3 ms·
Could you provide some metrics, please? I'll be happy to confess my ignorance, but I was under the impression that among countries where some form of Arabic is
by dreamweapon 12y ago
Could you provide some metrics, please? I'll be happy to confess my ignorance, but I was under the impression that among countries where some form of Arabic is counted among the official languages spoken, these variants were much closer to Modern Standard Arabic than, say, Swedish is to German.
Mutually unintelligible languages that qualify as Germanic; Nynorsk, Bokmal, Swedish, Danish, Hochdeutsch, Allemanic, at least 4 varieties of Swiss German, Dutch, Frisian, Scots, English, Jamaican Patois, Tok Pisin.
BTW, you forgot Kiezdeutsch.
- barry-cotter 12y agoI don't have any metrics on Arabic but here's what Wikipedia has to say on intelligibility > From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages.[34] This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. I also fogot Afrikaans. Arabic ia really, really diglossic so all educated Arabs will be able to speak and understand fusha but people don't talk like that outside of extremely formal situations. Speaking fusha at home would be as weird as a Romance speaker raising their kids in Latin.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]