Talk:Varieties of Arabic

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No, no, no - the whole point of calling it "Varieties of Arabic" was to avoid the language/dialect controversy. Otherwise we'll have instant edit wars between Lebanese who say their speech is a separate language and Lebanese who say it's not. - Mustafaa 22:28, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry. I'll move back. Isomorphic 22:29, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't understand though - if it's controversial, why does the article use the word "dialect" throughout? Isomorphic 22:32, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Good point - I've fixed that... My own sympathies are solidly with the "dialect" camp (hence my original word choice), but I've seen enough supporters of the opposite side to anticipate edit wars (rapidly degenerating to rehashes of the Lebanese civil war, or of Israeli propaganda about Arab illiteracy) once they find it. Mustafaa 22:42, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

OK, makes sense now. Interesting article, by the way. Isomorphic 22:45, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Picky little point: It's a little jarring that the article title is not given in bold anywhere in the first paragraph, as is standard Wikipedia convention. I don't trust that I could do this without introducing inaccuracies, as I don't know anything about the subject. - dcljr (talk) 08:01, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Great expansion - nice work, Benwing! My only quibble is with "The dominant order is subject-verb rather than verb-subject": I'm not sure that's entirely true. In Algerian Arabic, I think verb-subject is the commonest order for intransitive verbs (though SVO is the order for transitives.) However, I'm not 100% sure; reclassicization is hard to filter out sometimes. - Mustafaa 23:57, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I think it's more appropriate to call them dialects than languages, in the arab world we use the word "Lahjat" (لهجات)...For example Lebanese is divided from Arabic just like every other Arab dialect. radiant guy 08:52, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

"Appropriateness" is in the eye of the beholder, and with respect to language / dialect as much a political as an objective decision. Certainly by benchmarks such as "European" languages that are called languages, the spoken varieties of Arabic are more different. The article opted for varieties to avoid getting into dialect-language. A good choice. Arabic usage with respect to Arabic itself, is, I would add, usually full of rather unscientific misconceptions, etc. and is not a good benchmark for what an objective encyclopedia should apply. (collounsbury 13:05, 4 April 2007 (UTC))

[edit] More detail needed

There needs to be more detail in the classification, especially with Iraqi Arabic. I am not sure if every Arabic dialect of Iraq forms a genetic unit. Also having, the country based Arabic is confusing. Azalea pomp 16:54, 14 April 2007 (UTC)