Treebeard

Studying Arabic in an Arabic speaking country means you have to muddle through two and a half foreign languages at a time. There’s Modern Standard Arabic, called Foosha, which all books, papers and news sources are written or spoken in, as well as taught in the schools. However, nobody speaks this in their everyday lives, they opt for a form of Arabic which differs from region to region and country to country. So there’s a specific type of Arabic spoken in Jordan, simply called Spoken Arabic. It’s close enough to the forms spoken in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria that they all loosely share the classification of “Levinte Arabic.” I think. Or something weird like that. The overly killer part about this is THERE’S NO ESTABLISHED LEXICON, GRAMMER SET OR VOCABULARY FOR SPOKEN ARABIC. When it needs to be written down, it’s basically captured using the Standard Arabic writing system with a few minor differences. With no real home other than peoples’ mouths, it can accurately be described as an invisible language.

Arabic is so foreign from English that I really need something written in front of me, textbook style, that I can rely on. But that book doesn’t exist. Cry me a river. But this is one reason that everyone in town whom I ask for help with Spoken Arabic tries instead to teach me Foosha. Their intentions are good and they’re only reverting to what they know cos Foosha’s all they were taught in school. They just happen to speak a different language, and understanding the difference is an idea – as near as I can tell – they’ve never had to reason with. If I could just speak Foosha to all the town folks, I would, but that’d be the equivalent of me jabbering at Americans in Shakespearian English. Most Jordanians aren’t fluent in Foosha, they just know enough to get by. What they are fluent in doesn’t exist on paper. And this is the prey I must chase down. Would you believe me if I said it’s elusive?

So that’s two. The last half of a language comes in the form of the village dialect. As I’m finding there’s a host of words that are unique to the Beduin, those traditional desert nomad peoples whom most non-Palestinian Jordanians can trace their heritage to. Most the population isn’t as Bedo as they were in the past, so those that speak after the tradition of the Bedos are seen as very rustic and sometimes hard to understand. So what’s the difference? Well, the Arabic word for ‘later’ is ‘badain.’ That is unless you live in the one thousand person village of Al Rajif. Here they use ‘udon.’ Neat huh? Kinda, considering in the whole expanse of North Africa, the Arabian Pennensula and the Levant, that word is unique to my little village of Beduins. Other Beduins don’t even use that word. And that’s the way it is across the Arab World. Villages will have a set of words unique to themselves. You can imagine that while trying to learn myself I pick up village or region or country or area specific words, potentially as unfamiliar to the guy in the next village as the guy in the next country. Glory and consequence.

And dare my half-functioning brain forget, the Quran is written in Classical Arabic, fairly different than Standard and fully different than Spoken. So in one breath, a person can quote from the Quran using Classical, yammer about it in Foosha and finish up his statement in Spoken, throwing in some Beduin and village-specific words for fun. This is my linguistic life.

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