Egyptian Arabic - Spoken Varieties in Egypt

Spoken Varieties in Egypt

Saidi Arabic (Upper Egyptian) is a separate variety in Ethnologue.com and ISO 639-3 as well as in other sources. It carries little prestige nationally though it continues to be widely spoken (19,000,000 speakers) including in the north by rural migrants who have adapted partially to Egyptian Arabic. For example, the Saidi genitive exponent is usually replaced with Egyptian bitāʿ , but the realization of /ʔ/ as is retained. Second and third-generation migrants are monolingual in the Cairene variety, but maintain cultural and familial ties to the south.

The traditional division between Lower and Upper Egypt and their respective differences go back to ancient times. Egyptians today commonly refer to the people of the north as baḥarwa and to those of the south as ṣaʿayda . The differences throughout Egypt, however, are more wide ranging and do not neatly correspond to this simple division. There is a linguistic shift from the eastern to the western parts of the delta, and the varieties spoken from Gizah to el Minya are further grouped into a Middle Egypt cluster. Despite these differences, there are features distinguishing all the Egyptian Arabic varieties of the Nile Valley from any other Arabic variety. Such features include reduction of long vowels in open and unstressed syllables, the postposition of demonstratives and interrogatives, the modal meaning of the imperfect, and the integration of the participle.

The Western Egyptian Bedawi Arabic variety of the western desert is different from all other Arabic varieties in Egypt as linguistically it forms part of the Maghrebi group of varieties. The same was formerly true of the Egyptian form of Judaeo-Arabic. Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic is also distinct from Egyptian Arabic.