Is it similar to the anglophone world wherein there is fairly standard written English but accents vary immensely? Are there mutually unintelligible dialects of Arabic?
While we’re holding out for a real expert, I think it is more divergent than English, but not neccessarily mutually unintelligible. For one thing, educated Arabic speakers know Modern Standard Arabic as a lingua franca.
When speaking in native dialects my guess is that most meaning can be discerned with some effort, but that there may be unknown vocabulary. Iraqi arabic, for example, has many ties to Persian that a North African Arabic speaker might not understand.
Hopefully someone fluent can correct me but I believe that the popular shakoo makoo and moo as negation (e.g. moozien) are due to Persian influences.
I do not speak Arabic but my wife is Egyptian, though grew up in the U.S. It’s more than just accent. She has trouble talking with someone from, say, Iraq. The grammar can be different, and so is much of the vernacular. I was talking to an Iraqi friend of mine and told her how the first thing I learned in Arabic was to say, “I’m hungry,” but she didn’t recognize it in the Egpytian dialect, which pronounces the letter jeem, pronounced as a “j” sound just about everywhere but Egypt, where they call it *geem *and pronounce it like a hard “g”.
The typical greeting in Egypt, equivalent to “how are you,” is izayaak, not used anywhere else. Lebanon might be qi-fahk enta, and other dialects use qay-fa Haalak, which I think might be similar to Turkish (I don’t know if these are particularly good transliterations for these phrases but it gets the idea across).
To exacerbate matters, there is Modern Standard Arabic, which is used for formal situations (nearly all written works, news broadcasts, etc.) which is different than the colloquial dialects. I think most Arabic speakers also learn this form of the language. My wife did not and cannot understand a news broadcast or read a newspaper.
I would not go so far as to say that different dialects could be mutually unintelligilbe, but it’s not like an American talking to a Brit.
Written Arabic is quite standardized, it is the spoken version that causes trouble. In extreme cases (an uneducated Bangaldeshi talking to a hip kid from North Africa), the spoken version can approach unintelligibly. But anyone who is educated (or who even watches a lot of TV) can certainly make himself understood.
My understanding is that the spoken Maghrebi ( North African ) dialect(s) verges on the mutually incomprehensible with the the dialects of the Middle East, which themselves tend to be closer to each other ( and to Standard Arabic ).
I never could get a satiosfactory answer to this question (or rather I got too many answers).
It’s clear that the differences are significant, and it’s not even comparable to american vs british english. The variations also are less significant than between two different romances languages (say, french and spanish). But where exactly does it fall in this spectrum, I never could know.
I asked many arabic native speakers and got completely contradictory answers. Some said that they could easily understand anybody, others that they usually have no clue what those other arabic speakers are talking about (If they use their dialect. Most people would understand standart arabic.)
So, my best guess is that dialects from two remote areas (say Morroco and Irak) are just barely mutually intelligible when people put some effort into it.