I have come to a decision in my life recently the outcome of which could dramatically alter the future of the universe as we know it.

I’ve decided to learn French.

Why, you ask, have I come to this monumental decision? Well, it looks quite likely like I’m going to be spending time in Morocco next summer, and Moroccan Arabic scares the bejeezus out of me, so French seems like the next logical choice. In Middle Eastern Studies, French makes much more sense than, say, Spanish as a second language. After World War I, the region was split between French dominance and English dominance, and I’ve just been really lucky that so far I’ve managed to stick to the English speaking parts. Well, no more of that.

I’ve always hated being in a situation where I can’t understand what’s going on around me. I hate to miss out on things that are going on, for one, and also the control freak part of me hates not being able to offer input (or even have the option).

It remains to be seen whether this French thing will work out. It’s a Romance language, so compared with, say, every other language I’ve learned it has to be somewhat more familiar, right? I did learn Spanish once, and the grammar wasn’t that strange for a speaker of English.

Not compared with, say, Turkish which is so militantly rigid in its grammar that you have to plan out sentences six years in advance (Example: “Did you call your friends in Istanbul?” is Istanbuldaki arkadaşlarina telefon gittin mi? – literally “Istanbul-(located in)-(referringto) friend-(plural)-your-(receiving action) telephone call you-made interrogative?”) I can imagine that trying to speak Turkish while suffering from a migraine might possibly be one of the worst feelings ever.

Then, of course, is the question of whether I want to try to learn to read French or just speak it (writing is, presumably, out of the question for now since it’s hard to grade yourself on that). I’ve done both – I can speak Greek passably, but I can’t read it, and I can read Swedish but I neither speak it nor understand it when it’s spoken (too many dipthongs with weird pronunciation: how “sj” comes out “h” is beyond me). I’m also getting lazy with Arabic and need to work on keeping up my reading skills.

Which brings up the question: why aren’t I just planning to speak Arabic in Morocco? Good question.

Arabic is a tricky being. As a student of the language, you’re taught something called fusha (that’s foos-ha), or modern standard Arabic, which is a very intricate language with lots of grammatical rules, lots of regular verbs, even more irregular verbs, and seems to make some sense — even if I have never successfully been able to identify certain grammatical structures. In all my years of visiting the Middle East, I have never been pulled aside by a policemen and threatened with jail if I didn’t identify 10 examples of a jumla wasfiyya in the following article in the next five minutes, and somehow don’t seriously expect that such a thing will ever happen. These are the sorts of things that get you through the next exam and then anyone with good sense forgets about them as soon as is humanly possible.

Then we fly to the Middle East for our first year of study abroad and realize what every student of fusha eventually finds out: no one actually speaks fusha. People speak dialects of Arabic – educated people can speak fusha, but not as their ‘first language.’ So, after having gone through all of that, you have to learn a dialect. Naturally, studying in Egypt, I picked up (but never really studied) Egyptian Arabic.

Most people that teach the language remain militant that students must learn fusha. Some Universities are now offering the ‘major’ dialects (Texas now offers Egyptian and Levantine), but only to advanced students.

Moroccan Arabic, however, remains the sort of bastard child that no one deals with. Like Cypriot Greek, Moroccan Arabic has retained a lot of vocabulary from the medieval era that isn’t used in the rest of the Arab world anymore. It also has incorporated quite a bit of the Berber languages. For those of us who prefer the eastern dialects of Arabic, Moroccan is a frightening language. Those consonant clusters are initimdating: while vowels aren’t written in Arabic (as is the case with most Semetic languages: Hebrew and Amharic are the same way), it also seems that Moroccans don’t pronounce vowels, either. Oh, they’re there, of course (somewhere) but it’s a whole new way of looking at the language.

Since Morocco is decidedly Francophone (many of the major newspapers, for example, publish daily in Arabic and French), it seems like learning French might be cheating a bit – but I’m not sure that I have enough of a committment to Morocco to want to start on a new dialect.

Frankly, I just got good with the one that I already have.

Tags: Arabic - عربي, french, languages, studies, universities