Egyptian dialect, known colloquially as ‘ammia, is the most widely spoken and understood across the Arab World. Its international status took shape in the twentieth century, when the country’s musical industry, cinema, and later broadcast media grew to regional dominance. Yet, the Egyptian Arabic known to the rest of the world through these channels was never a mirror of the language spoken on the country’s streets. The dialect spoken by stars on screen during Egyptian cinema’s Golden Age (from the 1940s to the 1960s), used in radio broadcasts, or even most literary works written in ‘ammia, was in fact an elevated Cairene, representing only a small fraction of the country’s many Arabic tongues. With influences from both indigenous and foreign languages, and just as many regional dialects, Egyptian Arabic today is as diverse as the country itself. Egyptian Arabic from Islamic to European conquests Arabic was spoken in the Sinai and Eastern Desert long prior to the advent of Islam, but spread to the rest of Egypt through the Islamic conquests in the seventh century. By the tenth century, it had largely displaced Coptic as the country’s primary language. Because…
