Alphabet
Languages-on-the-Web: Arabic Links
Marhaba: Welcome to Arabic
Arabic Language and Culture Resources
Library of Congress Portals to the World: Egypt