Fusha, Egyptian, Levantine, Darija: can you hear the difference?

Every Arabic course makes you choose before you've heard any of it. Egyptian, Levantine, Moroccan Darija, or Modern Standard Arabic, which most people call Fusha. The descriptions all sound reasonable and it is hard to tell from a paragraph which one you actually want.

So this post does it the other way round. A short description of each, the words that give each one away, and then a game so you can find out whether you can already hear the difference. Most people can after about ten minutes. The tells are that consistent.

The short version

• Fusha is the written standard: news, books, signs, speeches, the Quran in its classical form. Everyone who went to school in an Arab country reads it. Nobody speaks it at home.
• Egyptian is spoken by over a hundred million people in Egypt, and understood far beyond it, because Egyptian film, television and music have been everywhere for a century.
• Levantine covers Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. City to city it shifts a little, but someone from Amman and someone from Beirut understand each other without effort.
• Darija is Moroccan Arabic. It drops vowels, borrows from French and Amazigh, and is the one the other three find hardest to follow.

The three spoken dialects are not slang versions of Fusha. They are full languages with their own grammar, and they share most of their vocabulary with Fusha and each other. What separates them is a small set of very common words, and a few sounds.

The words that give it away

You can identify most sentences from one word. These are the ones to listen for, because they come up constantly:

A few patterns are worth noticing. Fusha words are longer and end in vowels the dialects have dropped (uridu against baddi). Egyptian and Fusha sometimes agree, as with bikam, which is why Egyptian feels like the easiest bridge for people who learned Fusha first. Darija is the odd one out more often than not: bghit, daba and bezzaf have no lookalike in the other three.

The numbers in the transliteration are the ones Arabic speakers use when texting: 3 is ع, 7 is ح, and 2 is the glottal stop. There's a whole post on why.

The sounds that give it away

Words are the easy tell. Once you can hear these three letters, you can place a speaker from a single sentence even when the vocabulary overlaps.

• ق (qaf). Fusha says a deep q from the back of the throat. Egyptians and city Levantines replace it with a glottal stop, so qalb (heart) becomes 2alb. In Jordan, in rural Palestine and among Bedouin speakers it turns into a g: galb.
• ج (jim). Egyptians say a hard g: gamal, a camel. In Lebanon and Syria it softens to the s in "measure": zhamal. Fusha, Jordan and Darija keep j.
• ث (tha). Fusha keeps the th of "think". Egyptian and Levantine usually make it t or s: talata, three, against Fusha thalatha.

And Darija has a sound you'll notice before any of these: it drops short vowels so freely that words turn into clusters of consonants. Mzyan, good, is two syllables at most. That alone tells you you're hearing Moroccan.

Now with the whole set

The second round draws from everything Dialect Match knows: about thirty everyday words, forty things you'd find in a kitchen or a restaurant, and the phrasebook. Some questions are recordings, so this is where the sounds above come in.

So which one should you learn?

It depends almost entirely on who you want to talk to.

• Family, a partner, friends: learn their dialect, full stop. Nobody wants to be spoken to in news Arabic over dinner.
• No particular place in mind: Egyptian. It has the most speakers and the most films and series to learn from, and almost every Arab has heard enough of it to follow you.
• Living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Palestine: Levantine.
• Living in Morocco: Darija. Fusha will help you read the signs and not much else.
• Reading, religion, or Arabic literature: Fusha. Add a dialect later if you want to talk to people too.

Whichever you choose, you'll pick up some Fusha along the way, because it's what's written down. The reverse isn't true: years of Fusha won't teach you to say shu baddak.

Pick one and every game will start in it: