Is it just Eastern Arabic or is it something more, like Egyptian Arabic or another dialect? This is to both of my questions in the topic. Also, what is the differece between all of them? If you were to learn only one, can it pass for each version of it if that’s all you know?
I’m ignorant of this topic but I found this with Google.
I always thought it was farsi that was used the most…
In Iran, yes.
Farsi, also called Persian, is a totally different language than Arabic though they use a similar script. As DarrenS said, it’s the language of Iran.
Haj
Egyptian Arabic is the most widely understood in the Middle East, because Egypt produces most of the Arabic-language movies and television.
.:Nichol:.
Just dug this up through an idle search.
Let me try to offer some observations:
By pure demographic weight, Egyptian dialect is the most spoken, although it comes in at least two major varieties, northern Urban (Ciaro, Alexandria) and rural dialects.
Ex-Modern Standard, it is probably the most understood dialect due to film and TV production in Egypt, although my sense is that Lebanese (Bieruti) dialect is rapidly gaining on it.
Modern Standard (MSA) is not actually spoken by anyone as a ‘native’ tongue, it is a book language and in truth little used outside of TV, Radio, high end politics and writing. MSA is essentially the same as Classical but with some lexical and modest grammatical differences. The lexicon is the real issue, 1500 years accretes a lot of meanings. MSA is largely standardized across the Arab world, but one can note some modest differences in style and usage, sometimes connected to dialect influence, other times I guess connected to slightly different grammatical schools of thought. My unlearned hypothesis on the later, having noted dif. in usage btw Maghrebine writers and Machreqi writers.
As to Iraqi dialect, my experience with it is not extensive but I can observe that while it shares general eastern dialectal traits such as the (bi) prefix on the present tense, it also has some pronunc. and forms that are clearly Farsi influenced. Iraqi can be hard even for other native speakers to follow, if the Iraqi is not conforming his or her speech to a somewhat ‘classical’ upper-class model.
Overall for Arabic dialects, in my opinion you can more or less accurately divide them into several regional groupings:
Maghrebi: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, with Libya floating in there as well.
Egyptian and Levant (Sham): I find them to be fairly similar, although with some clear differences. Northern Sudanese more or less fits in here.
Gulf (Khalij): The Arabian Peninsula, although the Gulf states proper differ from Yemen in fact (Farsi influence I would say), however I think you can lump them together in large part.
In order to be a professionaly operative speaker, you need at least one dialect (either Egyptian or Lebanese, they are close enough to be interchangeable in most respects) and also some degree of MSA. BTW, speaking Machreqi dialects will get you nowhere fast in the Maghreb, for your understanding of them will be too poor in general to facilitate conversation.