There’s a saying among linguists that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

A language with too many armies and navies?.>

The Economist

The Arabic of the Koran remained a prestigious and nearly unchanging standard throughout the Islamic world. This is what most Arabs consider “Arabic”. But all spoken languages change, all the time, and the Arabic people actually used on the streets and in their homes, predictably enough, changed quite a lot in those 1400 years. Today, the Arab world is sometimes compared to medieval Europe, when classical Latin was still the only “real” language most people wrote and studied in—but “Latin” in the mouths of its speakers had become early French, Spanish, Portuguese and so on.

(….)

All educated Arabs learn the Koranic-based language that linguists call “modern standard Arabic”. It is used in political speeches, news broadcasts and nearly all writing—but nobody speaks it spontaneously in the marketplace or over the dinner table. Most people struggle to write it correctly.

(….)

For the language learner, it’s a daunting task. To be competent in “Arabic” means to learn one language to read and write, and a related but rather different language (like Latin and then Italian) to be able to speak. On top of that, the poor foreigner will be limited to understanding only a fraction of the Arab world.

Breastfeeding