Talk:Varieties of Arabic

Middle Arabic

Why is there no discussion of Middle Arabic? Andre🚐 19:51, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

I believe this article is about extant varieties, not the development of Arabic or extinct varieties. Eel of Oppo (talk) 03:47, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

"Classification" contradicts itself and other articles

The classification section of the article (which is the most important part as it goes over the varieties and how they are related to each other) is very contradictory.

The article first claims that "The greatest variations between kinds of Arabic are those between regional language groups..." This sets up a number of problematic statements.

"...Arabic dialectologists formerly distinguished between just two groups: the Mashriqi (eastern) dialects...and the Maghrebi (western) dialects...Arab dialectologists have now adopted a more detailed classification...divided into five major groups: Peninsular, Mesopotamian, Levantine, Egypto-Sudanic or Nile Valley (including Egyptian and Sudanese), and Maghrebi." The first claim here is supported by no source and the second by The Economist and an Encyclopedia (this article also has a general lack of sources). While the article does next mention, correctly, that "These large regional groups do not correspond to borders of modern states" it refuses to apply that or even elaborate at all. Yet, this classification is the one followed by all classification breakdowns in the infoboxes on the individual pages of these dialects.

That is all to preface that this article's classification is devoted to a geographic or even border-based classification that has no ground in reality and is contradicted by articles on this very site.

Connected to this is the issue that the Bedouin-sedentary divide is mentioned in a completely separate section as if this distinction that is made by the article somehow has no bearing on classification, and there is no attempt to explain how regional and Bedouin-sedentary divides interact or what their relationship is. This is hurt further as the classification section treats the Bedouin-sedentary distinction as a reoccurring phenomenon of individual distinctions within each regional group, which is blatantly false (ex. Hassaniyah is the most conservative dialect, similar to other Bedouin and Bedouin-derived dialects, while nearby Maghrebi sedentary pre-Hilalian dialects are some of the most innovative in the Arab world). This is further evident when one looks closely at the Variation § Morphology and Syntax and Variation § Phonetics sections of this very article!

That aside, to expand on the previous point about geography-based classification:

• Pre-Hilalian is mentioned but Hilalian is not even listed by name. Hilalian and Pre-Hilalian dialects are presented within the Maghrebi Arabic article as sub-groups of Maghrebi when the individual articles of Hilalian and Pre-Hilalian mention that they came in different waves and that Hilalian dialects "hold a close resemblance to the Gulf Arabic dialect, since they both developed from tribal Arabian dialects" almost as if they were in the same Bedouin-and-Bedouin-derived subfamily as Gulf Arabic. The "Bedouin" subsection of Maghrebi lists two of the many Hilalian dialects and, again, treats them as a subfamily of "Maghrebi"
• Gilit (spoken by South Mesopotamian Muslims) and Qeltu (Spoken by North Mesopotamians as well as Christian, Yazidi and Jewish South Mesopotamians) are treated as two branches of the same "Mesopotamian" branch when the Qeltu article, the Gilit article and even the "Mesopotamian Arabic" article make it clear that Qeltu is a sedentary dialect that was formerly spoken in all of Mesopotamia while Gilit is derived from the Bedouin dialects of the Najd and emerged from migrations in the 13th and 14th centuries. No wonder, then, that despite relatively high mutual intelligibility within the Bedouin and Bedouin derived dialect group and within the sedentary Mashriqi group, Gelet and Qeltu speakers have difficulty understanding each other
• Possibly the most obvious issue here is that San'ani, Ta'izzi-Adeni and, worst of all, Hadhrami (a Bedouin-derived dialect as opposed to the sedentary Mashriqi San'ani and Adeni, the affinities of which are discussed in their respective articles), Tihammiyah (which is its own highly innovative dialect) and Yafi'i (among the most innovative, arguably almost a creole) are all grouped together under the "Yemeni" group

This is a serious problem that threatens the very viability of this article and whether it can be said to be overall truthfull as a whole. Eel of Oppo (talk) 03:45, 18 March 2026 (UTC)