Egyptian Arabic, locally known as Colloquial Egyptian, or simply as Masri, is the most widely spoken vernacular Arabic variety in Egypt. It is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and originated in the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt. The estimated 111 million Egyptians speak a continuum of dialects. Egyptian Arabic is also known as Cairene Arabic. It is also understood across most of the Arabic-speaking countries due to broad Egyptian influence in the region, including through Egyptian cinema and Egyptian music. These factors help make it the most widely spoken and by far the most widely studied variety of Arabic.Mahmoud Gaafar, Jane Wightwick (2014).Colloquial Arabic of Egypt: The Complete Course for Beginners.
While it is primarily a spoken language, the written form is used in novels, plays and poems (vernacular literature), as well as in comics, advertising, some newspapers and transcriptions of popular songs. In most other written media and in radio and television news reporting, literary Arabic is used. Literary Arabic is a standardized language based on the language of the Qur'an, i.e. Classical Arabic. The Egyptian vernacular is almost universally written in the Arabic alphabet for local consumption, although it is commonly transcribed into Latin letters or in the International Phonetic Alphabet in linguistics text and textbooks aimed at teaching non-native learners. Egyptian Arabic's phonetics, grammatical structure, and vocabulary are influenced by the Coptic language; its rich vocabulary is also influenced by Turkish and by European languages such as French, Italian, Greek, and English.
Naming Speakers of Egyptian Arabic generally call their vernacular Arabic (, ) when juxtaposed with non-Arabic languages; Colloquial Egyptian (, ) or simply Aamiyya (, colloquial) when juxtaposed with Modern Standard Arabic and the Egyptian dialect (, ) or simply Masri (, , Egyptian) when juxtaposed with other vernacular Arabic dialects.Islam online on Mahmoud Timor
The term Egyptian Arabic is usually used synonymously with Cairene Arabic, which is technically a dialect of Egyptian Arabic. The country's native name, , is often used locally to refer to Cairo itself. As is the case with Parisian French, Cairene Arabic is by far the most prevalent dialect in the country.
Geographic distribution Egyptian Arabic is used primarily in Egypt and is spoken predominantly in Cairo and Alexandria and in the capitals of all Egyptian governorates and in other major cities across Northern and Southern Egypt.
Egyptian Arabic has become widely understood in the Arabic-speaking world primarily for two reasons:Jenkins, Siona. Egyptian Arabic Phrasebook. Lonely Planet Publications, 2001. p. 205 The proliferation and popularity of Egyptian films and other media in the region since the early 20th century as well as the great number of Egyptian teachers and professors who were instrumental in setting up the education systems of various countries in the Arabian Peninsula and also taught there and in other countries such as Algeria and Libya. Also, many Lebanese artists choose to sing in Egyptian, prominent examples like Nancy Ajram and Sabah.
History
Arabic was spoken in parts of Egypt such as the Eastern Desert and Sinai before Islam.The History of Herodotus by George Rawlinson, p.e 9 It also seems as though some Egypto-Arabic words derive from old Ancient Egyptian words. However, Nile Valley Egyptians slowly adopted Arabic as a written language following the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the seventh century. Until then, they had spoken either Koine Greek or Egyptian in its Coptic form. A period of Coptic-Arabic bilingualism in Lower Egypt lasted for more than three centuries. The period would last much longer in the south. Arabic had been already familiar to Valley Egyptians since Arabic had been spoken throughout the Eastern Desert and Sinai. Arabic was also a minority language of some residents of the Nile Valley such as Qift in Upper Egypt through pre-Islamic trade with Nabateans in the Sinai Peninsula and the easternmost part of the Nile Delta. Egyptian Arabic seems to have begun taking shape in Fustat, the first Islamic capital of Egypt, now part of Cairo.
One of the earliest linguistic sketches of Cairene Arabic is a 16th-century document entitled (, "The Removal of the Burden from the Language of the People of Cairo") by the traveler and lexicographer Yusuf al-Maghribi (), with Misr here meaning "Cairo". It contains key information on early Cairene Arabic and the language situation in Egypt in the Middle Ages. The main purpose of the document was to show that while the Cairenes' vernacular contained many critical "errors" vis-à-vis Classical Arabic, according to al-Maghribi, it was also related to Arabic in other respects. With few waves of immigration from the Arabian peninsula such as the Banu Hilal exodus, who later left Egypt and were settled in Morocco and Tunisia, together with the ongoing Islamization and Arabization of the country, multiple Arabic varieties, one of which is Egyptian Arabic, slowly supplanted spoken Coptic. Local chroniclers mention the continued use of Coptic as a spoken language until the 17th century by peasant women in Upper Egypt. Coptic is still the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church.
Ahmed Kamal Pasha (1851–1923), the author of Egypt's first Ancient Egyptian dictionary, referred to the fact that more than 12,000 words from the Modern Egyptian Arabic dialect are rooted in the Ancient Egyptian language. Kamal's efforts were groundbreaking, especially his assertion of linguistic connections between ancient Egyptian and Semitic languages, as both belong to the same Afro-Asiatic language tree. His methodology involved transliterating hieroglyphs into Arabic letters, making the study of ancient texts accessible to Egyptians, who still carried the roots of their ancient language into the modern dialect.
Status Egyptian Arabic has no official status and is not officially recognized as a language in Egypt. Standard Arabic is the official language of the state as per constitutional law with the name , , . Interest in the local vernacular began in the 1800s (in opposition to the language of the ruling class, Turkish), as the Egyptian national movement for self-determination was taking shape. For many decades to follow, questions about the reform and the modernization of Arabic were hotly debated in Egyptian intellectual circles. Proposals ranged from developing neologisms to replace archaic terminology in Modern Standard Arabic to the simplification of syntactical and morphological rules and the introduction of colloquialisms to even complete "Egyptianization" (, ) by abandoning the so-called Modern Standard Arabic in favor of Masri or Egyptian Arabic.
Proponents of language reform in Egypt included Qasim Amin, who also wrote the first Egyptian feminist treatise; former President of the Egyptian University, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed; and noted intellectual Salama Moussa. They adopted a modernist, secular approach and disagreed with the assumption that Arabic was an immutable language because of its association with the Quran. The first modern Egyptian novel in which the dialogue was written in the vernacular was Muhammad Husayn Haykal's Zaynab in 1913. It was only in 1966 that Mustafa Musharafa's Kantara Who Disbelieved was released, the first novel to be written entirely in Egyptian Arabic. Other notable novelists, such as Ihsan Abdel Quddous and Yusuf Idris, and poets, such as Salah Jahin, Abdel Rahman el-Abnudi and Ahmed Fouad Negm, helped solidify vernacular literature as a distinct literary genre.
Amongst certain groups within Egypt's elite, Egyptian Arabic enjoyed a brief period of rich literary output. That dwindled with the rise of Pan-Arabism, which had gained popularity in Egypt by the second half of the twentieth century, as demonstrated by Egypt's involvement in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War under King Farouk of Egypt. The Egyptian revolution of 1952, led by Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, further enhanced the significance of Pan-Arabism, making it a central element of Egyptian state policy. The importance of Modern Standard Arabic was reemphasised in the public sphere by the revolutionary government, and efforts to accord any formal language status to the Egyptian vernacular were ignored. Egyptian Arabic was identified as a mere dialect, one that was not spoken even in all of Egypt, as almost all of Upper Egypt speaks Sa'idi Arabic. Though the revolutionary government heavily sponsored the use of the Egyptian vernacular in films, plays, television programmes, and music, the prerevolutionary use of Modern Standard Arabic in official publications was retained.
Linguistic commentators have noted the multi-faceted approach of the Egyptian revolutionaries towards the Arabic language. Whereas Naguib, Egypt's first president, exhibited a preference for using Modern Standard Arabic in his public speeches, his successor Gamal Abdel Nasser was renowned for using the vernacular and for punctuating his speeches with traditional Egyptian words and expressions. Conversely, Modern Standard Arabic was the norm for state news outlets, including newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. That was especially true of Egypt's national broadcasting company, the Arab Radio and Television Union, which was established with the intent of providing content for the entire Arab world, not merely Egypt, hence the need to broadcast in the standard, rather than the vernacular, language. The Voice of the Arabs radio station, in particular, had an audience from across the region, and the use of anything other than Modern Standard Arabic was viewed as eminently incongruous.
In a study of three Egyptian newspapers (Al-Ahram, Al-Masry Al-Youm, and Al-Dustour) Zeinab Ibrahim concluded that the total number of headlines in Egyptian Arabic in each newspaper varied. Al-Ahram did not include any. Al-Masry Al-Youm had an average of 5% of headlines in Egyptian, while Al-Dustour averaged 11%.
As the status of Egyptian Arabic as opposed to Classical Arabic can have such political and religious implications in Egypt, the question of whether Egyptian Arabic should be considered a "dialect" or "language" can be a source of debate. In sociolinguistics, Egyptian Arabic can be seen as one of many distinct varieties that, despite arguably being languages on grounds, are united by a common in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).
Publications During the early 1900s many portions of the Bible were published in Egyptian Arabic. These were published by the Nile Mission Press. By 1932 the whole New Testament and some books of the Old Testament had been published in Egyptian Arabic in Arabic script.
The dialogs in the following novels are partly in Egyptian Arabic, partly in Standard Arabic: Mahmud Tahir Haqqi's Adhra' Dinshuway (; 1906), Yaqub Sarruf's Fatat Misr (; first published in Al-Muqtataf 1905–1906), and Mohammed Hussein Heikal's Zaynab (1914).
Early stage plays written in Egyptian Arabic were translated from or influenced by European playwrights. Muhammad 'Uthman Jalal translated plays by Molière, Jean Racine and Carlo Goldoni to Egyptian Arabic and adapted them as well as ten fables by Jean de La Fontaine. Yaqub Sanu translated to and wrote plays on himself in Egyptian Arabic. Many plays were written in Standard Arabic, but performed in colloquial Arabic. Tawfiq al-Hakim took this a step further and provided for his Standard Arabic plays versions in colloquial Arabic for the performances. Mahmud Taymur has published some of his plays in two versions, one in Standard, one in colloquial Arabic, among them: Kidb fi Kidb (, 1951 or ca. 1952) and Al-Muzayyifun (, ca. 1953).