Book: The Five-Minute Linguist
Chapter: Do all Arabs speak the same language?
Blurb:
Arabic is spoken by more than 250 million people in an area extending from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean. The most challenging thing about Arabic is that in order to get along well two variants of the language should be learned. One is Modern Standard Arabic, the language of literature and media throughout the Arab world and one is a colloquial variant of Arabic, a dialect, used in everyday talk in a given country.