Language or Dialect? And Whats the Difference?

Just like the rest of us, the creation of my Essay 2 Language Research Paper is well under-way. In my paper, I am looking at different features of different languages in order to better understand what makes certain languages more difficult to learn. One such language I am looking at is the Arabic Language. What makes the Arabic language so notoriously difficult to learn?

There are a number of reasons why Arabic is such a hard language to learn; two of the main reasons I've discovered are the divergent nature of Arabic dialects from one another, and the difficulty non-native speakers face when reading the unstressed vowels in Arabic writing.

When learning Arabic, generally students have to learn the standard variety of Arabic called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is very distinct from most of the modern dialects of Arabic; it is based on Biblical Arabic whereas the other forms of Arabic are simply based on the Arabic spoken in a given region (the Levant, Egypt, Gulf, North Africa, or Iraq just to name a few places associated with a dialect). The different dialects vary greatly from one another, and from MSA in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, and inflection. This begs the question then, if the different forms of Arabic can vary so greatly from one another, why are they all considered to be the same language instead of different languages?

The dialects of which the modern Arabic language consists all share a common lineage in Quranic Arabic (which is very similar to MSA, which is still used today). This strikes me as being similar to how French, Spanish, and Italian all share a common lineage in Vulgar Latin. French, Spanish, and Italian exist on a linguistic continuum, meaning that speakers of all three languages can understand one another to varying degrees based on natural proximity to one another; this is similar to the relationship between all the different modern dialects of Arabic. The different Romance Languages spoken in Western Europe today share similar vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but as you travel around the areas in which these languages are spoken you can clearly see vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation shift from country to country, or from municipality to municipality; and the same is true with the modern dialects of Arabic. So why are Spanish, French, and Italian considered languages but all the dozens of varieties of Arabic are considered one language? This comes down to the way in which languages are defined by linguistics.

In the field of modern linguistics, there is no one universal, solid definition for what exactly a language is. As in biology with the classifications of Organisms, in linguistics, the dividing lines between languages are totally arbitrary. Something is considered a language because enough people all decide it fits the broad, negotiable criteria suited to define a language. Arabic is considered one language and not several because it is what Arabic speakers, and linguists, have decided to believe. French, Spanish, and Italian are all different languages, again, because it is a commonly held belief. The dividing lines between languages and dialects are totally subjective, and can easily be argued in the present and renovated throughout time.

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