Sociolinguistic Artifacts

I was talking with the Arabic language scholar Rihab (رحاب) about the differences between Modern Standard Arabic (فصحى)and her native Moroccan variety when she mentioned that all varieties of Arabic are merely dialects and not languages, despite the fact that there are varying degrees of mutual intelligibility and most Arabic-speaking children have to spend years in school to learn MSA. She even said learning MSA was just as difficult as learning French, indicating major differences between Moroccan Arabic and MSA. The Ethnologue recognizes 30 distinct languages as part of the Arabic macrolanguage, including her Moroccan variety. There may be dialects within these, but Moroccan Arabic is not merely a dialect in itself. If you want to see a map of where these languages are spoken look at the wikipedia page for Varieties of Arabic! (Ethnologue makes you pay:( ) [Published on 2022]