I was talking more about liguistics, not politics/culture. Linguistically, they are separate languages, not dialects, though what you say is true (and it also h

I was talking more about liguistics, not politics/culture. Linguistically, they are separate languages, not dialects, though what you say is true (and it also holds for Spanish and Portuguese, for example). I don't speak Arabic, so I don't know how far the differences between say, Lebanese Arabic and Tunisian or Moroccan Arabic go. I do know that I've met people from Lebanon and Tunis, and they communicated in French between them, mostly. The explanation was basically that written Arabic was pretty much understandable by all Arabic speakers, but the dialects were too different in some cases.