Introduction

Dialects
Arabic is often thought of as having separate "spoken" and "written" forms. The spoken being the various dialects of 20 or so Arabic-speaking countries, and the the written being the standard Arabic thought in schools and educated Arabs. It's important to learn Colloquial Arabic since the most conversations take place in the colloquial language or it's called in Arabic as "Amiya" and of course the most written materials is in Standard Arabic. Thus, don't get shocked if someone (Egyptian) don't understand what you say in Standard Arabic, even with good Arabic grammar, since it's only used in formal writing or formal event.

Standard Arabic plays alots with different pronouncations for every words and it makes people let it be in simple way by ignore most of the difficult words to say. Some of the words just changed by the way of pronouncations only, but others it's totally a new word .

History
The Egyptians slowly adopted the Arabic language following the Arab-Muslim conquest of Egypt in the 7th century AD. Up till then, they were speaking Egyptian in its Coptic form. For more than three centuries, there existed a period of Coptic-Arabic bilingualism in Lower Egypt. This trend would last for many more centuries in the south. Arabic may have been already familiar to Egyptians through pre-Islamic trade with Bedouin Arab tribes in the Sinai and the easternmost part of the Nile Delta. Egyptian Arabic seems to have begun taking shape in Fustat, the first Islamic capital of Egypt, and now part of modern-day Cairo. The variety of Arabic spoken by the Muslim military troops stationed in Fustat was already different from Classical Arabic[10], which in part accounts for some of the unique characteristics of the Egyptian dialect.

One of the earliest linguistic sketches of Egyptian Arabic is a 16th century document entitled Daf` al-'iṣr`an kalām 'ahl Miṣr ('The Removal of the Burden from the Language of the People of Egypt') by Yūsuf al-Maġribi. It contains key information on early Egyptian Arabic and the language situation in medieval Egypt. The main purpose of the document was to show that while the Egyptians' vernacular contained many critical "errors" vis-à-vis Classical Arabic, according to Maġribi, it was also related to Arabic in other respects. With the ongoing Islamization and Arabization of the country, Egyptian Arabic slowly supplanted spoken Egyptian. Local chroniclers mention the continued use of Coptic Egyptian as a spoken language until the 17th century AD by peasant women in Upper Egypt. Coptic is still the liturgical language of the Egyptian Coptic Church.


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