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82-801: Mashriqi Arabic , or Mashriqi ʿAmmiya , encompasses the varieties of Arabic spoken in the Mashriq , including the countries of Egypt , Lebanon , Palestine , Kuwait , Jordan , Syria , Turkey , Iraq , Sudan , Saudi Arabia , UAE , Oman , Bahrain and Qatar . The variety is sometimes referred to as Eastern Arabic , as opposed to Western Arabic ( Maghrebi Arabic or Darija) and includes Mesopotamian Arabic and Peninsular Arabic , along with Egyptian Arabic , Sudanese Arabic , and Levantine Arabic . Speakers of Mashriqi call their language ʿAmmiya , which means "common or colloquial" in Modern Standard Arabic . Modern Standard Arabic ( الفصحى al-fuṣḥá )

164-579: A lingua franca (e.g., Turkey , Iran , Cyprus , Chad , Nigeria and Eritrea )– are particularly divergent in some respects, especially in their vocabularies, since they are less influenced by classical Arabic. However, historically they fall within the same dialect classifications as the varieties that are spoken in countries where Arabic is the dominant language. Because most of these peripheral dialects are located in Muslim majority countries, they are now influenced by Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic,

246-512: A Latin-based alphabet. It is the only Semitic language among the official languages of the European Union . Arabic-based pidgins (which have a limited vocabulary consisting mostly of Arabic words, but lack most Arabic morphological features) are in widespread use along the southern edge of the Sahara, and have been for a long time. In the eleventh century, the medieval geographer al-Bakri records

328-488: A certain dialect may be associated with backwardness and does not carry mainstream prestige—yet it will continue to be used as it carries a kind of covert prestige and serves to differentiate one group from another when necessary. A basic distinction that cuts across the entire geography of the Arabic-speaking world is between sedentary and nomadic varieties (often misleadingly called Bedouin ). The distinction stems from

410-507: A colloquial variety to add a spontaneous comment or respond to a question. The ratio of MSA to colloquial varieties depends on the speaker, the topic, and the situation—amongst other factors. Today even the least educated citizens are exposed to MSA through public education and exposure to mass media, and so tend to use elements of it in speaking to others. This is an example of what linguistics researchers call diglossia . See Linguistic register . Egyptian linguist Al-Said Badawi proposed

492-414: A common ancestry, and incipient immigrant pidgins. Arabic is characterized by a wide number of varieties; however, Arabic speakers are often able to manipulate the way they speak based on the circumstances. There can be a number of motives for changing one's speech: the formality of a situation, the need to communicate with people with different dialects, to get social approval, to differentiate oneself from

574-461: A dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language—this is the case in Bahrain, for example. Language mixes and changes in different ways. Arabic speakers often use more than one variety of Arabic within a conversation or even a sentence. This process is referred to as code-switching . For example, a woman on a TV program could appeal to

656-406: A high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. Egyptian Arabic is one of the most widely understood Arabic dialects due to a thriving Egyptian television and movie industry, and Egypt's highly influential role in the region for much of

738-451: A high degree of mutual intelligibility, especially between geographically adjacent ones (such as Lebanese and Syrian or between Iraqi and Kuwaiti). On the contrary, Maghrebi dialects, especially those of Algeria and Morocco, are harder to understand for Arabic-speakers from the Mashriqi ones, as it derives from different substrata. Varieties of Arabic In terms of sociolinguistics ,

820-404: A highly divergent Siculo-Arabic language descended from Maghrebi Arabic is also provided. True pronunciations differ; transliterations used approach an approximate demonstration. Also, the pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic differs significantly from region to region. "Peripheral" varieties of Arabic – that is, varieties spoken in countries where Arabic is not a dominant language and

902-429: A major distinction exists between the formal standardized language, found mostly in writing or in prepared speech, and the widely diverging vernaculars , used for everyday speaking situations. The latter vary from country to country, from speaker to speaker (according to personal preferences, education and culture), and depending on the topic and situation. In other words, Arabic in its natural environment usually occurs in

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984-468: A more detailed classification for modern variants of the language, which is divided into five major groups: Peninsular , Mesopotamian , Levantine , Egypto-Sudanic or Nile Valley (including Egyptian and Sudanese ), and Maghrebi . These large regional groups do not correspond to borders of modern states. In the western parts of the Arab world , varieties are referred to as الدارجة ad-dārija , and in

1066-553: A number of common innovations from CA. This has led to the suggestion, first articulated by Charles Ferguson , that a simplified koiné language developed in the army staging camps in Iraq, whence the remaining parts of the modern Arab world were conquered. In general, the rural varieties are more conservative than the sedentary varieties and the rural varieties within the Arabian peninsula are even more conservative than those elsewhere. Within

1148-431: A singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g. chair , chairs , chair's , chairs' ); there is no manifest difference in the form of chair between "The chair is here." (subject) and "I own the chair." (direct object), a distinction made instead by word order and context. Cases can be ranked in the following hierarchy, where a language that does not have a given case will tend not to have any cases to

1230-492: A situation of diglossia , which means that its native speakers often learn and use two linguistic forms substantially different from each other, the Modern Standard Arabic (often called MSA in English) as the official language and a local colloquial variety (called العامية , al-ʿāmmiyya in many Arab countries, meaning " slang " or "colloquial"; or called الدارجة , ad-dārija , meaning "common or everyday language" in

1312-497: A text in an Arabic-based pidgin, probably one that was spoken in the region corresponding to modern Mauritania . In some regions, particularly around South Sudan , the pidgins have creolized (see the list below). Immigrant speakers of Arabic often incorporate a significant amount of vocabulary from the host-country language in their speech, in a situation analogous to Spanglish in the United States. Even within countries where

1394-492: A variety of factors, such as gender , number , phonological environment, and irregular historical factors. Pronouns sometimes have separate paradigms. In some languages, particularly Slavic languages , a case may contain different groups of endings depending on whether the word is a noun or an adjective . A single case may contain many different endings, some of which may even be derived from different roots. For example, in Polish,

1476-468: A very weak grasp of the formal language. In another example, groups of educated speakers from different regions will often use dialectical forms that represent a middle ground between their dialects rather than trying to use the formal language, to make communication easier and more comprehensible. For example, to express the existential "there is" (as in, "there is a place where..."), Arabic speakers have access to many different words: In this case, /fiː/

1558-536: Is learned as the speaker's first language whilst the formal language is subsequently learned in school. While vernacular varieties differ substantially, Fus'ha ( فصحى ), the formal register , is standardized and universally understood by those literate in Arabic. Western scholars make a distinction between Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic while speakers of Arabic generally do not consider CA and MSA to be different varieties. The largest differences between

1640-516: Is most likely to be used as it is not associated with a particular region and is the closest to a dialectical middle ground for this group of speakers. Moreover, given the prevalence of movies and TV shows in Egyptian Arabic, the speakers are all likely to be familiar with it. Iraqi/Kuwaiti aku , Levantine fīh and North African kayn all evolve from Classical Arabic forms ( yakūn , fīhi , kā'in respectively), but now sound different. Sometimes

1722-435: Is moulded by this religious framework, reflecting the collective identity and adjusting to the intricate balance of belief systems. Religion in this context functions as a sociopolitical construct, inextricably linked to the authority of the state and its historical evolution. It speaks for the individual, often before they can express themselves, and thus, the interplay between faith and politics must be fully understood to grasp

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1804-676: Is not really possible to keep this classification, partly because the modern dialects, especially urban variants, typically amalgamate features from both norms. Geographically, modern Arabic varieties are classified into five groups: Maghrebi , Egyptian (including Egyptian and Sudanese ), Mesopotamian , Levantine and Peninsular Arabic . Speakers from distant areas, across national borders, within countries and even between cities and villages, can struggle to understand each other's dialects. The greatest variations between kinds of Arabic are those between regional language groups. Arabic dialectologists formerly distinguished between just two groups:

1886-646: Is often marked in English with a preposition . For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case , or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί ( tôi podí , meaning "the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς ( poús ) "foot") changing to dative form. More formally, case has been defined as "a system of marking dependent nouns for

1968-665: Is pronounced as a voiced /ɡ/ in the urban varieties of the Arabian Peninsula (e.g. the Hejazi dialect in the ancient cities of Mecca and Medina ) as well as in the Bedouin dialects across all Arabic-speaking countries, but is voiceless mainly in post- Arabized urban centers as either /q/ (with [ɡ] being an allophone in a few words mostly in North African cities) or /ʔ/ (merging ⟨ ق ⟩ with ⟨ ء ⟩ ) in

2050-583: Is the primary official language used in the government, legislation, and judiciary of countries in the Mashriq region. Mashriqi Arabic is used for almost all spoken communication, as well as in television and advertising in Egypt and Lebanon, but Modern Standard Arabic is used in written communication. In Lebanon, where Mashriqi Arabic was taught as a colloquial language as a separate subject under French colonization, some formal textbooks exist. The varieties of Mashriqi have

2132-723: Is the process or result of altering nouns to the correct grammatical cases. Languages with rich nominal inflection (using grammatical cases for many purposes) typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns with a similar pattern of case inflection or declension. Sanskrit has six declension classes, whereas Latin is traditionally considered to have five , and Ancient Greek three . For example, Slovak has fifteen noun declension classes , five for each gender (the number may vary depending on which paradigms are counted or omitted, this mainly concerns those that modify declension of foreign words; refer to article). In Indo-European languages, declension patterns may depend on

2214-458: Is the study of how language usage is affected by societal factors, e.g., cultural norms and contexts (see also pragmatics ). The following sections examine some of the ways that modern Arab societies influence how Arabic is spoken. In the Arab world, religion transcends the boundaries of personal belief, functioning as a pervasive and influential force in every facet of life. It is deeply embedded within

2296-555: Is used by Arabic speakers over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones when the Arabic alphabet is unavailable or difficult to use for technical reasons; this is also used in Modern Standard Arabic when Arabic speakers of different dialects communicate each other. Three scientific papers concluded, using various natural language processing techniques, that Levantine dialects (and especially Palestinian) were

2378-680: The Arabic alphabet . Vernacular Arabic was first recognized as a written language distinct from Classical Arabic in 17th century Ottoman Egypt , when the Cairo elite began to trend towards colloquial writing. A record of the Cairo vernacular of the time is found in the dictionary compiled by Yusuf al-Maghribi . More recently, many plays and poems, as well as a few other works exist in Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian Arabic ; books of poetry, at least, exist for most varieties. In Algeria , colloquial Maghrebi Arabic

2460-534: The Hebrew and Aramaic languages. Though they have features similar to each other, they are not a homogeneous unit and still belong philologically to the same family groupings as their non-Judeo counterpart varieties. There have been a number of Arabic-based pidgins and creoles throughout history, including a number of new ones emerging today. These may be broadly divided into the Sudanic pidgins and creoles, which share

2542-633: The Maghreb ), in different aspects of their lives. This situation is often compared in Western literature to the Latin language, which maintained a cultured variant and several vernacular versions for centuries, until it disappeared as a spoken language, while derived Romance languages became new languages, such as Italian , Catalan , Aragonese , Occitan , French , Arpitan , Spanish , Portuguese , Asturleonese , Romanian and more. The regionally prevalent variety

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2624-474: The Maghrebi Arabic group, first-person singular verbs begin with a n- ( ن ). Further substantial differences exist between Bedouin and sedentary speech, the countryside and major cities, ethnic groups, religious groups, social classes, men and women, and the young and the old. These differences are to some degree bridgeable. Often, Arabic speakers can adjust their speech in a variety of ways according to

2706-608: The Mashriqi (eastern) dialects, east of Libya which includes the dialects of Arabian Peninsula , Mesopotamia , Levant , Egypt , Sudan , and the Maghrebi (western) dialects which includes the dialects of North Africa ( Maghreb ) west of Egypt . The mutual intelligibility is high within each of those two groups, while the intelligibility between the two groups is asymmetric : Maghrebi speakers are more likely to understand Mashriqi than vice versa. Arab dialectologists have now adopted

2788-767: The Nubian languages . Egyptian varieties are influenced by the Coptic language . Mesopotamian varieties are influenced by the Mesopotamian languages ( Sumerian , Akkadian , Mandaic , Eastern Aramaic ), Turkish language , and Iranian languages . Levantine varieties (ISO 639–3: apc ) are influenced Western Aramaic languages , and to a lesser extent, the Turkish language and Greek and Persian and Ancient Egyptian language : Some peninsular varieties are influenced by South Arabian Languages . Jewish varieties are influenced by

2870-453: The dative ) and genitive cases. They are used with personal pronouns : subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever) and possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose; whosever). Forms such as I , he and we are used for the subject (" I kicked John"), and forms such as me , him and us are used for

2952-466: The nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation. English has largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have three cases, which are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative (including functions formerly handled by

3034-1402: The object ("John kicked me "). As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance, in Ancient Greek , the locative case merged with the dative), a phenomenon known as syncretism . Languages such as Sanskrit , Kannada , Latin , Tamil , and Russian have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes ) to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: Persian has three; modern English has three but for pronouns only; Torlakian dialects , Classical and Modern Standard Arabic have three; German , Icelandic , Modern Greek , and Irish have four; Albanian , Romanian and Ancient Greek have five; Bengali , Latin, Russian, Slovak , Kajkavian , Slovenian , and Turkish each have at least six; Armenian , Czech , Georgian , Latvian , Lithuanian , Polish , Serbo-Croatian and Ukrainian have seven; Mongolian , Marathi , Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu , Malayalam , Assamese and Greenlandic have eight; Old Nubian and Sinhalese have nine; Basque has 13; Estonian has 14; Finnish has 15; Hungarian has 18; and Tsez has at least 36 cases. Commonly encountered cases include nominative , accusative , dative and genitive . A role that one of those languages marks by case

3116-573: The "first," "second," "third" and so on. For example, the common "when-then" construction is called the सति सप्तमी (Sati Saptami) or "The Good Seventh" as it uses the locative, which is the seventh case. In the most common case concord system, only the head-word (the noun) in a phrase is marked for case. This system appears in many Papuan languages as well as in Turkic , Mongolian , Quechua , Dravidian , Indo-Aryan , and other languages. In Basque and various Amazonian and Australian languages , only

3198-400: The 20th century. Another way that varieties of Arabic differ is that some are formal and others are colloquial (that is, vernacular). There are two formal varieties, or اللغة الفصحى al-lugha(t) al-fuṣḥá , One of these, known in English as Modern Standard Arabic ( MSA ), is used in contexts such as writing, broadcasting, interviewing, and speechmaking. The other, Classical Arabic, is

3280-494: The Arab world, both communities in Baghdad share Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as the prestigious form of the language. However, the Muslim colloquial dialect is more closely associated with power and economic dominance, reflecting the greater influence of the Muslim community in the city. Consequently, Christians often adopt the Muslim dialect in formal or public contexts—such as a Christian school teacher addressing students—demonstrating

3362-557: The Arabic varieties of the Qur'an and their Arabic-speaking neighbours, respectively. Probably the most divergent non-creole Arabic variety is Cypriot Maronite Arabic , a nearly extinct variety that has been heavily influenced by Greek , and written in Greek and Latin alphabets. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic . Its vocabulary has acquired a large number of loanwords from Sicilian , Italian and more recently English , and it uses only

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3444-755: The Indo-European languages had eight morphological cases , although modern languages typically have fewer, using prepositions and word order to convey information that had previously been conveyed using distinct noun forms. Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages (except Macedonian and Bulgarian ), with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic , German and Modern Greek , which have four. In German, cases are mostly marked on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns. In Icelandic, articles, adjectives, personal names and nouns are all marked for case, making it

3526-519: The Iraq War and the mass emigration of Iraqi Christians in the early 21st century. In Baghdad , notable differences exist between the Arabic spoken by Christian and Muslim residents. The Christian community in Baghdad is longstanding, and their dialect traces its roots to the sedentary vernacular of urban medieval Iraq. By contrast, the typical Muslim dialect of the city is a more recent development, originating from Bedouin speech patterns. As in other parts of

3608-568: The Latin casus , which is derived from the verb cadere , "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱad- . The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις , ptôsis , lit. "falling, fall". The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative. This imagery is also reflected in the word declension , from Latin declinere , "to lean", from

3690-787: The PIE root *ḱley- . The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from casus , including cas in French, caso in Italian and Kasus in German. The Russian word паде́ж ( padyézh ) is a calque from Greek and similarly contains a root meaning "fall", and the German Fall and Czech pád simply mean "fall", and are used for both the concept of grammatical case and to refer to physical falls. The Dutch equivalent naamval translates as 'noun case', in which 'noun' has

3772-512: The Sunni Arabs. This socio-political dynamic exerts a profound influence on the evolution of language in Bahrain, steering its development in line with the interests and cultural practices of the Sunni minority. The case of Iraq further exemplifies how religious affiliation can significantly influence linguistic variation within the Arab world. This observation is drawn from a study conducted prior to

3854-446: The Sunni population, which began migrating to the island in the 18th century. Despite being a minority, the Sunni population holds a dominant position, with the ruling family of Bahrain being Sunni. This dominance is reflected in the public sphere, where the colloquial language presented on television and in media is almost exclusively that of the Sunni community. As a result, power, prestige, and economic control are closely associated with

3936-464: The accusative or the vocative cases are placed after the nominative and before the genitive. For example: For similar reasons, the customary order of the four cases in Icelandic is nominative–accusative–dative–genitive, as illustrated below: Sanskrit similarly arranges cases in the order nominative-accusative-instrumental-dative-ablative-genitive-locative-vocative. The cases are individually named as

4018-512: The accusative, genitive, and dative have merged to an oblique case, but many of these languages still retain vocative, locative, and ablative cases. Old English had an instrumental case, but neither a locative nor a prepositional case. The traditional case order (nom-gen-dat-acc) was expressed for the first time in The Art of Grammar in the 2nd century BC: Πτώσεις ὀνομάτων εἰσὶ πέντε· ὀρθή, γενική, δοτική, αἰτιατική, κλητική. There are five Cases,

4100-514: The authority of the formal language by using elements of it in her speech in order to prevent other speakers from cutting her off. Another process at work is "leveling", the "elimination of very localised dialectical features in favour of more regionally general ones." This can affect all linguistic levels—semantic, syntactic, phonological, etc. The change can be temporary, as when a group of speakers with substantially different Arabics communicate, or it can be permanent, as often happens when people from

4182-425: The bus stop, in the future John is waiting for us at the bus stop . We will see what will happen in the future . by hand with John This letter was written by hand . I took a trip there with John . All of the above are just rough descriptions; the precise distinctions vary significantly from language to language, and as such they are often more complex. Case is based fundamentally on changes to

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4264-601: The classical/standard and the colloquial Arabic are the loss of grammatical case ; a different and strict word order; the loss of the previous system of grammatical mood , along with the evolution of a new system; the loss of the inflected passive voice , except in a few relic varieties; restriction in the use of the dual number and (for most varieties) the loss of the distinctive conjugation and agreement for feminine plurals . Many Arabic dialects, Maghrebi Arabic in particular, also have significant vowel shifts and unusual consonant clusters . Unlike other dialect groups, in

4346-418: The closest colloquial varieties, in terms of lexical similarity , to Modern Standard Arabic: Harrat et al. (2015, comparing MSA to two Algerian dialects, Tunisian, Palestinian, and Syrian), El-Haj et al. (2018, comparing MSA to Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, and North African Arabic), and Abu Kwaik et al. (2018, comparing MSA to Algerian, Tunisian, Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian). Sociolinguistics

4428-457: The complexities of the language and culture of the Arab world. Religion and politics here are intertwined to such a degree that they cannot be separated. Bahrain offers a clear example of the intricate relationship between religion, identity, and societal structures in the Arab world. A significant distinction exists between the Shiite population, Bahrain's oldest and most established community, and

4510-451: The context and to their intentions—for example, to speak with people from different regions, to demonstrate their level of education or to draw on the authority of the spoken language. In terms of typological classification, Arabic dialectologists distinguish between two basic norms: Bedouin and Sedentary. This is based on a set of phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics that distinguish between these two norms. However, it

4592-400: The context. This is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a prestige variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the prestige dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities, especially including the capital Amman. Moreover, in certain contexts,

4674-415: The countryside move to the city and adopt the more prestigious urban dialect, possibly over a couple of generations. This process of accommodation sometimes appeals to the formal language, but often does not. For example, villagers in central Palestine may try to use the dialect of Jerusalem rather than their own when speaking with people with substantially different dialects, particularly since they may have

4756-529: The dental ⟨ض⟩ /dˤ/ . Grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers ( determiners , adjectives , participles , and numerals ) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English , one says I see them and they see me :

4838-399: The eastern parts, as العامية al-ʿāmmiyya . Nearby varieties of Arabic are mostly mutually intelligible , but faraway varieties tend not to be. Varieties west of Egypt are particularly disparate, with Egyptian Arabic speakers claiming difficulty in understanding North African Arabic speakers, while North African Arabic speakers' ability to understand other Arabic speakers is mostly due to

4920-481: The extent to which language in Baghdad, and the wider Arab world, is shaped by the prevailing sociopolitical landscape. When it comes to phonetics the Arabic dialects differ in the pronunciation of the short vowels ( / a / , / u / and / i / ) and a number of selected consonants, mainly ⟨ق⟩ /q/ , ⟨ج⟩ /d͡ʒ/ and the interdental consonants ⟨ث⟩ /θ/ , ⟨ذ⟩ /ð/ and ⟨ظ⟩ /ðˤ/ , in addition to

5002-464: The following distinctions between the different "levels of speech" involved when speakers of Egyptian Arabic switch between vernacular and formal Arabic varieties: Almost everyone in Egypt is able to use more than one of these levels of speech, and people often switch between them, sometimes within the same sentence. This is generally true in other Arabic-speaking countries as well. The spoken dialects of Arabic have occasionally been written, usually in

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5084-587: The language of the Qur'an . It is rarely used except in reciting the Qur'an or quoting older classical texts. (Arabic speakers typically do not make an explicit distinction between MSA and Classical Arabic.) Modern Standard Arabic was deliberately developed in the early part of the 19th century as a modernized version of Classical Arabic. People often use a mixture of both colloquial and formal Arabic. For example, interviewers or speechmakers generally use MSA in asking prepared questions or making prepared remarks, then switch to

5166-465: The listener, when citing a written text to differentiate between personal and professional or general matters, to clarify a point, and to shift to a new topic. An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect . This refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities, depending on

5248-403: The more extensive case system of Old English ). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order , by prepositions , and by the " Saxon genitive " ( -'s ). Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases: Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative case form,

5330-474: The most conservative Germanic language . The eight historical Indo-European cases are as follows, with examples either of the English case or of the English syntactic alternative to case: John waited for us at the bus stop. Obey the law . The clerk gave a discount to us . According to the law ... of (the) The pages of the book turned yellow. The table is made out of wood . Hello, John! O John , how are you! (archaic) at

5412-455: The noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence – one of the defining features of so-called fusional languages . Old English was a fusional language, but Modern English does not work this way. Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Proto-Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of

5494-424: The oblique case form, a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself , ourselves ) which is based upon the possessive determiner form but is coreferential to a preceding instance of nominative or oblique, and the possessive case forms, which include both a determiner form (such as my , our ) and a predicatively-used independent form (such as mine , ours ) which is distinct (with two exceptions:

5576-781: The official language is Arabic, different varieties of Arabic are spoken. For example, within Syria, the Arabic spoken in Homs is recognized as different from the Arabic spoken in Damascus, but both are considered to be varieties of "Levantine" Arabic. And within Morocco, the Arabic of the city of Fes is considered different from the Arabic spoken elsewhere in the country. Geographically distant colloquial varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research by Trentman & Shiri indicates

5658-701: The older meaning of both 'adjective (noun)' and '(substantive) noun'. The Finnish equivalent is sija , whose main meaning is "position" or "place". Similar to Latin, Sanskrit uses the term विभक्ति (vibhakti) which may be interpreted as the specific or distinct "bendings" or "experiences" of a word, from the verb भुज् (bhuj) and the prefix वि (vi) , and names the individual cases using ordinal numbers. Although not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages , such as Latin , Old Persian , Ancient Greek , and Sanskrit . Historically,

5740-423: The phrase-final word (not necessarily the noun) is marked for case. In many Indo-European , Finnic , and Semitic languages , case is marked on the noun, the determiner, and usually the adjective. Other systems are less common. In some languages, there is double-marking of a word as both genitive (to indicate semantic role) and another case such as accusative (to establish concord with the head noun). Declension

5822-405: The right [nominative], the generic [genitive], the dative, the accusative, and the vocative. Latin grammars, such as Ars grammatica , followed the Greek tradition, but added the ablative case of Latin. Later other European languages also followed that Graeco-Roman tradition. However, for some languages, such as Latin, due to case syncretism the order may be changed for convenience, where

5904-410: The right of the missing case: This is, however, only a general tendency. Many forms of Central German , such as Colognian and Luxembourgish , have a dative case but lack a genitive. In Irish nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, whereas the dative–locative has remained separate in some paradigms; Irish also has genitive and vocative cases. In many modern Indo-Aryan languages,

5986-399: The sedentary varieties, the western varieties (particularly, Moroccan Arabic ) are less conservative than the eastern varieties. A number of cities in the Arabic world speak a "Bedouin" variety, which acquires prestige in that context. The following example illustrates similarities and differences between the literary, standardized varieties, and major urban dialects of Arabic. Maltese ,

6068-662: The sentence. It is widely accepted that the Ancient Greeks had a certain idea of the forms of a name in their own language. A fragment of Anacreon seems to prove this. Grammatical cases were first recognized by the Stoics and from some philosophers of the Peripatetic school . The advancements of those philosophers were later employed by the philologists of the Library of Alexandria . The English word case used in this sense comes from

6150-430: The settlement patterns in the wake of the Arab conquests. As regions were conquered, army camps were set up that eventually grew into cities, and settlement of the rural areas by nomadic Arabs gradually followed thereafter. In some areas, sedentary dialects are divided further into urban and rural variants. The most obvious phonetic difference between the two groups is the pronunciation of the letter ق qaf , which

6232-440: The social fabric, permeating language, politics, and cultural identity. From birth, individuals are not only given a name but are also ascribed a place within a specific religious order: whether as Muslims, divided into Sunni or Shia , or as Christians , Druze , or Jews . These religious identities are not fluid or optional; rather, they are firmly entrenched, shaping and defining the individual’s experience. Even language itself

6314-564: The third person singular masculine he and the third person singular neuter it , which use the same form for both determiner and independent [ his car , it is his ]). The interrogative personal pronoun who exhibits the greatest diversity of forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and genitive forms ( who , whom , whose ) and equivalently-coordinating indefinite forms ( whoever , whomever , and whosever ). Although English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only

6396-534: The type of relationship they bear to their heads ". Cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient . They are often closely related, and in languages such as Latin, several thematic roles are realised by a somewhat fixed case for deponent verbs, but cases are a syntagmatic/phrasal category, and thematic roles are the function of a syntagma/phrase in a larger structure. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order , as thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in

6478-695: The urban centers of Egypt and the Levant . The latter were mostly Arabized after the Islamic Conquests . The other major phonetic difference is that the rural varieties preserve the Classical Arabic (CA) interdentals /θ/ ث and /ð/ ذ, and merge the CA emphatic sounds /ɮˤ/ ض and /ðˤ/ ظ into /ðˤ/ rather than sedentary /dˤ/ . The most significant differences between rural Arabic and non-rural Arabic are in syntax. The sedentary varieties in particular share

6560-514: The widespread popularity of Egyptian and Levantine popular media (for example Syrian or Lebanese TV shows). This phenomenon is called asymmetric intelligibility . One factor in the differentiation of the varieties is the influence from other languages previously spoken or still presently spoken in the regions, such as Western varieties are influenced by the Berber languages , Punic and by Romance languages . Sudanese varieties are influenced by

6642-548: Was advocated for Lebanese Arabic by Said Aql , whose supporters published several books in his transcription. In 1944, Abdelaziz Pasha Fahmi, a member of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Egypt proposed the replacement of the Arabic alphabet with the Latin alphabet. His proposal was discussed in two sessions in the communion but was rejected, and faced strong opposition in cultural circles. The Latin alphabet (as " Arabizi ")

6724-453: Was taught as a separate subject under French colonization, and some textbooks exist. Mizrahi Jews throughout the Arab world who spoke Judeo-Arabic dialects rendered newspapers, letters, accounts, stories, and translations of some parts of their liturgy in the Hebrew alphabet , adding diacritics and other conventions for letters that exist in Judeo-Arabic but not Hebrew. The Latin alphabet

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