Languages of Lebanon

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Languages of Lebanon
Beyrouth, secteur 40 - El-Zarif.jpg
Official Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)
Semi-official French
Main Lebanese dialect of Levantine Arabic
Minority Western Armenian
Foreign English
Signed Levantine Sign Language
Keyboard layout

In Lebanon, most people communicate in the Lebanese variety of Levantine Arabic, but Lebanon's official language is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). French is recognized and used next to MSA on road signs and Lebanese banknotes. Lebanon's native sign language is the Lebanese dialect of Levantine Arabic Sign Language. English is the fourth language by number of users, after Levantine, MSA, and French. Most Armenians in Lebanon can speak Western Armenian, and some can speak Turkish.

Contents

Lebanon exists in a state of diglossia: MSA is used in formal writing and the news, while Lebanese Arabic—the variety of Levantine Arabic—is used as the native language in conversations and for informal written communication. When writing Levantine, Lebanese people use the Arabic script (more formal) or Arabizi (less formal). Arabizi can be written on a QWERTY keyboard and is used out of convenience.

Mutual intelligibility between Lebanese and other Levantine varieties is high, while MSA and Levantine are mutually unintelligible. Despite that, Arabs consider both varieties of Arabic to be a part of a single Arabic language. Some sources count Levantine and MSA as two languages of the same language family.

Statistics

According to Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024), [1] these languages have the most users in Lebanon:

  1. Levantine Arabic5,230,000
  2. Modern Standard Arabic4,780,000
  3. French2,530,000
  4. English2,130,000
  5. Western Armenian261,000
  6. Turkish189,000

Diglossia and local varieties' classification

Lebanon—and the Arab world in general—exists in a state of diglossia: [2] the language used in literature, formal writing, or other specific settings is very divergent from that used in conversations. Lebanon's official language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), [3] has no native speakers in or outside Lebanon. [4] It is almost never used in conversations [5] and is learned through formal instruction rather than transmission from parent to child. [6] MSA is the language of literature, official documents, and formal written media (newspapers, instruction leaflets, school books), [6] and in spoken form, it is mostly used when reading from a scripted text (e.g., news bulletins) and for prayer and sermons in the mosque or church. [6] Levantine, conversely, is spoken natively and used in conversations, TV shows, films, and advertisements. [7] This diglossia has been compared to the use of Latin as the sole written, official, liturgical, and literary language in Europe during the medieval period, while Romance languages were the spoken languages. [8] [9] Levantine—specifically its Palestinian dialect—is the closest Arabic variety to MSA, [10] [11] [12] but Levantine and MSA are not mutually intelligible. [13] [2] They differ significantly in their phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax, [14] and exposure to MSA in the early childhood of native speakers of an Arabic variety results in a linguistic system that behaves like that of bilinguals. [15]

Levantine speakers often call their language العامية al-ʿāmmiyya, 'slang', 'dialect', or 'colloquial' (lit.'the language of common people'), to contrast it to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic ( الفصحى al-fuṣḥā, lit.'the eloquent'). [lower-alpha 1] [17] [18] [19] They also call their spoken language عربي ʿarabiyy, 'Arabic'. [20] Alternatively, they identify their language by the name of their country, such as لبناني libnāni, 'Lebanese'. [21] شامي šāmi can refer to Damascus Arabic, Syrian Arabic, or Levantine as a whole. [22] Lebanese literary figure Said Akl led a movement to recognize the "Lebanese language" as a prestigious language instead of MSA. [23] Most people consider Arabic to be a single language. [24] The ISO 639-3 standard, however, classifies Arabic as a macrolanguage and Levantine as one of its languages, giving it the language code "apc". [25]

Code-switching and loanwords

Maya Diab code-switches to English from Lebanese Levantine mid-sentence

Code-switching (alternating between languages in a single conversation) between Levantine, MSA, French, and English is very common in Lebanon, often being done in both casual situations and formal situations like TV interviews. [26] [27] This prevalence of code-switching has led to phrases that naturally embed multiple linguistic codes being used in daily sentence, like the typical greeting "hi, كيفك؟ [lower-alpha 2] Ça va ?", which combines English, Levantine and French. [28] [29] [30] Code-switching also happens in politics. For instance, not all politicians master MSA, so they rely on the Lebanese Levantine Arabic. [31]

Additionally, many words used in the Lebanese dialect of Levantine have been borrowed from French, such as telfizyōn listen (French: télévision listen , meaning 'television'), balkōn (French: balcon listen , meaning 'balcony') and doktōr listen (French: docteur listen , meaning 'doctor'), [32] and from English, such as CD, crispy, hot dog, and keyboard, [33] with some phrases and verbs being altered to follow the syntax of Levantine Arabic, instead of English. For example, shayyik comes from the English word 'check', and sayyiv comes from the English word 'save'. [33]

Minority languages

Western Armenian is used between the Armenians in Lebanon, [34] [35] who fled to Lebanon between 1895 and 1939 for multiple reasons, most notably the Armenian genocide. [lower-alpha 3] [37] In 2015, Armenians made up around 4% of Lebanon's population. [38] Their mother tongue remains widespread, [34] and some Armenians in Lebanon can also speak Turkish, more than a century after their ancestors left Turkey. [24]

Some Kurds fled to Lebanon from violence and poverty in Turkey, but they are now dispersed in Lebanon and have largely abandoned Kurdish languages. [lower-alpha 4] [34] Kurds in Lebanon were estimated at 70,000 in 2020, and Kurmanji's users at 23,000. [1]

Syriac Aramaic is also spoken as a first language in some Lebanese communities such as Syriac Catholics, Syriac Orthodox and Assyrian Lebanese.[ citation needed ] It is also used in liturgies in other communities such as Maronite Catholics.[ citation needed ]

Usage

Conversation

Lebanon's native language, Levantine Arabic, [1] is the main language used in conversations. MSA, despite being Lebanon's second language by number of users, [1] is almost never used in conversations, [5] while English [33] and French [40] are, even between some native speakers of Levantine. Levantine Arabic Sign Language is Lebanon's native sign language, and Lebanon's deaf population is estimated at 12,000. [41] [1]

Oral media

Many public and formal speeches and most political talk shows are in Lebanese, not MSA. [31] In the Arab world, most films and songs are in vernacular Arabic. [42] Egypt was the most influential center of Arab media productions (movies, drama, TV series) during the 20th century, [43] but Levantine is now competing with Egyptian. [44] As of 2013, about 40% of all music production in the Arab world was in Lebanese. [43] Lebanese television is the oldest and largest private Arab broadcast industry. [45] Most big-budget pan-Arab entertainment shows are filmed in the Lebanese dialect in the studios of Beirut. Moreover, the Syrian dialect dominates in Syrian TV series (such as Bab al-Hara ) and in the dubbing of Turkish television dramas, which are both aired in Lebanon. [43] [46] With the release of Secret of the Wings in 2012, Disney began re-dubbing and dubbing its films in MSA, instead of Egyptian, [47] [48] and in March 2013, Disney and pan-Arab television network Al Jazeera made a deal allowing the latter to distribute some of Disney's MSA-dubbed shows and films. [47] [49] The release of Frozen with an MSA dub and without an Egyptian one caused a controversy in the Arab world. [47] [7]

Lebanese zajal and other forms of oral poetry are often in Levantine. [50] [26]

Typically, news bulletins are in MSA. [2] On the popular television network LBCI, Arab and international news bulletins are in MSA, while the Lebanese national news broadcast is in a mix of MSA and Lebanese Arabic. [2] Lebanese TV station OTV and some radio stations that cover news of the Armenian diaspora in Lebanon broadcast daily news bulletins in Armenian. [34]

Lebanon used to have two francophone television stations, but they were shut down in the mid-1990s. Show hosts on television networks that are traditionally affiliated with Christians, such as MTV and LBCI, tend to use more English and French words than hosts in networks owned by Muslims, such as Future TV, Al-Manar, and NBN. [33]

Writing and scripts

Unlike Levantine, [51] Modern Standard Arabic has a standardized spelling in the Arabic script [52] and is typically used in literature, official documents, newspapers, school books, and instruction leaflets. [6] In formal media, Levantine is seldom written, except for some novels, plays, and humorous writings. [53] [54] Subtitles are usually in MSA, [55] sometimes translating Arabic dialects to MSA. [56]

Arabic script MSA plaque on Said Akl's statue in AUST's campus, Beirut Said Akl Statue in Beirut.JPG
Arabic script MSA plaque on Said Akl's statue in AUST's campus, Beirut

Most Arabs struggle to write MSA correctly. [24] On social media [51] and when texting, they use their native variety, either in the Arabic script or Arabizi. Arabizi combines the Latin alphabet with Western Arabic numerals to make up for sounds unavailable with the Latin alphabet alone. [57] [30] The numbers are visually similar to the Arabic character they represent. For example, 3 represents "ع". [58] Arabizi is commonly used on social media and discussion forums, SMS messaging, and online chat, [59] especially among younger generations. Arabizi initially evolved because of the lack of support for Arabic letters, but it is now used to save time switching keyboards and, for typists who are not proficient in an Arabic keyboard, save time typing. [60] A 2012 study found that, when writing in Levantine on Facebook, Arabizi is more common than the Arabic script in Lebanon, while the Arabic script is more common in Syria. [61] Several studies have reported that the complexity of Arabic orthography slows down the word identification process, [7] but Arabizi is not always read faster than the Arabic script, depending on vowelization, the reader's gender, and other factors. [7]

In the 1960s, Lebanese poet Said Akl—inspired by the Maltese and Turkish alphabets [62] designed a new Latin alphabet for Lebanese and promoted the official use of Lebanese instead of MSA, [63] but this movement was unsuccessful. [64] [65]

Education

Syrian refugee students, Lebanon, 2016 The Right to Education - Refugees.jpg
Syrian refugee students, Lebanon, 2016

Between 1994 and 1997, the Council of Ministers passed a new National Language Curriculum that required schools to use either English or French in natural sciences and mathematics. [33] [66] In general, school students are exposed to two or three languages: MSA and either French, English or both. [27] Students' native language, Levantine, is not taught in schools, although MSA-medium lessons are often taught in a mix of MSA and Levantine with, for instance, the lesson read out in MSA and explained in Levantine. [26] [3] Foreign language teachers, such as English and French teachers, also commonly code-switch to Levantine. [40]

Although all language teachers face difficulties, especially in low socio-economic schools, MSA teachers' teaching resources are inferior to those of English and French, focusing mostly on classical books, as other resources are rare. [40] Many young Lebanese struggle with basic MSA reading and writing skills, [5] while Syrian refugees in Lebanon transitioning from the MSA-centric Syrian education system to the English- and French-centric Lebanese system struggle with English and French. They are therefore often placed several grade levels below their age level, causing negative consequences on their psychosocial well-being. [67]

The number of students learning in English is increasing, while those learning in French is decreasing: In 2019, 50% of school students studied in French, compared to 70% twenty years prior to that, and 55% of French-educated students chose to go to English-medium universities. [68] [69] Lebanon's brain drain is high, [47] [70] and its job market is weak. [47] [40] Foreign language proficiency, therefore, is highly beneficial to Lebanese graduates, as it helps them find jobs abroad. [40]

Government and law

Following its independence in 1943, Lebanon's official language changed from French and MSA to just MSA. Today, MSA is the official language, while French is a recognized one. [51] [1] Lebanon's national anthem [71] and all government-related announcements, documents, and publications are in MSA. [33] French is also used, alongside MSA, on road signs, the Lebanese lira and public buildings.

Lebanese Arabic—the variety of Levantine Arabic—is used in courtrooms, but in order to record court proceedings, the judge restates in MSA what the suspect has said, and the court recorder handwrites the judge's translation. [33] [72] This process, according to a report funded and led by the World Bank, "risks an edit or an omission in the restatement by the judge." [73] [74]

Brands and businesses

"For sale" written in MSA, French, and Armenian in Bourj Hammoud Bourj Hammoud Multilinguisme.jpg
"For sale" written in MSA, French, and Armenian in Bourj Hammoud

Email communication and announcements in professional job settings are mostly through English. [33] Of Lebanon's 34 radio stations, 11 have either French or English names. [33] Using photographs from 2015, a 2018 study of the linguistic landscape of Lebanon's capital, Beirut, found that the Arabic script is only used in 20% of storefront's primary text (store's name) and 9% of secondary text (other information, such as opening hours). The Armenian script was absent. [75]

History

Flag of Greater Lebanon (1920-1926) Flag of Lebanon during French Mandate (1920-1943).svg
Flag of Greater Lebanon (1920–1926)

Starting in the 1st millennium BCE, Aramaic was the dominant spoken language and the language of writing and administration in the Levant [76] where Lebanon is. Because there are no written sources, the history of Levantine Arabic before the modern period is unknown. [77] In the early 1st century CE, a great variety of Arabic dialects were already spoken by various nomadic or semi-nomadic Arabic tribes in the Levant. [78] [79] [26] These dialects were local, coming from the Hauran—and not from the Arabian Peninsula [80] and related to later Classical Arabic. [81] Initially restricted to the steppe, Arabic-speaking nomads started to settle in cities and fertile areas after the Plague of Justinian in 542 CE. [80] These Arab communities stretched from the southern extremities of the Syrian Desert to central Syria, the Anti-Lebanon mountains, and the Beqaa Valley. [82] [83] The Muslim conquest of the Levant (634–640 [84] [85] ) brought Arabic speakers from the Arabian Peninsula who settled in the Levant. [86] Arabic became the language of trade and public life in cities, while Aramaic continued to be spoken at home and in the countryside. [83] The language shift from Aramaic to vernacular Arabic was a long process over several generations, with an extended period of bilingualism, especially among non-Muslims. [83] [87] Christians continued to speak Syriac for about two centuries, and Syriac remained their literary language until the 14th century. [88] [89] In its spoken form, Aramaic nearly disappeared, except for a few Aramaic-speaking villages, [89] but it has left substrate influences on Levantine. [87] The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century reduced the use of Turkish words due to Arabization and the negative perception of the Ottoman era among Arabs. [90] With the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon (1920–1946), [91] the British protectorate over Jordan (1921–1946), and the British Mandate for Palestine (3–1948), French and English words gradually entered Levantine Arabic. [92] [93]

See also

Notes

  1. Native speakers of Arabic generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic and refer to both as العربية الفصحىal-ʻArabīyah al-Fuṣḥā, lit.'the eloquent Arabic'. [16]
  2. Transliterated as kīfak (when asked to a male) or kīfik (when asked to a female)
  3. According to Minority Rights Group , [36] Cilician Catholics seeking refuge from the Armenian Orthodox Church's persecution initially came to Lebanon in the 18th century. Subsequent and bigger immigration waves arrived due to massacres by the Turks in 1895–1896 and the Armenian genocide of 1915. More arrived when France's attempt to establish an Armenian entity in Cilicia failed in 1920–1921. The last influx resulted from France ceding Alexandretta to Turkey in 1939.
  4. Kurdish is often seen as a single language, and its descendants Kurmanji and Zazaki as it dialects, instead of separate languages. [39]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arabic</span> Semitic language and lingua franca of the Arab world

Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Levant</span> Region in the Eastern Mediterranean

The Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of West Asia and core territory of the political term Middle East. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to Cyprus and a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea in western Asia: i.e. the historical region of Syria, which includes present-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and most of Turkey southwest of the middle Euphrates. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece in Southern Europe to Cyrenaica, Eastern Libya in Northern Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Levantine Arabic</span> Arabic variety spoken in the Levant

Levantine Arabic, also called Shami, is an Arabic variety spoken in the Levant, namely in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and southern Turkey. With over 54 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic comprehensible all over the Arab world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modern Standard Arabic</span> Formal literary variety of Arabic

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA) is the variety of standardized, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages also the variety of spoken Arabic that approximates this written standard. MSA is the language used in literature, academia, print and mass media, law and legislation, though it is generally not spoken as a first language, similar to Contemporary Latin. It is a pluricentric standard language taught throughout the Arab world in formal education, differing significantly from many vernacular varieties of Arabic that are commonly spoken as mother tongues in the area; these are only partially mutually intelligible with both MSA and with each other depending on their proximity in the Arabic dialect continuum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lebanese Arabic</span> Dialect of North Levantine Arabic

Lebanese Arabic, or simply Lebanese, is a variety of North Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and primarily spoken in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic. Due to multilingualism and pervasive diglossia among Lebanese people, it is not uncommon for Lebanese people to code-switch between or mix Lebanese Arabic, French, and English in their daily speech. It is also spoken among the Lebanese diaspora.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Languages of Syria</span>

Arabic is the official language of Syria and is the most widely spoken language in the country. Several modern Arabic dialects are used in everyday life, most notably Levantine in the west and Mesopotamian in the northeast.

The Arabic language family is divided into several categories which are: Old Arabic, the literary varieties, and the modern vernaculars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Syrians</span> Ethnic group

Syrians are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, who have Arabic, especially its Levantine dialect, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians retained Aramaic, which is still spoken in its Syriac and Western dialects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethnic groups in Syria</span>

Arabs represent the major ethnicity in Syria, in addition to the presence of several, much smaller ethnic groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethnic groups in the Middle East</span>

Ethnic groups in the Middle East, in the 'transcontinental' region which is commonly a geopolitical term designating the intercontinental region comprising West Asia without the South Caucasus, and also comprising Egypt in North Africa. The region has historically been a crossroad of different cultures and languages. Since the 1960s, the changes in political and economic factors have significantly altered the ethnic composition of groups in the region. While some ethnic groups have been present in the region for millennia, others have arrived fairly recently through immigration. The largest socioethnic groups in the region are Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis but there are dozens of other ethnic groups that have hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of members.

Bedouin Arabic refers to a typological group of Arabic dialects historically linked to Bedouin tribes, that has spread among both nomadic and sedentary groups across the Arab World. The group of dialects originate from Arabian tribes in Najd and the Hejaz that have spread since the 10th century until modern day. Bedouin dialects vary by region and tribe, but they typically share a set of features which distinguish them from sedentary-type dialects in each region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Varieties of Arabic</span> Family of language varieties

Varieties of Arabic are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related to geographical distance and some that are mutually unintelligible. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects as well as local native languages and dialects. Some organizations, such as SIL International, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be separate languages, while others, such as the Library of Congress, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic.

Western Egyptian Bedawi Arabic, also known as Sahil Maryut Bedouin Arabic, is a group of Bedouin Arabic dialects spoken in Western Egypt along the Mediterranean coast, west to the Egypt–Libya border. Ethnologue and Glottolog classify Western Egyptian Bedawi Arabic as a Libyan Arabic dialect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Palestinian Arabic</span> Dialect of Arabic spoken in the State of Palestine

Palestinian Arabic is a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by most Palestinians in Palestine, Israel and in the Palestinian diaspora.

This article is about the phonology of Levantine Arabic also known as Shāmi Arabic, and its sub-dialects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Damascus Arabic</span> Arabic dialect of Damascus

Damascus Arabic or Damascus Dialect is a North Levantine Arabic spoken dialect, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Damascus. As the dialect of the capital city of Syria, and due to its use in the Syrian broadcast media, it is prestigious and widely recognized by speakers of other Syrian dialects, as well as in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. Accordingly, in modern times it is sometimes known as Syrian Arabic or the Syrian Dialect; however, the former term may also be used to refer to the group of similar urban sedentary dialects of the Levant, or to mean Levantine Arabic in general.

Cilician Arabic, Cilicia-Antioch Arabic, Çukurova Arabic, or Çukurovan is a Levantine dialect spoken in Turkey in the geo-cultural area of Cilicia, the coastal region of the Turkish Eastern Mediterranean from Hatay to Mersin and Adana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English language in Lebanon</span>

English is a secondary language of Lebanon, with 40% of the population saying in 2011 that it can speak it non-natively.

Levantine Arabic grammar is the set of rules by which Levantine Arabic creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other vernacular Arabic varieties.

Levantine Arabic vocabulary is the vocabulary of Levantine Arabic, the variety of Arabic spoken in the Levant.

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