Peter Hessler wrote a wonderful New Yorker story about Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, mixing history and language history, politics, and his personal history in Eg

Peter Hessler wrote a wonderful New Yorker story about Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, mixing history and language history, politics, and his personal history in Egypt. It goes into much more detail. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabic-from-egypts-revolution https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabi... Some random quotes: > Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world. > At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but nowadays even Egyptian medical students don’t use Arabic texts. “What happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge,” Doss said. “And it becomes more conservative.” > After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no infrastructure projects. The word “factory” did not appear in the book. People said things like “Ya hag, I’m an engineer and after five years of university, I’m working as a waiter in a restaurant.” > The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported “shah” from the Persians, and then the phrase al-shah mat—the king died—was introduced to English as “checkmate.” > Translation into fusha can clean up a politician’s words. For example, in April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: “The ideal shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state for it, no, it won’t happen . . . but we are on a pathway in which we’re succeeding each day more than the day before.” In Al-Ahram, the quote appeared in fusha as: “Idealism exists in books, but we’re walking the pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day.” > During the last century, publishers sometimes rejected books that used Egyptian, and even novels about everyday life, like Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy,” featured fusha dialogue that no Egyptian would ever speak. Egyptian Arabic still lacks a standardized orthography, but its use has become more common during the past fifteen years, in part because of the Internet and texting. Nowadays, a writer like Rakha can publish in Egyptian, but to some degree it’s too late, because people rarely read Arabic books of any sort. For Rakha’s third novel, he’s writing in English, primarily because he wants to attract readers.