Standard Arabic or Local Dialect - Which Should You Learn First?

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Standard Arabic or Local Dialect – Which Should You Learn First?

Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. ?

Here you go – my first video update from when I was in Egypt!

As always, activate Youtube's captions option to view subtitles as this is in Arabic, and I hope you like the intro!


Since I was only asking questions (and I probably should have prepared them better, since I was trying to think of good ones on the spot), this video isn't the best one to showcase my normal spontaneous casual spoken level in the language, so I'll make sure to have someone interview me before my time in Egypt is up, so you can hear me do more talking and hesitate much less (having to lead an interview is an extra distraction).

But for now, I'd rather let other people do most of the talking, especially in the cultural video updates! I prefer to share their stories while I'm here, rather than mine!

Modern Standard Arabic? I think not

Probably one of the most frequent comments I've received about learning Arabic, usually from people in Arabic speaking countries that are not Egypt, or from elitist academics, all of whom ignored my travel-in-Egypt focus, has been “You should be learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)! It's much better than a dialect!”

Now that I'm actually using what I spent months preparing for, in the country itself, I can confirm that learning a dialect is far superior to learning MSA if you plan to speak the language. (Note that I'm not suggesting Egyptian dialect as superior; if I was going to any other country then that dialect would have been my focus)

If your goal is to use Arabic academically (or religiously) then by all means stick with MSA, as it would likely be the better choice for you.

But if you plan to make friends, buy things and haggle, travel, attempt to blend in and not get ripped off, watch a lot of TV such as comedy or soap operas, and even work in most jobs, then you'd be crazy to learn MSA first. Even the locals (a vast majority of them) do not speak it. They do indeed understand it, but you'd have to seriously and unrealistically restrict your interactions if you wanted a reply in MSA.


MSA's use is for reading, for understanding religious texts, and for following very formal procedures or watching the news. (Although I've listened to some radio news in dialect).


It is not a “lingua franca” in practical use outside of formal settings, as you may think it could be. Nearly all Egyptians I've talked with have told me that they simply speak in their dialect, and muddle through (such as a Spanish speaker in Italy or Brazil would) or try to learn the local dialect, when travelling in other Arabic countries.

A world apart; shouldn't even be called a dialect IMO

I use the word “dialect” because that's what is commonly accepted, but I don't like this word in this context. It's a far cry from dialects as we know them in Europe, such as between my Irish dialect and other ones in English, or Rio Portuguese, or Colombian Spanish compared to other ones.



The only major difference is vocabulary, since MSA incorporates new words to fit into the modern world. Grammatically and for most common words though, it's essentially Arabic that existed over 1,300 years ago, preserved to this day because of the importance of understanding the Koran in its original form.

Despite no formal recognition of “dialects”, and despite teaching of Classical Arabic throughout the ages, the way people speak has indeed naturally evolved. It's the same way that Latin, which would have been in use formally 2,000 years ago as we see it written even to this day, actually gave rise to vulgar Latin, which itself evolved into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc.


Cases and completely different words


In MSA you add an -u to subjects of sentences, an -i if it's affected by some prepositions and so on. (Latin also has such grammatical cases, whereas modern Romance languages pretty much never do.) So in MSA you have to constantly think whether a word is the subject, the object, or acted on by a preposition, or you will say it wrong.

This simply doesn't apply in the Egyptian dialect (and other dialects from what I'm told). In the sentences, “The house is there”, “I put it in the house” or “I like this house”, house is always “bayt”, but would be “baytu“, “bayta” and “bayti” respectively in MSA.

Then there is a host of completely different vocabulary. “How” is “Izzay” in Egyptian Arabic, but “Kayf” in MSA. “Where” is “Fayn” in Egyptian Arabic, but “eyen” in MSA. Tomorrow is “bokra” in Egyptian Arabic, but “3'da” (where 3′ is a sound that doesn't exist in European languages, mentioned in the video).



Then like many languages, dialects are way more flexible in accepting loan words. Even though technically they should say Faransaewi and Ingilizy for French and English, I've noticed that young Egyptians (not older ones mind you) simply say European language names in English (“English”, “French”), and sprinkle heaps of English words into their sentences. You'll hear that in the video above; this is not for my benefit, but how I've heard young Egyptians talking amongst one another.

And I'm told that other countries, like Morocco, do the same a lot with French.

At times I've asked them for what the Arabic equivalent is of a very English word they just dropped into an Arabic sentence, and they don't know!

Even a different writing system!


Text messages, emails, and sometimes even informal speeches are written using the same letters we use in European languages. Here's a snippet from my friend's Facebook page, it was a congratulations message for his wedding: “Mbrooooooook ya 2maaaaaar anbs6lk ya 7lwee anshla shofk mbso6a wytmmlkon 3la 5er”. The numbers you see are used to express Arabic letters that don't have a clear English equivalent, but the shape of the number resembles an Arabic letter.

The problem is that Arabic script, while perfect for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic, is seriously lacking to accurately describe Egyptian Arabic and other “dialects”. Vowel sounds change, and sometimes a word may be pronounced the classical way, and sometimes it's pronounced a more Egyptian way. You can show this much more efficiently in Latinized script.

As stated in the video, to replace certain sounds that don't exist in European languages, you see numbers used a lot. Unfortunately, there is no standardization to this, so you will see it vary a lot depending on who is writing.  But a good overall view of how most people use it is described in this Wikipedia article.

“Languages” or “dialects”?


Anything else is “just a colloquial version, spoken in the street”, which is quite a huge dismissal when you consider Egypt's population of 80 million, the vast majority of whom may never speak Modern Standard Arabic (even though they will indeed hear it regularly).




If you wanted to sell a language learning course, it's easier to make just one to cater to everyone and go with the flow that you'll be fine using this one no matter where you go. Business-wise, it makes more sense because you'll sell more copies and production costs will be much lower. But I still think it's misleading to present MSA as a useful language to learn for travellers.

Then again, if you ask many natives what they think which is more useful between MSA and dialect, I know MSA would get nearly all the votes, because the sentiment of native speakers is that you should learn “proper” Arabic. It's a sense of academic and religious devotion, rather than practical advice for communicating with people in the country.

It's an academic language. Let's just agree to call a spade a spade! If you are learning it for academic purposes, then of course most of what I say in this post is irrelevant to you (I'm a traveller, and learning something to speak with locals in the country will always be my bias when deciding how useful something is).

What to do?

OK, so after all that, what is a language learner to do? The point of this post isn't to tell the world to abandon MSA. It is essential if you want to read anything (apart from emails and text messages, which will be in something like Franco-Arabic between many young people), and formal proceedings will take place in it.

Going back to the title of this post, my suggestion is simple: If you have a spoken priority (and let's be honest, a lot of us simply don't), learn a dialect FIRST. Then go on to MSA. Choose that dialect based on where you want to visit.

The grammar of dialects is much less complex in comparison to MSA, so you'll be able to get into communication faster, and you'll be able to have chats with anyone you may come across from that country (that includes online), rather than just with teachers who are experienced in speaking MSA. You'll simply get into the language quicker.




I haven't ironed out those mistakes because I had no good material to help me do it, as I've had in countless other languages.

Hell, even Esperanto and Irish (Geailge) have more material to work with compared to Arabic dialects, and I went for the biggest dialect! It's incredible when you consider the number of speakers involved.

My suggestions

If you have similar spoken priorities to me then…

  1. What I did in my first two months was precisely what I'd suggest you try out yourselves too. This will get you to the stage of being able to converse with someone, but doing so with poor sentence structure and a bunch of grammar mistakes (that don't hinder communication too much), like I was doing at my two month point.

Start by getting a phrase book, because these do indeed focus on dialect (the great thing is that they cover several dialects, not just Egyptian, so this will work if you are going elsewhere in the Arabic world), they don't distract you with Arabic script and are small enough to consume quickly. Lonely Planet does one for several dialects for instance. (If you speak French, I found Assimil's de Poche to be very helpful).


  1. Use Romanized Arabic much more than Arabic script.

This is probably the most controversial piece of advice I'll give that I know many will disagree on, but if you have a spoken focus, Arabic script is inefficient to represent the words of dialect, especially because of lack of most vowels shown.



Do indeed learn Arabic script though! It's just a few hours work, and you are done. But initially, as a traveller you only need this for recognition, such as in signs and menus. Reading novels and newspapers can come later.


Luckily I've finally come across a decent book that I'd recommend for people to try out after lots of spoken practice, and thanks to this I am finally tying up loose ends. It's kind of technical, but is a huge help for me to speak correctly, so with a bit of practice I can get that final flow I need:

Kullu Tamam

(Literally means “Everything is OK”). It has some problems like an occasional typo, and it's incredibly dry (no pictures, and the dialogues aren't interesting) so I definitely can't recommend it to absolute beginners. But it only discusses dialect, and does so using Romanized script. It gets into technical explanations of why certain things are said in certain ways.



I came across some other highly recommended books for beginner learners, that were indeed about Egyptian dialect, but they were almost always written in Arabic script and this will slow you down too much (both because of lack of familiarity with script to read through it efficiently, and because they don't represent a lot of the sounds well enough). If you are a beginner don't learn through a book written just in Arabic script.

With a spoken focus, you can get into reading later, and that's more suited to an MSA focused approach anyway, because dialect is pretty much never written in script (I'm told that subtitles for children's TV shows use it for instance).



I've started reading online newspapers since I got to Egypt, and am glad I didn't focus much on reading text in my initial months. I can already order food off menus and follow directions on signs, because I practised individual word reading of Arabic script throughout my learning period, but reading full texts that are effectively in the wrong language is best left until when you already know one of those languages well enough.


What a mess!


There is never one right way to learn a language, but the advice in this post is what I'd suggest if you have similar goes and uses for your languages as I do.

If anything I've written (about MSA etc.) here needs correction, let me know and I'll apply it.

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Benny Lewis

Founder, Fluent in 3 Months



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