Arabic, Arabian would refer to the geographic region of the Arabian peninsula. The dialects are on a spectrum, neighboring countries might understand each other reasonably well, but not countries further apart. Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian share a lot of features, same goes for gulf countries, Egyptian is pretty distinct but well known outside the country due to its output of movies, music and tv series, Algerian and Tunisian are pretty similar, Moroccan’s kind of its own thing, Maghrebi dialects also include a lot of vocabulary from Berber languages, which won’t be understood in other regions. Finally, in most countries, local dialects are not taught in school but rather Fusha, or modern standard Arabic, which is the language you’ll hear on the news or read in the papers, and is common to the entire Arabic-speaking world. People don’t speak it day to day but usually understand it well and can communicate in a mix of that and their dialects if they’re speaking to someone from another Arabic-speaking country.

I study linguistics and a lot of different languages, and what you said made me think of how the difficulty in learning a second language depends on how different it is to our native tongue, or how accents within our own language are difficult to understand depending on how different and unfamiliar they are to us. Yet people tend to insist that certain languages are ‘simply’ hard, and insist that unfamiliar grammar or pronunciation ‘make no sense’, no matter how many millions of people use them naturally since childhood. I think it’s very difficult to imagine things which are instinctive to us being anything other than immanent truths about the universe, and anything contradicting those instincts feels wrong. What is familiar feels simple and obvious, difference feels complicated and somehow malicious; it’s ‘unnatural’. What is natural is ourself, everything else is crazy.

🎶 I want to beeeee part of your wooooorld 🎶