mōdgethanc wrote:I just looked at it and it just says "Egyptian", "Levantine" and "Sudanese". But that doesn't necessarily mean they're classified as different languages because there are also different pages for "Korean" and "North Korean" (wtf?).Meera wrote:Also mōdgethanc, I think the LDI classifies them as diffirent languages, on the GLOSS website they have diffirent sections for each Arabic. For example this is how they word it : "Arabic-MSA, Arabic-Egyptian, Arabic-Levantine, Arabic- Iraqi".
Anyway, as I said this isn't really about whether varieties of Arabic are dialects or languages. That's a really pointless discussion to get into anyway since there is no objective way to tell either way. The point I was trying to make to my friend was that they're about as different as the Romance languages are and just learning MSA (which is what he wanted me to do) wouldn't mean I could talk to any Arab in their native tongue. He said Arabic isn't any different from another language in terms of how much variety it has, which I disagree with since I've never come across an English accent I couldn't understand without a little work, except for English-based creoles (which are not really like English at all) and to some extent Scots.
I think its weird that they classify North Korean and Korean diffirently. And I think with a little work all native Arabic speakers could undertsand each other. If an Egyptian studied Morrocan Arabic, I'm sure he would catch on to it faster than we as non-natives would. I think as non-native speakers its hard for us to judge on this because we don't really know what it's like. Also your Sudanese friend is probably exposed to media from all over the Arab world. If he gets Arabic channels, he probably hears Egyptian, Lebanese and maybe even gulf Arabic, so he might be able to understand another dialect speaker than say a person living in a village in Yemen, just because he hears it all the time.