Talk:Iraqi Arabic

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	Iraqi Arabic is part of the WikiProject Iraq, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Iraq on the Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
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[edit] This statement is pure unsubstantiated (uncited) speculation

Says the article: Iraqi Arabic is considered to be the most difficult and complex of all the other varieties of Arabic, along with Hijazi and Yemeni Varieties. It has changed very little, and has kept the closest pronounciation in comparision with all the other Arabic varieties towards the Arabic spoken by the Prophet Mohammed.

The Prophet Muhammad would probably be very surprised to hear that, as would most ordinary Iraqis. Now, I admit that my Arabic isn't even good enough to warrant an AR 1 tag on my userpage, but my Arabic instructor is from Iraq and I know for a fact that many Iraqi pronunciations are non-standard, such as cheleb for Standard Arabic keleb (کلب, "dog"). As far as vocabulary, Iraqi Arabic has far more borrowings from Persian and Turkish than other dialects. Since the Hejaz is a major site for pilgrimage, and the coastal areas have more contact with outside groups, I could see their dialects importing more words too. But the present Saudi dialect, I believe, is based more on the speech of tribes from the interior, that would have seen fewer foreign imports, and it is more conservative in other ways as well. The Prophet & his contemporaries would probably be much more at home with the pronunciation of Saudi Arabic, even though he would still be able to understand Arabs from farther afield.

I don't think Iraqi Arabic is any more or less diffucult for a non-Arabic speaker to learn than any other dialect. Foreign languages generally are hard to learn as an adult. It is rather more difficult for an English speaker to learn Arabic, which shares few cognates and uses a different alphabet and has a radically different grammar, than it would be to learn, say, French. But that applies to Arabic generally, not the Iraqi dialect in particular. Iraqi kids learn it just fine --- it can't be too difficult then, or it would have died out by now.

This article needs major renovations, and I'm not sure I'm wholly qualified. I just know enough to know that in its current state, it's pretty shabby. --Jpbrenna 03:56, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The claim that Iraqi is the closest to the dialect spoken by Muhammad is rather iffy. In my experience, ALL Arabs claim their dialect is the closest to the one spoken by Muhammad. I don't know much about the Iraqi dialect in particular, but what I do know leads me to believe that Iraqi is unlikely to be the most conservative dialect of Arabic. Rhesusman 14:40 4 August 2005 (UTC)

The claim seems quite valid, and many wouldn't be surprised to know if this was the case. [User:81.158.205.127]

Please don't delete the Talk contributions of other users without discussing them first (especially if you haven't the courage in your convictions to create an account and identify yourself in some way). If you have any citations to back up the suppositions being bandied about here, please share them for examination. A linguistic study comparing the (reconstructed/assumed) pronunciation of Classical Arabic with modern Iraqi Arabic would probably be most appropriate. RJCraig 10:23, 6 March 2006 (UTC)