Where Do We Go from Here?

Arabic’s language situation is complex. On the one hand, you have Standard Arabic (or Fus'ha), which acts as a common medium used in most texts and formal situations such as official speeches and pan-Arab news; however, it’s no one’s mother tongue. On the other hand, you have the dialects, which are used in everyday speech but are not mutually intelligible with each other or with Standard Arabic. Although everyone is aware of this reality, Arabic education does not reflect it. In fact, the current approach is a disservice to children who want to learn Arabic and to the language itself, hindering literacy rates in Standard Arabic and even Arabs’ self-esteem and confidence when it comes to mastering Standard Arabic.

The path to improving Arabic literacy and our relationship with the language is obvious: deal with the reality of the Standard Arabic-dialect split in Arabic curriculums. Although the impact of the Standard Arabic-dialect split is being acknowledged more these days, actions to improve children’s education to reflect that remain largely non-existent.

This isn’t about throwing out Standard Arabic or dialects—clearly the exclusive focus on Standard Arabic hasn’t worked, and trying to focus exclusively on dialects would have equally disastrous results. Standard Arabic is, without a doubt, a part of our Arab heritage and plays an important role in pan-Arab communication. However, dialects are also part of our heritage—what Arab doesn’t take pride in their colloquial songs, poetry, and proverbs? Cutting off either one is tantamount to cutting off a part of ourselves. Arabic education’s exclusive focus on Standard Arabic fails to take into consideration the background of different learners and their mother dialects. I would have hoped that the education system would have improved since I was a child, but it’s 2025 and I’m watching my son go through the same system and seeing the same negative impact it has on his relationship with the language. It’s the same negative impact many parents see: their children gravitate toward foreign languages such as English, struggle to master Arabic, and even express dislike of Arabic.

The pressing research question that needs to be answered for teaching Arabic is not should we change Arabic education, but rather how should we change the education systems to reflect the Standard Arabic-dialect split. However, before undertaking that research, there are a few basic truths that we can use as a basis.

First, dialects are different languages. I’m surprised I still have this argument with people when it’s so obvious that a child who has no familiarity with Standard Arabic can’t understand it. To drive the point home, modern computational power can quantify the differences with natural language processing techniques. Utilizing The Living Arabic Project’s database, my brother (my co-conspirator) and I did a study on the degree of shared vocabulary between dialects and Fus'ha, which we presented at The Fourth Biennial Arabic Language Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Conference. We estimated that there is only a 50% shared vocabulary between any one dialect and Standard Arabic if you ignore harakātharakātDiacritical marks in Arabic that represent short vowels (like a, i, u) and certain grammatical endings. They guide pronunciation but are typically omitted in standard written Arabic, especially in adult texts.. This is in line with other studies, such as the Saiegh-Haddad and Spolsky study that estimated a 60% overlap for children from a Palestinian village. And that’s without accounting for the significant morphological and syntactic differences. Understanding those differences can support the development of education methodologies that use dialect as a stepping stone to Standard Arabic.



Second, you need to know your starting point to know how to get to your destination. That means that we need to understand where students are coming from, their background with Arabic, and the relationship between their home dialect and Standard Arabic. Considering the situation in Arab countries, a Moroccan will need a different approach than a Syrian. Outside of Arab countries, heritage speakers are often taught the same curriculum as non-native speakers. The question is how to deal with these different backgrounds in the classroom.

Third, although Arabic dialects differ significantly from Standard Arabic, there are also a lot of similarities. Arabic education systems can probably learn a lot from similar situations, such as how Germany deals with its diglossia, or how former colonies balance the colonial language that acts as the lingua franca (e.g. French or English) and multiple indigenous languages. But Arabic’s situation is unique, and the overlap with Standard Arabic varies based on dialect and context. That can be utilized to help children bridge to Standard Arabic.

Lastly, preserving Standard Arabic is important, but if teaching a language is only about preserving it, then it is an open acknowledgement that we’re failing to pass it on to our children. Rather, education is about empowering learners to communicate effectively in Arabic. That means mastery of Arabic in both its forms—dialect and Standard Arabic— and the ability to switch between them comfortably and at will. This requires moving beyond rote memorization and rigid grammar rules in Standard Arabic to focus on naturally producing the language.

Taking these points into consideration, there needs to be a concerted effort to test different curriculums that take into consideration Standard Arabic and dialects. It’ll be iterative: from each study there will be takeaways, and the next effort will be better.



There are numerous specific points of research that can be looked into, such as:

• How can we enable teachers to deal with Standard Arabic and dialects in the classroom? Can we systematically break down all the ways Arabic dialects are different and find ways to help teachers deal with the differences?
• How can we teach skills like “control” and “code-switching”—the ability to switch comfortably between Standard Arabic and a dialect—at a young age?
• Can we make publicly available, standardized assessment tools?
• Can we raise children’s awareness of different dialects at an early age so they can communicate across dialectical lines?
• Outside of Arab countries, what role can heritage speakers play in a classroom? How can teachers incorporate their students’ backgrounds into the classroom?

This area of research goes beyond a single organization, and the optimal answer will vary based on the individual institute, the goals of that institute, and the makeup of the classroom (the background of the students and teachers). But right now, teachers that want to try a new approach are left to their own devices, forced to create many of their own tools from the ground up while trying to meet academic benchmarks, and most seem to find it easier to stay with the traditional methods. A lot of the innovation is coming from individual efforts, especially tech companies that see chances to make new tools. However, regarding dialects or trying to help learners bridge between Standard Arabic and dialects, these new tools focus only on non-native adults.

Acknowledging the Standard Arabic-dialect split in children’s education is taboo among many Arabs because they are fundamentally afraid that they will lose SA—and with it, the connections to the religion of Islam, Arab history, and other Arab nations. But by not helping our children work in both Standard Arabic and dialects, we are already losing Standard Arabic. Riham Shendy looked at the World Bank’s learning poverty indicator, defined as the ability of children to “read and understand a simple text by age 10,” and found that in the five wealthy Gulf countries—Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—-on average 36.6 percent of students aged 10 are unable to meet this marker. Countries with comparable GDP per capita have an average 2.7 percent for the same indicator.

The next steps—researching and testing new education methods that are designed to deal with Arabic’s Standard Arabic-dialect split—are clear and obvious. The question is, are we willing to take them, or will we continue down the path of hurting our children and their connection with Arabic?