# Flexibility of Syrian Arabic



## Abu Fahm

Is preposition b in verbs like ba3rif, bithub... only serving as a helping sound? Is it optional in these dialects, or not pronouncing it would make you sound like a foreghner?

In Iraqi arabic and Gulf arabic instead of sound b infront of a verb, a helping sound e is attached. For example et-tkallim 3rabi? (do you speak arabic) in khaliji vs bet-tkallim 3rabi? in Levantine. 

Does it feel un-natural for speakers of Egyptian and Levantine not pronouncing this sound? and from the other side, does it feel un-natural for the Khalijis to pronounce it (if they are trying to speak shaami)

I am asking this because I am used to MSA way of pronouncing things, and I dont want to completely change the way I talk. I am trying to learn Syrian Arabic, but I am watering it down and removing things like preposition b. I am also not going to pronouce the ta marbuta as e but will keep pronouncing it as a. I will keep pronouncing q as q or g or k, as it will be easier for me then changing q to hamza. 

If I do what I am intending to do, would my "Syrian" sound really unnatural and wrong?


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## TheArabicStudent

When I first started learning Syrian dialect I planned to just speak in MSA but understand Syrian.  After a while it just became easier to speak Syrian than MSA.  Things like the b before verbs just make the language flow better.  Syrian is a language that was allowed to evolve and become streamlined while MSA is one that is frozen in time and complicated with obsolete grammar and rules.

Depending on how much Syrian you listen to and how many shows you watch you might find yourself saying things the dialect way too.


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## Finland

Hello!



Abu Fahm said:


> Is preposition b in verbs like ba3rif, bithub... only serving as a helping sound? Is it optional in these dialects, or not pronouncing it would make you sound like a foreghner?


 
No, the b in the verbs is not just there to make pronounciation easier, it has grammatical value. Using it or not using it changes what you are saying, so not using it correctly makes you sound like a foreigner if you speak Syrian Arabic otherwise.



Abu Fahm said:


> I am asking this because I am used to MSA way of pronouncing things, and I dont want to completely change the way I talk. I am trying to learn Syrian Arabic, but I am watering it down and removing things like preposition b. I am also not going to pronouce the ta marbuta as e but will keep pronouncing it as a. I will keep pronouncing q as q or g or k, as it will be easier for me then changing q to hamza.
> 
> If I do what I am intending to do, would my "Syrian" sound really unnatural and wrong?


 
If you do what you are intending to do, I think you will just sound like a foreigner who is mixing dialect and fusha. And there is nothing bad in that per se. You'll be understood. Although I don't really see the point why you would make efforts to learn Syrian Arabic if you decide to leave some of its aspects aside.

I myself mix a number of dialects when speaking with people. For my, the purity of my spoken version of Arabic is not important, but when I do try to imitate a local dialect (and Syrian is the one I do the best), I obviously try to go all the way. But the most important thing in communication, I think, is to go ahead and speak; you'll learn the details as you go along. I am sure even if you decide not to learn all aspects of the dialect, if you spend some time in Syria you'll soon adopt them even without noticing!

Have fun 
S


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## TheArabicStudent

Finland, can you give some example of when the b could change the meaning of a sentence?  I've always felt that it's just something that developed in Egyptian and Syrian for speed and flow.  The same way with the إ that is thrown in in certain places.  They will sometimes say الإكويت instead of الكويت or إكتير إكبير or إجديد just because it's easier to say than if you didn't have a vowel sound there.


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## Finland

Hello!



TheArabicStudent said:


> Finland, can you give some example of when the b could change the meaning of a sentence? I've always felt that it's just something that developed in Egyptian and Syrian for speed and flow.


 
Perhaps I didn't express myself very clearly, but in any case I didn't mean that the b changes the _meaning_. It has grammatical value. The present tense without b in Syrian Arabic could be called for example subjunctive. You'll say e.g. "biddak tiijii?", not "biddak bitiijii". It should not be forgotten that although dialects are primarily only spoken versions of a given language, they still have a grammar and rules.

HTH
S


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## clevermizo

Abu Fahm said:


> If I do what I am intending to do, would my "Syrian" sound really unnatural and wrong?



Yes it most certainly would, however only if you were trying to speak Syrian Arabic. Your Arabic would still nevertheless be intelligible I'd think, just obviously foreign. So you have to decide whether or not you want to speak Syrian, in which case you ought to employ the local grammatical rules - or whether you simply want to speak an intelligible Arabic, in which case it may not be necessary to change your standard Arabic too much.



TheArabicStudent said:


> Finland, can you give some example of when the b could change the meaning of a sentence?



I'm not Finland, but sure:

_Btishrab shaay?_ "Do you drink tea?"
_Tishrab shaay?_ "Won't you have some tea?"

The b- is an integral part of the present, habitual indicative tense in the Levant. Without the b-, the verb is more like the subjunctive in many European languages.

The b- is optional in some cases, and this varies a lot from region to region. For example, you can say _3am biktob_ and _3am iktob_ for "I am writing." It is probably optional because the word "3am" already signals that it is indicative. Also, _ra7 t2uul_ and _ra7 bit2uul_ for "You will say". Again, the "ra7" makes the indicative obvious. Again this differs from region to region.

However, when it is the basic, habitual tense "I drink", "I write", "You go" etc., the b- is just part of the conjugation and it would sound weird without it.

Furthermore, although there are some cases when its omission seems optional, there are other cases where it is always omitted, as Finland notes:

btiji (you come)
biddak tiji (you want to come)
*biddak btiji

This is because the form without b- (the so-called "subjunctive") must follow in certain constructions, bidd- being one of them. In this sense it is mildly analogous (though not entirely by any means) to the inflectional difference between تريد أنْ تذهبَ and تذهبُ in standard Arabic, where the presence of the تريد أن verbal construction calls for a different inflection in the verb تذهب.



TheArabicStudent said:


> I've always felt that it's just something that developed in Egyptian and Syrian for speed and flow.



Although I don't know the exact origin of this use of b-, I would strongly argue against its having developed for epenthesis alone. Especially since the grammatical mode of the verb changes. This is quite different from the processes of syncope and epenthesis you cite.


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## outo_otus

Abu Faham, the Gulf dialects also use 'b-' infront of many verbs but with a slightly different nuance than that of the Levant.

It often indicated a near-future action:
Baruu7 il jaam3a ba3ad shway - I will go to the university soon

Basawiiha 3ogub amshi - I will do it before I leave

'b-' is not used to indicate habitual action I believe (in the gulf).

Hope this helped.


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## Muwahid

clevermizo said:


> Yes it most certainly would, however only if you were trying to speak Syrian Arabic. Your Arabic would still nevertheless be intelligible I'd think, just obviously foreign. So you have to decide whether or not you want to speak Syrian, in which case you ought to employ the local grammatical rules - or whether you simply want to speak an intelligible Arabic, in which case it may not be necessary to change your standard Arabic too much [...]



Hello clevermizo, so would it be correct to say a verb with the ب in front is simply the standard indicative verbal form? And where it's used without it, it's because it's in another form, like subjunctive and jussive, or because it's implied like with future indicators?

Thanks


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## clevermizo

That's more or less it, yes. The form without b- and the form with b- are distinct grammatical entities with different usages.


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## WadiH

I think the answers in this thread rest on some faulty assumptions or simply unrealistic expectations.  I note this obsession with not "sounding foreign."  Well, I hate to break it to you, but it's almost impossible not to sound foreign.  I can't even imitate the dialect/accent of members of my own family  without it sounding noticeably affected to the person I'm imitating (and I'm actually quite good at picking up accents and dialects).

So, bottom line is, you'll never sound Syrian.  Besides, what kind of Syrian do you want to sound like?  Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia?  Some village just outside of Homs?  There are almost infinite ways to speak Syrian.  I remember an anecdote on this forum about the professor who tried to affect the most localized Damascene accent he could muster, and people thought he sounded ridiculous.  It's like someone learning American English, but deciding that he was going to learn to speak exclusively in the manner of central Kentucky or northern Wisconsin.

Moreover, people in the Arabic-world don't want you to speak exactly like they do.  I don't go to Syria and start affecting a Syrian accent and use 100% of Syrian grammar: I just water down the local aspects of my speech enough for the other person to understand me.

Just try to speak in a "neutral" Syrian way, making sure you have the right syntax, and the basic rules of grammar, and the right (pan-Syrian) vocabulary.  If you want to supplement that with MSA, that's totally fine, and it's not even necessarily foreign (there's even a name for it: عامية المثقفين).  In the mainstream of society, nobody speaks in "pure" MSA or pure dialect, except perhaps in the most intimate of settings with one's own family.

Like someone else said on this thread, if you already know MSA, and you already understand Syrian, then with enough practice and exposure to Syrian Arabic you'll pick up the "Syrian way" of speaking and you'll speak it in your own personal way, just like natives do.



clevermizo said:


> That's more or less it, yes. The form without b- and the form with b- are distinct grammatical entities with different usages.



But isn't it true (and I remember you saying this in another thread), that most Syrian verbs will start with _b-_ anyway?  My impression is that the b- is only omitted if there is some future aspect to the verb (I don't mean "aspect" in the technical sense of course).

Of course, the b- undoubtedly started out with a grammatical purpose.  In Urban Hejazi and Sudanese Arabic, there are still a lot of cases where the b- is omitted:
محمد يدرس كتير ("Muhammad studies a lot")
محمد بيدرس دحين ("Muhammad is studying right now")
محمد بيدرس في الجامعة ("Muhammad studies at the university")



outo_otus said:


> Abu Faham, the Gulf dialects also use 'b-' infront of many verbs but with a slightly different nuance than that of the Levant.
> 
> It often indicated a near-future action:
> Baruu7 il jaam3a ba3ad shway - I will go to the university soon
> 
> Basawiiha 3ogub amshi - I will do it before I leave
> 
> 'b-' is not used to indicate habitual action I believe (in the gulf).
> 
> Hope this helped.



The Peninsular _b-_ indicates the future, while the Mashriqi _b-_ indicates present.  That is not a slight nuance, that is a big fundamental difference (the difference between "I will go" and "I go" or "I am going").  And indeed, the two _b-_'s have completely independent etymologies and are completely unrelated (if anyone's interested, the Peninsular _b-_ ultimately comes from يبغي > يبي, the verb for "want").


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## clevermizo

Wadi Hanifa said:


> But isn't it true (and I remember you saying this in another thread), that most Syrian verbs will start with _b-_ anyway?  My impression is that the b- is only omitted if there is some future aspect to the verb (I don't mean "aspect" in the technical sense of course).



That it's a future-sort of meaning is an interesting way to look at it that I hadn't thought of. But nevertheless, you're still saying that the two forms have distinct grammatical properties. And this is isn't just true of Syria. *Biddi baakol sounds "strange" or "wrong" all over the Levant, or so I believe. This was my point, that you can't just add it when you want as some sort of phonetic "ease" of pronunciation.

I agree with the entirety of your post by the way, I think you really made some excellent points for this thread. As a non-native speaker, I try to learn as much about regional accents as I can. But I think that the analogy with American English doesn't work entirely. Because, although perhaps nebulous or poorly defined, there is a "standard" American accent which is exported and a pronunciation that is taught all over the world which if spoken phonetically perfectly (unlikely, of course) would make you sound entirely American and not foreign at all. However, what it would make you sound like is _unplaceable_. When I talk to people, they know I'm not Midwestern, that I'm probably from a coast, probably the Northeast. Etc. And there's no reason for an learner of American English to sound like a person from a specific region.

However, with Arabic it's more difficult. It would be odd for me to speak in fus7a only, which is the only Arabic really exported for me to learn to speak. And if I want to pick a dialect to learn, well there's no such thing as one Syrian Arabic or one Egyptian Arabic, etc. It's as if someone told me I should learn American English to speak English in America, but that there was no real American English to learn to speak. If there was no "standard" American accent, what on earth do I learn? The difficulty with Arabic is that a so called "koine" of colloquial language from a region has not been "exported" in a systematic way for non-natives to learn. So the task is much more difficult, I think.

Well I'd have to learn quite a lot about all the regions. I'd have to learn which dialects sound "marked" and which ones sound "neutral." Which phonological features sound "like you're from Chicago" or "Savannah" or the Appalachian mountains and which features make it sound "American" and not "British", but otherwise unspecific. For example, the pronunciation of the word bad as [bæ:d] is very neutral sounding, occurs everywhere, is the so-called "standard" and doesn't mark where you're from. If you say [bye:ad] however, you sound like you're from parts of the northern Midwest. It would sound perfectly reasonable for me to hear a non-native speaker say [bæ:d] but very strange for me to hear a non-native say [bye:ad] just as I assume it probably sounds weird for me as a non-native to say فاهمة [fee:hme] rather than [faa:hme] since it's particular of parts of Lebanon, rather than more neutral of the Levant urban dialects as a whole. 

In my case, I made a decision that the colloquial Arabic I'd speak would be that of the Levant. This is mostly because I had resources available to me at the time, as well as travel plans. In fact more specifically, I speak like the "northern" regions such as Syria and Lebanon because I say things like "bshuuf" and not "bashuuf" - that's simply how I learned. Now that said, I had to learn a lot about Levantine dialects which is an ongoing process. I learned that [aa]>[ee] is markedly Beiruti. I don't necessarily want to affect that and try to make someone think I'm from Beirut. There are certain grammatical features and phonological speaker specific to Damascus that I know because all my materials have been up till now based on the dialect of the speech of urban Muslims from Damascus. Nevertheless, I'm not going to try to sound like I'm from Damascus. 

Basically when I speak, I aspire to sound like I'm "from somewhere in the Levant" in the sense that my speech is natural in that way, as opposed to the Peninsula or Iraq or Morocco or Egypt. To me it's like sounding "American" and not "Australian" although beyond that you wouldn't be able to say where in America I'd have originated, which is a property of native American accents. But I think that sounding American and not Australian is a conscious decision a learner has to make, otherwise they'd just be completely overwhelmed.

My point is that you can't just get a textbook and be on your way. Obviously that's true for all languages, but especially so for Arabic I think. You have to spend a lot of time learning about regional differences and finding an Arabic of your own that is natural and intelligible, but not necessarily affected. It's a difficult thing to do but it definitely gives you a better understanding of the cultural environment that you're entering - much more so than if you sufficed to learn to speak "conversational MSA" and never bothered to learn much more. Note, I realize that Wadi above is not at all insinuating that anyone do this. I just wanted to add my thoughts because learning to speak Arabic in a natural way is a difficult task for learners, and these are exactly the sorts of issues we have to grapple with.


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## elroy

I'm not familiar enough with Syrian Arabic to discuss its intricacies, so I'll use Palestinian Arabic to make just one point:

There's a difference between regional differences such as, for example, "humme" versus "hinne" versus "hunne" (all of which occur in PA) and things like "ra7 baakol," which _never_ occurs in PA, regardless of what variety of the dialect you speak - so I think it's totally legitimate to ask whether or not certain things mark someone's speech as _non-Syrian_, if that speaker's goal is to speak Syrian Arabic - which, although not a monolithic entity, definitely exhibits a number of distinctive features that distinguish it from other dialects.

My own speech, for example, is about 80% "Jerusalemite" (because I grew up in the Jerusalem area), and about 20% "Galilean" (because my parents are both from the Galilee), but it's distinctly _Palestinian_.

I think this sort of echoes what Clevermizo said, but I felt the need to chime in anyway.


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## Abu Fahm

Thank you everyone for your comments. All of them very helpfull. I am trying to come up with my own way of speaking arabic based on the knowledge of MSA and the resources of spoken arabic I have available which are Syrian arabic and Yemeni arabic. So I am planning spend some time learning both dialects, and decide which one is easier to pronounce etc.


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## clevermizo

Honestly, I think the easiest way to "pick" what to learn or what to base your learning off of is to make some impromptu travel plans. It focuses you and forces you to choose something. I know lots of travelers and learners want an Arabic they can speak everywhere from Casablanca to Dubai, but who really has the time to travel all that distance? By the time you learn enough of one dialect group and get good enough, especially with knowledge of standard Arabic, you'll be able to make it more intelligible once you do decide to travel further. I think any dialect is pretty much a gateway to all others, despite whatever anyone thinks as sounding the "most" like standard Arabic.


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## Abu Fahm

I am intending to travel to countries of the gulf region for work reasons. So as my first choice, I wanted to learn Khaliji dialect(s). The only thing is I never found anything worse reading to learn those dialects. All I could find was some basic dialogues for tourists.

On the other hand I found some serious material on Syrian and Yemeni including comprehensive grammar, vacab, recorded conversations with transcription, really good stuff. So between these two, I was hoping to learn to understand Khaliji.


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## Mahaodeh

If your aim is to be able to communicate in Arabic, then a mixture of the two with MSA is as good as you can get. In the gulf region you can find all the dialects and not only khaliji. They generally have huge numbers of expatriates and everyone is used to all dialects. In terms of business, it became very common to hear a hybrid dialect similar to what Andrew once described as a "white dialect" (if I remember correctly) that can not really be regarded any particular dialect but is indeed Arabic.

The quickest way to find it is to switch to MBC (the TV channel) and look for the commercials that are aimed at teaching (or reminding) the younger generations of some particular code of conduct. You can also find some general commercial advertisements such as one for Lipton tea. I distinctively recall one about holding your temper and it included a group of youths and soccer practice. We were trying to guess what the native dialects of the actors were and we were not able to, but we clearly understood every word - it is probably easier to guess the dialect if they were speaking MSA


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