By Wikipedia CAIRO – “Last night it was beautiful, it was a miracle,” said Haneen, a drama and translation student at Cairo University, of the demonstrations that…
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Egyptian Arabic; compare the Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation: /al. luɣatu l. misˤrijjatu l. ħadiːθata/, /al. luɣatu l. misˤrijjatu l. ʕaːmmijjata/, literally means The Egyptian colloquial language) is a variety of the Arabic language of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. It originated in the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt around the capital Cairo. Descended from the spoken Arabic brought to Egypt during the AD seventh-century Muslim conquest, its development was influenced mainly by the indigenous Copto-Egyptian language of pre-Islamic Egypt, and later by other languages such as Turkish/Ottoman Turkish, Italian, French and English. The 76 million Egyptians speak a continuum of dialects, among which Cairene is the most prominent. It is also understood across most of the Arab World due to the predominance of Egyptian media, making it the most widely spoken and one of the most widely studied varieties of Arabic. The terms Egyptian Arabic and Masri are usually used synonymously with "Cairene Arabic", the dialect of the Egyptian capital. The country's native name, Maṣr, is used locally to refer to the capital Cairo itself. Similar to the role played by Parisian French, Masri is by far the most dominant in all areas of national life. While it is essentially a spoken language, it is encountered in written form in novels, plays, poems as well as in comics, advertising, some newspapers and transcriptions of popular songs. In most other written media and in TV news reporting, a standard register of Classical Arabic is used. The Egyptian vernacular is normally written in the Arabic alphabet for local consumption, although it is commonly transcribed into Latin letters or in the International Phonetic Alphabet in linguistics text and textbooks aimed at teaching non-native learners. Also, it is written in ASCII Latin alphabet mainly online & SMSs.
