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A little jealous of Arabic speakers for that, ngl (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Small correction: Most speakers or Arabic dialects understand each other, but there's a pretty strong divide between Maghrebi (everything East of Egypt) and Middle Eastern (everything West of Libya) dialects. So a Libyan and a Moroccan will be generally able to understand each other, and same for an Egyptian and an Iraqi, but put an Egyptian and a Libyan in a room together and Standard Arabic will start showing up.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I think it's pretty hard to generalize but it's kinda of like degrees of separation. you can have something like dialect A and B understand each other, and so do B and C, and C and D, but A and D would have difficulty.

    imo Egyptian is very different from Iraqi, but they're likely to understand each other because Iraqi is similar to the Standard Arabic, and Egypt has exported their culture to the Arab world through theater, tv and music.

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