Modern Standard Arabic

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Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Arabic or MSA refers to the variety of Arabic used in most written media, news reporting, and some television talk shows in the Arabic-speaking world. It is a modernized form of Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, with which it shares most of its vocabulary, syntax and morphology, though there are noticeable differences. The Arabic word Fụṣha is used to refer to both Standard and Classical Arabic.

Some say that most university-educated Arabic speakers experience difficulty conversing in MSA for a long time. Many believe that they can only do so for a limited amount of time, until they feel the need to code switch to another dialect. There are few situations where one is expected to speak MSA without preparing first. Many do not feel confident speaking the language or feel that they would sound artificially pedantic. Television personalities, such as news reporters and talk shows hosts, always can speak MSA fluently. .

MSA seems to be gaining new phonemes, in use. Some of these are the hard "g" sound, the "v" sound, and the "p" sound.

The hard "g" sound is perceived by almost all speakers as a separate phoneme from the "k" sound, which it is supposed to be an allophone with. Some words require the hard "g" sound instead of the soft one. (e.g. "anglatair" meaning England). But there is no standard way to write the "g" sound without making it ambiguous with either the "k" sound (As would be done with the hearing of Classical Arabs), the "j" sound, the "q" sound or the "għ" sound. Some write the "għ" sound and add three dots, for a distinctly Arabic representation of the "g" sound.

Only few distinguish between the "v" sound and the "f" sound. Even fewer distinguish between the "p" and the "b" sound. Cartoon shows, and documentaries almost always keep the phoneme distinctions of foreign words (esp. Names).

1 The difference between MSA and Classical Arabic
2 Vocabulary
3 Morphology
4 See also
5 External links

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The difference between MSA and Classical Arabic

Most Arabs do not differentiate between the two. Western scholars of Arabic do. The differences between Classical Arabic and MSA are usually viewed as stylistic by Arabs.

Newer vocabulary has become part of the language, some originated from an Arabic dialect, some from other languages, and some are neologisms. Along with this, some Classical Arabic words are archaic and not understood.

Avoidance of the word "maa" due to the ambiguity, it can create. This might have been part of Classical Arabic as well.
Having the subject come before the verb is more common than it was in Classical Arabic.

Some of these trends are:

The verb, as often as not, comes between the subject and object.
The word "inna" is used less in detached writing, and is used greatly in rhetorical text.
The energetic mood and the "la" particle meaning "certainly" is reserved for extremely rhetorical speech and is rarely used in writing.

An existential "There is..." construction has been introduced by calquing the word هناك (hunaaka) or هنالك (hunaalika), both meaning "there", in imitation of English sentences such as "There were three problems".

Secondary object pronouns were attached directly onto the verb complex in Classical Arabic, but use a separate helper إيا (iyyaa-) in Modern Standard Arabic .

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Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic is extremely rich. By being familiar with many Arabic words, one can easily guess the meaning of others. Even though this allows many more Arabic words to be remembered, it allows many Arabic words to be created.

Due to the long history of the Arabic language many words have been born. At the time of the Quran's revelation many synonyms for the same word already existed due to ancient Arabic dialectical variation.

In modern times, Arabic became increasingly used as an international, political language of many countries. As a practical language the excess words for an idea eventually became certainly archaic.

The vocabulary of MSA does not include every word in the Quran. The vocabulary of the Quran includes many common terms, and many rare words. A few of these words were only understood by few during the time of the Quran's revelation.

Along with these purely Arabic words there are borrowings from the English and French. These borrowings however are avoided by some authors, who use an Arabic equivalent is used instead. Example (kumbyuutir==>hžaasuub).

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