# Is Lebanese an Arabic dialect?



## Dymn

First off, I admit my total ignorance when it comes to Arabic and Semitic philology, so I'm at a loss here and I'm trying not to say something unsound.

However, on Twitter I've come across the Christian Lebanese statistician Nassim Taleb which apparently is very critical and bashing of what he deems are "unscientific" metodologies in various branches. At first, he seemed to criticize psychology, now it seems he also ventures into linguistics. Apparently, one of his most strongly held opinions is that Lebanese (or North-Western Levantine generally?) is not an "Arabic dialect", but rather a standalone Semitic variety (influenced or derived?) by various languages such as Arabic, Aramaic, and Phoenician. This is the article that talks about it. He seems to be very bitter of what he calls "low-IQ Western Arabists".

I must admit I haven't completely understood the article, in part because of my null background in Semitic languages. But his bitter rhetoric, his ethnic background, and his lack of training in linguistics make me think it's just another unscientific twaddle of the one's he's so critical about. In fact in one of the replies to the tweet a follower suggests the Tunisian variety is like a hodge-podge of Berber, Punic and Arabic (rather than an Arabic-derived dialect with influences from both), and Taleb agrees. I feel this really discredits him. I wonder if someone in this forum can confirm my intuition, or if he does really have a point at all?


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## merquiades

I know less than you about Arabic, but with a cursory look at the comparisons of Levantine Arabic and Standard Arabic on Wikipedia, it looks like they are related but the differences are rather on the same level as those between some Romance languages, (beure vs/ bere,  taula vs/ tavola...)  Without studying a "standard" communication might not always be easy between Arabic dialects.
There is another problem I picked up by reading about use of language in Lebanon.  Whereas Classical Arabic is the official language, there seems to be a popular rejection of it, to the point some people would rather just use English or French.  Plus they're not shy about mixing languages either.  That might be a revelation of a general attitude towards Arabic as something which is foreign to (or undesirable in) Lebanon, and could even affect or skew the work of scholars or linguists...  This article is an interesting read.


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## jimquk

As far as I'm aware, Levantine Arabic, (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian) is considered as one of the main dialects of Modern Arabic. No doubt it is influenced by Aramaic, but it is not less Arabic for that. I doubt if there's much evidence of a distinctive Phonecian element, that would distinguish Lebanese Arabic ftom that spoken in Syria, although there are I believe slight differences across the Levantine area which would be more akin to regional accents than dialect differences. But of course, this is largely a subjective matter.

I have no doubt that you are correct in ascribing a socio-political motive behind claims that Lebanese don't really speak Arabic, and are really Phonecians. It reflects a deep division among some Lebanese, and a reaction to a bitter history.

Genetic studies suggest that Lebanese both Christian and Muslim, are largely derived from a local, non-Arabian, population, but the same applies in many other "Arab" countries. Whether that makes them Arab or not is a matter of perspective.


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## Derakhshan

It is Arabic, of course. Disregard such ideologically motivated figures.

Jabal al-Lughat: Why "Levantine" is Arabic, not Aramaic: Part 1

Jabal al-Lughat: Why "Levantine" is Arabic, not Aramaic: Part 2

Jabal al-Lughat: Why "Levantine" is Arabic, not Aramaic: Part 3

Jabal al-Lughat: Taleb unintentionally proves Lebanese comes from Arabic


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## Pedro y La Torre

Sounds like politically motivated nonsense. That particular individual seems to relish fighting with everyone about everything.


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## berndf

Pedro y La Torre said:


> Sounds like politically motivated nonsense.


Absolutely. A few more Aramaic and Canaanite borrowing than already exist in standard Arabic don't change the basic nature of the language.


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## berndf

jimquk said:


> Genetic studies suggest that Lebanese both Christian and Muslim, are largely derived from a local, non-Arabian, population, but the same applies in many other "Arab" countries. Whether that makes them Arab or not is a matter of perspective.


Genetics of a language and the genetics of their speakers are different things. Otherwise you had to deny that American English was a variety of English because only a minority of speakers are decendant of people from England.


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## Kevin Beach

As soon as anybody introduces personal insults into their argument, I assume it's because they haven't got enough objectively observable fact or rational judgement to support their case. As they say in football: Play the ball, not the man, or you'll get a red card.


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## jimquk

berndf said:


> Genetics of a language and the genetics of their speakers are different things. Otherwise you had to deny that American English was a variety of English because only a minority of speakers are decendant of people from England.



Of course. I mentioned it because the underlying point about Lebanese language not being Arabic is the political assertion that Lebanese people are not Arabs. It is slightly off-topic, but relevant context, I think.


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## berndf

jimquk said:


> It is slightly off-topic, but relevant context, I think.


Sure. It is relevant because it is a regularly made mistake and it was good that you mentioned it.


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## merquiades

You can speak Arabic and not be an Arab. There are so many people nowadays that speak a language that was born or is linked to a place far away. The example of Americans speaking English but otherwise having no link to England is relevant. Same could be said for Arabic too. You don't even have to be Muslim. Why reject it? 
Or they COULD standardize their spoken dialect and then use it (a bit like Luxembourg). It might actually be better for them than using a difficult classical language few people seem to master.


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## Treaty

A point of knowing standard/classical Arabic (apart from the obvious Islamic reason) is that different Arabs can relate to each other a one umbrella ethnicity. Standardizing dialectal variants will compartmentalize Arabs. I'm not sure that's what many of them would like. Anyway, I always thought classical Arabic as one of the most patterned and rule-based languages. For me personally, this would be a positive point for the ease of learning a language.


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## Dymn

Thanks everybody, especially @Derakshan for the articles. It's crystal-clear now.



merquiades said:


> Or they COULD standardize their spoken dialect and then use it (a bit like Luxembourg). It might actually be better for them than using a difficult classical language few people seem to master.


Yes, and these are separate issues. One thing is what linguistic policy you take, which each society should decide it by itself, another thing is denying the truth through pseudoscience. For example Maltese can obviously have their own standard, write it in Latin script and whatever, but you can't deny it's phylogenetically just another Arabic variety.

I gather Lebanon is a beast of its own kind, with almost a half of its population being Christians, and French and English still play a role even bigger than that of other Arab countries, which leads to many Lebanese seeing themselves as something separate from the Arab world. I've always assumed Arabs are simply those having Arabic as their mother tongue, regardless of religion, but it seems it's not so clear-cut. Copts at least seem to reject being labelled Arab. I guess it's a politically charged issue, especially with Arabic being the sacred language of Islam.

Going back to topic, Nassim insists linguistic borders are not as clear in the Middle East as they are in Europe. Is this true? Would it be reasonable to compare Arabic's linguistic borders with, say, the "clear-cutness" of Romance or Sinitic languages? To the point that his assertion is just as ridiculous as saying "Romanian is not a Romance language but its own Indo-European branch with Latin and Slavic influences"? I think he doesn't understand, correct me if I'm wrong, that very few languages are actual mishmashes from various sources, and that the core of a language always reflects its true origin.


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## L'irlandais

Are the linguistic borders in Europe clear cut?
Or do they they just appear to be clearer cut from a distance?  As those of the middle East might appear to someone, like myself, with little local experience of Middle Eastern linguistic borders. As Pedro hinted at earlier, simplistic political motivated notions add little to any meaningful discussion.

I have added a detailed map of languages and dialects spoken in Europe.  It is a pretty colorful affair.  Bear in mind one colour represents a dialect.  For example, the local dialect spoke in the town where I currently live, is spoke across 4 countries, France (Alsace), Germany, Switzerland and Austria.  Yet despite this mutual intelligibility the variation for town to town even within Alsace is fairly wide.  Linguistics claims as many as 250 different dialects (if only 7 or 8 « families ») in Germany. The situation in Ireland and England is similar, despite them being represented with a single colour on this map, regional dialects are the norm in Europe.

I think your question is interesting, since as this BBC article shows, it may be entirely possible to loose one’s mother tongue.
Campaign to save the Arabic language in Lebanon


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## Dymn

L'irlandais said:


> Are the linguistic borders in Europe clear cut?


This is his assertion, not mine. He probably refers to European nation states having pushed their national language throughout their territory, whereas in the Arab world local vernaculars are not only alive and kicking but actually the only means of communication in daily life.

But even if we're talking about traditional vernaculars in Europe, there are indeed some clear-cut borders. There isn't any transitional variety between any of the various Indo-European branches even if they border each other, even within some of the branches there are clear-cut borders if I'm not wrong, like German-Danish. By fuzzy borders I mean the existence of transitional dialects which are hard to classify, not the fact that some towns might have spoken different languages at different times in history.


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## merquiades

@Treate  Adopting a national standard doesn't preclude learning standard Arabic for communication throughout the region.  Unfortunately I can't say if classical Arabic is easy for the Lebanese, but something surely is keeping them from learning it.  If it's not difficulty, it must be an attitude towards it.
I don't think developing a national standard would be necessarily bad for Lebanon.  It could end the anomaly of foreign languages being more important than the langauge of the people. What good can come from such desdain for one's own language?

There is certainly some malaise in Lebanon regarding Arabic but I cannot put my finger on it.  I once interviewed a Lebanese student who had a strong Arabic accent, and in the course of the interview I said English must be hard for Arabic speakers.  He quickly told me he didn't know because he didn't speak Arabic and it was much harder for him to learn it.  As it wasn't the subject of the meeting, I didn't press but was taken aback. I have also heard groups of Lebanese people speaking to each other in French when it was clear it wasn't the native language of anyone, and wondered what these odd situations mean. I have picked up this nonchalant attitude towards the language from many sources, written articles and oral encounters.  I suppose it is, as @Dymn imagines, due to the status symbol of French and English from colonization. A post-colonial identity seems particularly daunting for Lebanon
Back to the subject, I cannot help but think that this malaise has somehow contributed to linguists looking to deny that Lebanese Arabic is actually Arabic. They seemingly may have a public readily prepared to support these theories however preposterous they be.

Neither Middle Eastern nor European borders are natural and reflect clear, precise linguistic borders.  What is Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel was carved out of centuries of colonialism from the Ottomans, to the French and British, and Israeli expansion etc. The Wikipedia map shows North Levantine Arabic dialect to be spoken not just in Lebanon but in all neighboring regions of Syria and even a part of southern Turkey.  Looks like there might even be more speakers outside Lebanon.  It may have been more natural to have a Levantine nation formed up of Lebanon and a large part of Syria as they share a similar culture, but history divided them.

Yes,of course, in the end, the Lebanese will do what they want... reject (classical) Arabic completely, embrace it, create a new language with its own set of rules and deny it's Arabic, or maybe just keep the status quo.  It doesn't bother many to speak a dialect of a language, deny it is such, learn a bit of standard Arabic, and then adopt French and/or English and/or a mix of them all.

It would be nice if some Lebanese could chime in but I have never seen any on these fora.


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## elroy

A few thoughts:

+ Linguistically, Lebanese Arabic is no more or less Arabic than any other variety/dialect of Arabic.
+ Lebanese people are no more or less Arab than any other people who identify as Arab today even though they are not originally/ethnically Arab (i.e. not originally from the Arabian Peninsula).
+ These days, the Arabic language is by and far what determines who identifies as Arab.  Roughly speaking, we can divide the Middle East into three demographic categories: 

People who speak Arabic as a native/primary language and do not identify with a non-Arab ethnic group with a language still spoken today
People who speak Arabic as a native/primary language and do identify with a non-Arab ethnic group with a language still spoken today
People who do not speak Arabic as a native/primary language
Category 3 includes most people from Cyprus, Iran, and Turkey.  Category 1 includes the majority of people from the countries that are considered to be part of the "Arab world."  Category 2 includes many minority groups in those countries (Armenians, Assyrians, Copts, and Kurds, among others).

People in Category 3 do not identify as Arab.  Some people in Category 2 do not identify as Arab even though they speak Arabic as a native/primary language.  By and large, people in Category 1 identify as Arab.

Lebanon, like most other countries in the Arab world, has people from both Categories 1 and 2.  In this sense, Lebanon is no different from the nearby countries of Palestine/Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, or Iraq.

+ I do not get the sense that Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is significantly easier or harder for Lebanese people to master than for other Arabs.  Lebanon, like any other Arab country, has people who are very good at MSA and people who aren't.  Of course, factors like culture and the educational system do play a role, but overall I would not say that there is a noteworthy difference between Lebanese people and other Arabs when it comes to MSA mastery. 


merquiades said:


> It would be nice if some Lebanese could chime in but I have never seen any on these fora.


 We do have a wonderful one, @barkoosh, who is a regular and distinguished contributor to the Arabic forum.  Maybe he'll want to share his thoughts.


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## Delvo

Dymn said:


> I gather Lebanon is a beast of its own kind, with almost a half of its population being Christians, and French and English still play a role even bigger than that of other Arab countries, which leads to many Lebanese seeing themselves as something separate from the Arab world. I've always assumed Arabs are simply those having Arabic as their mother tongue, regardless of religion, but it seems it's not so clear-cut. Copts at least seem to reject being labelled Arab.


Arabs are descendants of a particular tribe from the Arabian Peninsula (most of Saudi Arabia and other countries to the south and east of it, but not to the north or west). Outside that peninsula, there's a mismatch between the ethniticities and the language: the people are non-Arabs who speak Arabic. The Arabs were invaders, so their language was the language of the invaders, which bothers people in some places more than in other places. Similar situations exist wherever else conquerors' languages have been adopted by the conquered. Welsh are non-English people who speak English. About half of Mozambicans are non-Portuguese people who speak Portuguese. The Aka, Gele, Koya, and Bongo are non-Bantu people who speak Bantu languages. Nearly all (all but 100 or less) Manchu are non-Han who now speak a language of the Han. Nearly all (all but 100 or less) Ainu are non-Japanese people who speak Japanese.

The dominance of Islamic culture among both Arabs and those whom they conquered makes it hard to isolate non-Islamic or pre-Islamic elements of any of them that can be identified as Arabic or non-Arabic, but I can name a few.
➤*Arabs before Islam* had a system of countless gods or nature spirits, even divided into more than one "species", for different aspects of nature, such as a moon-god (with a name coincidentally similar to "Allah") and a species of mostly unnamed spirits associated with wind and possibly fire, called "djinn/genies". They also had an elaborate  system of astronomy, with individual names for the stars, based on stories they told about those stars or scenes they envisioned them acting out, a bit like the kinds of names & stories/scenes we might expect for constellations, but ascribed by ancient Arabs to individual stars rather than to groups of them. I don't think we have any information on the early Arabian view of the shape of the world, but this amount of astrological study implies that they probably must have understood at least the sky as spherical. The only distinctly Arabian mythical animal species I can name is rocs, raptors big enough to carry an elephant. No real animal seems to have much symbolic, philosophical, or religious significance; camels were probably the most important, but they don't show up in ritual & narrative & such the way, for example, horses do in early Indo-European cultures.
➤*Canaanites before various conquests*, which would include the people of Lebanon as well as the ancestors of the Hebrews, have/had none of that. There's no indication of a Canaanite astrology (hardly even any hint that they ever noticed stars at all!). They believed the world was flat, the sky was a solid dome with lights attached inside it and moving around on it, and outside the sky was a great abyss full of water. They might have once had over 30 individually named gods, but focused most of their attention on less than 10 and had a tendency to favor one over the rest (but didn't all agree on which one). And those gods were not normally individually associated with specific natural phenomena like a god of the moon or a god of wind or a god of fire, but were typically associated instead with different human tribes, different geographic areas, and possibly types of human behavior & personality. Their mythical beasts were not just real animals with a twist like rocs, but were described in such strange ways that we can't tell whether they were entirely imaginary and unrelated to any real animal in any way, or simply real animals with mythical-sounding poetic descriptions so dense we can't tell what the real original might have been (behemoth, leviathan, re'em). The one real animal they had the most reverence for was the bull, which could even be used to represent certain gods (and might have been what "re'em" referred to).

Of course, that's all just for historical perspective on what differences there originally were between Arabs and non-Arabs regardless of language. To avoid interference from Islam, it was necessary to talk about stuff from a long time ago. Most Lebanese today, probably even all of them, don't retain any identifiable remnants of distinct Canaanite culture; they've been under too many kinds of foreign rule for too long (Arab, Egyptian, Ottoman, Persian, Assyrian, Roman, Greek, British, French). But that doesn't mean they can't still retain an awareness that Arab culture isn't theirs and possibly even a resentment of Arabs for having forced foreign culture on them instead, even if they don't know exactly what they could replace it with that would be truly theirs.

And again, that kind of pattern repeats in other cases where conquerors have severely suppressed or eliminated a culture after defeating them. Irish people today don't believe in Irish mythology, even after recently regaining independence from their English conquerors. Nationalist movements in Germanic-language-speaking countries today, who would surely find the most truly Germanic symbols & imagery to use if they could, must settle for Roman style because the kinds of symbols & imagery the Germanic people would have used before Roman interference is largely lost. In Morocco, use of the Berber alphabet is unnecessary because people are familiar with two others (Roman and Arabic), but it gets used anyway as an act of defiance against Arab suppression and deliberate preservation of their endangered Berberness.



Dymn said:


> Nassim insists linguistic borders are not as clear in the Middle East as they are in Europe. Is this true?


I think so. Arabic dominates more than any single language (or even any single whole branch of the IE family) does in Europe, and the other languages that Arabic overran were also usually related to it, seemingly more closely than is often the case in Europe, so they might be able to blend together better. Canaanite languages were Northwest Semitic, not the same branch of Semitic as Arabic, but Semitic languages overall seem to diverge more slowly than Indo-European ones.

One place I get that impression from is word-lists I've seen for Hebrew and Arabic, which tend to look about as similar to each other overall as two Germanic languages might, or two Indic languages, or two Latin-derived languages... not nearly as different as languages from two different IE branches. That's odd because Hebrew and Arabic would have split from each other roughly 2½-3 times as long ago, which is more like the time of the initial breakup of PIE into its first-order branches. On top of that is this guy's experience, which fascinated & shocked me. (Don't worry, the obnoxious music cuts at about 1:20; the story I'm about to refer to starts at about 8:25.) When he was in Egypt and knew Hebrew better than he knew Arabic but needed to communicate in Arabic, he sometimes tried filling in the gaps in his Arabic with an "Arabized" version of something he knew in Hebrew... and it worked. They thought he sounded odd, but they understood him and responded accordingly, while trying to figure out which dialect of Arabic he was speaking. And the really cool part of it for this thread is what guess they came up with: *they thought he sounded Lebanese.* An attempt at Arabization of a Canaanite language struck other Arabic-speakers as sounding like it came from the place where our original post's article said they still really speak Canaanite!

Of course, if most of the experts agree that the Semitic language being spoken in Lebanon is a form of Arabic, not a Canaanite language surviving from before Arabic arrived, I have no choice but to go with that. But I'd still suspect that it's a _version_ of Arabic that has absorbed enough non-Arabic influence to actually blur the lines to make it look at least a little bit as if it were the other way around. There is precedent for that kind of blurriness when two similar-enough languages interact. This reminds me of something I ran into recently about English and Norse, after the Viking invasion of England but before the French one. A serious, reasonable case by a legitimate linguist was presented that the main language of England by the time the French arrived was really a descendant of Old Norse, and Old English was essentially extinct (other than its influence on the surviving Norse language of England, which would go on to be _called_ "Middle English"). The linguist who was presenting this case didn't believe it himself, and most don't, but he at least relayed it as something worth taking seriously. (I think it was Dr Jackson Crawford, but can't find the video now.) And that situation involved a pair of languages that don't look a lot more similar than Northwest Semitic languages and Arabic.


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## elroy

Delvo said:


> But I'd still suspect that it's a _version_ of Arabic that has absorbed enough non-Arabic influence to actually blur the lines to make it look at least a little bit as if it were the other way around.


 Nope.  Not true.


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## Mahaodeh

I don't want to go into the details of the culture and religion that you went into because I believe that it's irrelevant; but I just wanted to point out a mistake you made and built your argument on it. By the time Islam came, the Levant was almost completely Christian, with some Jews and _maybe_ a few pockets where people still followed older religions but they were already vastly Christian. Hence religious beliefs should be quite irrelevant. Also, the languages spoken, if we excluded the Greek of the Byzantines and _maybe_ Latin, were dialects of Arabic, dialects of Aramaic, and Hebrew. Canaanite, Phoenician, and Ugaritic were already dead languages.


Delvo said:


> But I'd still suspect that it's a _version_ of Arabic that has absorbed enough non-Arabic influence to actually blur the lines to make it look at least a little bit as if it were the other way around.


I agree with elroy, no, this is not true. Consider Maltese that developed into a language in its own right but is still considered a descendant of Arabic. It has much more non-Arabic influence and it can be very difficult for an average Arabic speaker to understand Maltese but the origin is still pretty clear.

Lebanese on the other hand has as much non-Arabic influence as any other dialect of Arabic. It is clearly part of the continuum of dialects, and it's not any further away from Classical Arabic dialects than the dialect of Arabic spoken in Mecca today. It's also mutually comprehensible with other dialects while Hebrew, the descendant of Canaanite, is not; neither are all the dialects of Aramaic still alive today whether they are eastern or western. I don't see any blurry lines here.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Mahaodeh said:


> Lebanese on the other hand has as much non-Arabic influence as any other dialect of Arabic. It is clearly part of the continuum of dialects, and it's not any further away from Classical Arabic dialects than the dialect of Arabic spoken in Mecca today. It's also mutually comprehensible with other dialects while Hebrew, the descendant of Canaanite, is not; neither are all the dialects of Aramaic still alive today whether they are eastern or western. I don't see any blurry lines here.



If Lebanese Arabic were completely divergent from Palestinian Arabic, Syrian Arabic and other dialects in the neighbourhood, perhaps the initial claim would have some relevance. But as you say, it isn't. I don't think any serious linguist will do anything other than ignore such claims.


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## Delvo

Mahaodeh said:


> I don't want to go into the details of the culture and religion that you went into because I believe that it's irrelevant; but I just wanted to point out a mistake you made and built your argument on it.


The ancient history bit was not an argument or support for one. It was just a response to someone who had wondered what "Arab" could mean other than "Arabic speaker", and was forced to refer to the past because the distinction was much clearer in the past and has now become mostly a matter of history.


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