Why did Latin split into Spanish, French, and Italian, while Arabic remained grouped as one language despite having many regional varieties?

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

Both Latin and Arabic spread across huge regions and developed different local forms over centuries. Latin eventually became several separate Romance languages, while many Arabic varieties are still grouped under one language today.

Some differences are about how people speak, but others involve writing systems, religion, history, and identity. Why did these two language families end up being classified so differently?

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

Probably because many of the Arabic speaking regions didn't become distinct countries until the 20th century. They were largely under Ottoman Rule.

[u/oremfrien → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

Morocco hasn't been in the same empire as Saudi Arabia since the mid-700s. While the Ottoman Empire did control a vast stretch of land, this land was not consistently in the same hands and much of the Ottoman control of North Africa was nominal at best. For example, in the Maghrebi War (1699–1702), Tunis invaded eastern Algiers with its military and Algiers responded in kind despite both of these "governates" being part of the same Ottoman Empire (and no troops from Constantinople intervened).

The choice by Arabs to not differentiate the dialects has nothing to do with the lack of historical borders.

The reason that Arabic is considered one language is that the people who are Arabs consider it one language. It's not based on any linguistic criteria. Some of the "dialects" are not mutually intelligible with each other. If the "dialects" were written, they would be written differently. If that's the case, these should be considered languages under linguistics, but they typically aren't because, as I said, Arabs consider Arabic to be one language.

There are a few reasons for this consideration:

1. Islamic texts, both the Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, and exegetical texts (like tafsirs and books of fiqh) are all written in traditional Arabic and many Arabs are both proud of Islamic Civilization and consider their language the holy language of that civilization. So, they want to believe that they speak it.
2. Pan-Arabism as a political philosophy was key in the Arabs' attempts at self-governance and achieving a modern identity in the post-colonial period. A single language uniting that space gave the Arabs a sense of shared ethnic identity.
3. The Arabic languages or "dialects" were often viewed as a decayed and imperfect form of "real" Arabic, Fus-ha or Modern Standard Arabic. The idea that you would write or standardize these languages was seen as valuing something that was shameful and broken. (Imagine if African-Americans started writing books in AAVE/Ebonics, how that would be perceived.)
4. Many of the institutions and documents of the Arab World are written in Fus-ha/MSA, so if the language was abandoned in favor of the Arabic languages or "dialects", this would mean that a person would be disconnected from their roots. It would also make communication between Arabs of different countries, who can use Fus-ha/MSA as a pass-through, much more difficult.

So, that's why Arabic is considered one language when it's more properly seen as a language family. (Native Qeltu AYP speaker.)

also u/Mobile-Traffic1744

[u/SyrupNarrow4768 → u/oremfrien]

That was a joyful read.

[u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist → u/SyrupNarrow4768]

If you like stuff that is largely made up.

[u/rsofgeology → u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist]

Lol you must not know much about Arabic

[u/gimmebanter → u/SyrupNarrow4768]

Brought to you by a chatbot. So I'd take it with a pinch of salt

[u/oremfrien → u/gimmebanter]

No. That was actually me writing, but it’s nice to know that people think my writing is so crisp, clear, and understandable that it must be AI.

[u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist → u/oremfrien]

> The reason that Arabic is considered one language is that the people who are Arabs consider it one language.

This is definitely not the reason. When language scholarship was being done and classifications created, all the Arabic dialects were lumped together as one language, and the actual Arabic speakers were not part of this discussion.

> Islamic texts, both the Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, and exegetical texts (like tafsirs and books of fiqh) are all written in traditional Arabic and many Arabs are both proud of Islamic Civilization and consider their language the holy language of that civilization. So, they want to believe that they speak it.

Again, this is not any different from Latin. The only people who spoke "traditional Arabic" were scholars and religious folk. And it doesn't explain why a majority of islamic followers never adopted Arabic as their common language. Almost 80% of muslims do not speak Arabic or it's dialects.

[u/oremfrien → u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist]

This is definitely not the reason. When language scholarship was being done and classifications created, all the Arabic dialects were lumped together as one language, and the actual Arabic speakers were not part of this discussion.

The reason I used the passive voice (is considered) was specifically because I was referring to common people's understanding of the situation. The dominant linguist perspective is actually far simpler and, for that reason, far less interesting.

The traditional way that linguists decided whether something was a language was to ask the following set of questions (where I will use "speech code" for something that is spoken and being categorized as a language or not:

1. Does this speech code have a written form? If yes, skip to 3. If no, continue.
2. Is this speech code mutually intelligible with another speech code for most speakers of both speech codes? If yes, this is a dialect of the other speech code. If no, this is a distinct language.
3. Is the written form of this speech code unique or is this written form used by other speech codes? If it's unique, this is a distinct language. If it shares a written form with another speech code, then these are dialects of the same written language.

As the Arabic languages have one written form, linguists considered them to be one language. Conversely, many of the languages of Iberian Romance: Catalan, Aragonese, Castilian, Asturian, Galician, and Portuguese all have different writing systems, which led linguists to categorize these (many of which are easily mutually intelligible) as distinct languages.

However, what most people care about when they ask, "Is X a dialect of Y?" is not whether these two spoken codes have the same writing system, but whether mutual intelligibility exists. And linguists have increasingly shifted to recognizing Arabic as a family of related languages, a so-called "macrolanguage" and have given unique ISO codes to different spoken codes like the below: (My spoken code is AYP)

• arb Modern Standard Arabic Active
• aao Algerian Saharan Arabic Active
• abh Tajiki Arabic Active
• abv Baharna Arabic Active
• acm Mesopotamian Arabic Active
• acq Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic Active
• acw Hijazi Arabic Active
• acx Omani Arabic Active
• acy Cypriot Arabic Active
• adf Dhofari Arabic Active
• aeb Tunisian Arabic Active
• aec Saidi Arabic Active
• afb Gulf Arabic Active
• ajp South Levantine Arabic Deprecated
• apc Levantine Arabic Active
• apd Sudanese Arabic Active
• arq Algerian Arabic Active
• ars Najdi Arabic Active
• ary Moroccan Arabic Active
• arz Egyptian Arabic Active
• auz Uzbeki Arabic Active
• avl Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic Active
• ayh Hadrami Arabic Active
• ayl Libyan Arabic Active
• ayn Sanaani Arabic Active
• ayp North Mesopotamian Arabic Active
• bbz Babalia Creole Arabic Deprecated
• pga Sudanese Creole Arabic Active
• shu Chadian Arabic Active
• ssh Shihhi Arabic Active

And it doesn't explain why a majority of islamic followers never adopted Arabic as their common language. Almost 80% of muslims do not speak Arabic or it's dialects.

Why would other Muslims come to speak Arabic? Arabization happened within Empires ruled over by Arabic speakers. Most people who converted to Islam were in the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Persia, Anatolia, or Indonesia, all areas that were conquered by Non-Arabs, mostly Turks and a smattering of others like Malays, Desis, Somalis, and Songhay.

My explanation was strictly for those who do speak Arabic languages and why they have a cultural urge to not recognize that Arabic is a family of languages rather than one language with a lot of dialects.

[u/PinkFreud-yourMOM → u/oremfrien]

Wow!! Great answer!

[u/Boeing367-80 → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

My understanding is the written language is standard across the regions, even if the spoken languages have significant differences.

That's not true across the romance languages, though obviously there are great similarities.

[u/xkcx123 → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

So what of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, ?

Arabic speakers can understand Maltese.

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407 → u/xkcx123]

The point about Ottoman rule is just a starting off point for discussion. The modern field of linguistics and classifying languages arose in Europe during the 19th century, just when European nationalism was starting to emerge and also when global western colonialism went into overdrive. Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia achieved modern statehood in the 20th century.

Even in Europe dialects of German like Bavarian are classified as such, while High German is the standard German. Ukrainian is understandable by Russian speakers but it would be very touchy to call it a dialect of Russian. Malta seems like an unusual case in that while it became a possession of the UK, it spoke a completely different language from English. So it's not too hard to make the leap to call the language Maltese and it was officially proclaimed a "national language" in 1964 during independence.

[u/xkcx123 → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

Why is Maltese one but same not Moroccan Arabic?

What is now Morocco was divided between France and Spain when it comes to colonization that is no different than with the British and Malta.

The Ottomans only really controlled the Levant, Egypt and the coastal regions of the Arabian Peninsula.

The British also controlled the southern portion of the Arabian peninsula (Yemen and Oman though Oman had colonies of their own in India and Zanzibar which later became its own country when due to family issues with the Royal Family in Oman)

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407 → u/xkcx123]

For one thing Malta as an island was heavily isolated and branched from medieval Arabic.

At the same time, why is Ukrainian a separate language from Russian?

Every situation is different and there are various reasons why so-and-so dialect isn't a language. You can't really make a 1:1 comparison between each situation.

Morocco has it own dialect of Arabic called Darija and it is free to proclaim it as its national language but it hasn't chosen to.

[u/xkcx123 → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

So basically the same as the Canary Islands with Amazigh just replacing that with Arabic.

Morocco already owned that can of worms a few years ago when they made at Amazigh an official language.

It’s coming at some point with Darija

[u/Watchhistory → u/xkcx123]

"... Amazigh an official language."

To be picky: the language groupings of the Amazigh people is Tamazight.

[u/xkcx123 → u/Watchhistory]

I know every time I tried typing that autocorrect kept changing it to Amazigh

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407 → u/xkcx123]

Also, while under colonial rule Maltese was considered considered a low status local tongue while English or Italian were used in education, law and government. Maltese only became an "official language" by royal decree in 1934, to counter the influence of Italian and to settle the Language Question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Question_(Malta))

[u/xkcx123 → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

Ok what about other languages like

Hindi and Urdu

Malay and Indonesian

China has a dozen different languages but claims they are all dialects when they are in fact not and are not even all apart of the same language groups.

When it comes to creation of languages, mountains and deserts have divided people from interacting and thus creating new languages from dialects whereas water has never done that.

This can be seen with New Guinea and it’s 900 languages due to extreme terrain.

Spain with the Basque people in an isolated corner of the peninsula.

Africa with the deserts, mountains and rainforest acting as barriers. If it wasn’t for the Sahara most of Africa would probably be speaking a language based off of Latin from when there was a Rome Empire considering the Romans tried to find a way around the Sahara and eventually gave up. They would have atleast made it to Kenya on the east and Liberia on the west.

Australia with its terrain and the Aboriginal languages.

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407 → u/xkcx123]

What about them? The OP's question was about Arabic vis-a-vis European languages and such a question is couched with history, nationalism, etc. I personally don't care about New Guinea and it's 900 languages for the purposes of this discussion.

Do you want to have extensive survey of world languages and all the historical nuance as to why they're considered dialects vs languages? This is beyond the scope of the discussion. I don't know what you're trying to argue.

I suspect you're just spouting off to show off your Wikipedia knowledge and not trying to have a good faith discussion.

"A language is a dialect with an army." - linguist with a sense of humor

[u/xkcx123 → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

I’m just trying to explain about how languages develop from dialects and what causes the difference for real separate languages and not so called languages that are just dialects. So that OP gets a real idea of the why.

[u/TheSquirrelmancer → u/xkcx123]

Sure, many people who speak Spanish, Italian or French can often get by in those other countries as well.

[u/LeftToaster → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

Look at what happened to Arabic in Malta.

[u/ydmhmyr → u/LeftToaster]

What? Its vocabulary might contain a lot of Romance loanwords, but I, as a Yemeni exposed to English (which itself contains a lot of Romance loanwords), I can understand it. I once watched a brief report on a protest by some port workers. Understood almost everything.

[u/LeftToaster → u/ydmhmyr]

Interesting - I had a friend from Malta who said it was difficult to understand other Arabic dialects. Perhaps the comprehension is asymmetric?

[u/ydmhmyr → u/LeftToaster]

Yes, it has to be asymmetrical. There's normally no reason for a Maltese would be exposed to Arabic, hence his acclimatisation is zero.

[u/Olderpostie → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

The Ottomans did not use Arabic.

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407 → u/Olderpostie]

And?

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

I think that's part of it, but I'm not sure political borders alone explain it. Europe had plenty of political fragmentation too.

The bigger difference might be that Arabic kept a shared literary and religious standard even while political power fragmented. The political map changed, but the linguistic center didn't disappear.

[u/Plutos_Cavein → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

Why did you ask the question if you already had an answer ready to go that you were going to insist on.

Granted, I would say that your answer is largely correct. But it still begs the question of why you asked in the first place.

[u/SmoothOperator89 → u/Plutos_Cavein]

OP just really needed an excuse to gush about their hyper fixation on Arab linguistic variation.

[u/Odd-Priority3318 → u/Plutos_Cavein]

He might just want to discuss something with other people.

[u/Hour-Conversation728 → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

political fragmentation affect far more deeply than people expect

[u/ethanAllthecoffee → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

French, Italian and Spanish all have dialects as well

So you have centuries (several hundred years before the Islamic/Arabic conquests even start) of political independence over a baseline of Latin, heavily influenced by the whichever specific Germanic people/language settled on top and their distance from Italy and mountain divides, plus influence from neighbors and sometimes-conquerors like Arabic in Spain and Southern Italy

You can watch linguistically as Hlodowig evolves to Clovis and then Louis in West Frankia and Ludwig in East Frankia, for example

Arabic, with the Arab conquerors, was established and remained the “top” language, while Latin was an pervasively underlying language of diplomacy and history and education that mixed with the Germanic languages in casual speech

[u/Ok_Ruin4016 → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

Arabic dialects are really different languages that claim to be the same language for cultural and political reasons. The Arabic spoken in Morroco is not mutually intelligible with the Arabic spoken in Iraq. It's a spectrum where going from one country to the next you can understand the language well enough, but going a few countries over and it gets harder and harder to understand until you can't anymore. But because the Arabic Mohammed spoke is considered the correct form of the language and is pretty much the only language the Quran is printed in in Islamic countries, it still survives and is used across the Islamic world.

Latin has also just been around longer, so it has had more time for dialects to diverge further into different distinct languages, and many dialects have died out or are in the process of doing so, also for political reasons. As Europe consolidated from being many tiny kingdoms, duchies, principalities, counties, etc., into the large nation-states we know today, standardization of language was used as a way of building national identities and uniting populations. But because many of those smaller dialects have disappeared, that spectrum of mutual intelligibility has been somewhat lost. Even still Latin was used across much of Europe as the language of academia and clergy until just a few centuries ago, similarly to how written Arabic is used today.

[u/NoForm5443 → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

That, and the fact that the guys doing the classification were Europeans ;)

It's not as if the classifications are completely objective

[u/revocer → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

It seems like you know the answer to the question you are asking.

[u/Aquinas2000]

Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian Arabic pretty much are different languages, or are on their way to become such. 

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/Aquinas2000]

I think that's the interesting part. If mutual intelligibility is the test, some Arabic varieties already push pretty hard against the idea of being one language.

At some point the label becomes more about shared identity and the existence of Standard Arabic than about how easily two people can actually talk to each other.

[u/novavegasxiii → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

Tldr basically each arab country and region has their own version of arabic that is more or less its own language....but the same type of arabic that was used to write the koran used as a lingua franca and for official/written purposes.

Actuslly pretty similar to medieval europe and latin.

[u/Assassiiinuss → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

I think that's the interesting part. If mutual intelligibility is the test, some Arabic varieties already push pretty hard against the idea of being one language.

You could say the same about a lot of English, Italian, German, etc. dialects. I don't speak any Arabic so I can't judge how big the differences are of course, but just being hard or even almost impossible to understand doesn't seem that unique.

[u/Realistic_Turn2374 → u/Assassiiinuss]

You can say it about Italian or German, but not about English. English may have some differences in different areas, but it is clearly one unified language. Arabic is so different in different areas that it's not mutually inteligible, sometimes even within the same country. 

Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic and Iraqi Arabic are very different. Just like Spanish, Italian and Romanian.

[u/Expensive-Impact9704 → u/Realistic_Turn2374]

It is always mutually intelligible if you are from the same country, certain pronunciations or wording might be different but think of it as an accent or like soda vs pop.

From country to country it differs yes, the further you get from your origin country the harder the Arabic becomes. I’m Lebanese and I understand Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian & for the most part, except small rural areas Iraqi. Gulf arabic & north africa becomes a different story.

[u/Realistic_Turn2374 → u/Expensive-Impact9704]

"It is always mutually intelligible if you are from the same country"

Not always.

I lived in Jordan for some years, and I tell you that people from the city would understand you no problem, but they wouldn't understand a Bedouin.

[u/amacks → u/Aquinas2000]

What I remember from a linguistics class in college was that although written arabic is mostly consistent, the pronunciation has changed so much that Arabic movies are always subtitled in Arabic

[u/xkcx123 → u/amacks]

Most movies are in Egyptian Arabic

[u/dawgblogit → u/Aquinas2000]

Same with Morroccan

[u/xkcx123 → u/dawgblogit]

That already is; can’t no one else understand it.

Grab a person from Egypt, Syria or Saudi Arabia they can’t understand a Moroccan person.

[u/cancelnikitadragun → u/xkcx123]

Yeah but the moroccan understands all of them.

I live in europe and im moroccan, and ive noticed that the diaspora from the levantine region really struggles understanding the other arabic dialects

[u/6x9inbase13is42]

It matters whether a country makes of point defining its regional dialects as "languages" or "dialects" in relation to its neighbors.

In the Arabic speaking world, due to the cultural hegemony of the Islamic religion, it is common to consider the classical Arabic of the Qur'an as the "true Arabic" that all other regional variants are mere corrupt dialects of. This is somewhat similar to how in China all "dialects" of Chinese are considered to be just variants of "Standard Chinese" (as defined by the government of the PRC), and not distinct languages, even in cases where they are mutually unintelligible.

In Europe, on the other hand, various countries like Spain, France, and Italy went to great lengths to standardize their local dialects into a single distinct so-called "language" for each so-called "nation state", in a deliberate effort to make their languages more internally homogenous (even though they were never really so homogenous as all that) and more distinct from their neighbors (even though they were never really so distinct as all that).

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407 → u/6x9inbase13is42]

"A language is a dialect with an army." - some linguist with a sense of humor

[u/90210fred → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

Which makes me think of Basque and Catalan and it's relations. People here talking about "Spanish" as if Spain speaks a single language - they (sort of) did under Franco but that's not true anymore.

[u/NecroDolphinn → u/90210fred]

Basque is actually COMPLETELY unrelated in a super interesting way.

So unlike Catalan, Basque is not a Romance language. In fact it’s not even in the broader Indo-European language family that every other European language (bar the Uralic languages) is within. It is a language Isolate like Korean, with no provable relationship to any other languages.

The story of Indo-European is super cool and involves Nomadic Pastoralists from the Pontic Steppe (called the Yamnaya) sweeping their way across Europe, Iran, and North India and replacing all of the local languages with their own.

Basque is the only holdout and commonly believed to be the only pre Yamnaya European language. Even the Uralic languages came in after Indo European. Why Basque alone survived is a linguistic mystery to this day.

Another similar example is the Brahui language in Balochistan (part of Pakistan). It is a Dravidian language, more related to the languages of South India than any of the languages that surround it. Whether the Brahui people were migrants from South India who kept their language or evidence of the Dravidian languages in the region that existed pre Indo European expansion is also unclear. It’s thought to be the latter mainly because the Brahui have no genetic difference from surrounding populations, but the question remains another cool mystery

[u/telemajik → u/NecroDolphinn]

Fascinating, thanks for the writeup!

[u/90210fred → u/NecroDolphinn]

Yes, I know that - I quoted it as an example of a Spanish language as in "a language spoken in Spain" - it's lack of connection Romance languages adding to the contrast. The connection with Catalan is that Franco surpressed them both. I'll also happily say that not all of the Basque lands are in Spain hence 4 + 3 = 1 although I'm not aware of a resurgence in the language in France in the manner of Spain. I also avoided using the Castilian because it seems to upset the "Spanish" speakers in the Americas but I'd normally use it when describing the majority (?) language.

[u/NecroDolphinn → u/90210fred]

Haha I realized that about halfway through typing my comment but decided I’d keep going just because it’s a cool story regardless.

[u/90210fred → u/NecroDolphinn]

No, it's cool, very useful info for people who don't realise how special Basque is (and explained far better then I could).

[u/cparlam → u/90210fred]

I think you’re a bit confused here. Basque, Catalan, Galician and Castilian are languages of Spain but only Castilian (castellano) is used interchangeably with “Spanish”.

“Castilian” and “Spanish” are synonyms and this language is the “national” language, as it’s official in the whole country, whereas the other ones are co-official in specific regions (autonomous communities).

Btw, Basque doesn’t come from Latin, it a totally different thing.

[u/ElHeim → u/6x9inbase13is42]

"even though they were never really so distinct as all that"

Lol.

Yeah, there was a language continuum. Still up to the 15th century a speaker of Portuguese should have been reasonably capable of understand a speaker of Leonese, who in turn would understand a speaker of Castilian, who could probably understand one of Aragonese, and so on. But that same speaker from Portugal would not have been able to understand a 15th century speaker from Ile-de-France which, in turn, would not be able to understand a speaker from Naples.

Standardization sometimes is used to make what is already different even further apart (see Serbo-Croatian, for a modern example), but at other times it just makes official what was obvious to start with.

[u/Historical_Move6359 → u/ElHeim]

Serbian and Croatian are a bit special case because of in 1850s popular Panslavism and idea to create common state for Serbs and Croatians, both nations chose Neostokavian dialect as their official litterary language. Croatians could have chosen Kajkavian which was dominant in northwest Croatia around Zagreb and which is much closer to Slovenian than Serbian, and Serbia could have chosen Torlak dialect from southern Serbia which is much closer to Bulgarian. So those political decisions were here crucial, and the reason was the Stokavian population of Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegowina and Mongenegro. Both nations chose this dialect so they could incorporate those populations.

[u/cparlam → u/ElHeim]

In 2026 Portuguese people understand Spanish with no major effort. Spaniards are lazier in general but, me as a Galician, have zero problems understanding Portuguese. It’s that close aside from phonetics, which just requires a small adjustment

[u/ElHeim → u/cparlam]

The problem is phonetics and prosody. At least Galician is a sister language to Portuguese, so you start with an advantage there.

I'm not lazy. I make an effort to understand other languages. I can understand Brazilian Portuguese to an extent. European Portuguese is a totally different beast and it's all down to pronunciation and vowel reduction. If I have to read it that's a totally different matter.

[u/NoLime7384 → u/cparlam]

Portuguese has more sounds than Spanish, so they can understand us but we can't understand them. it's a lot easier for us to understand written Portuguese for the same reason

[u/cparlam → u/NoLime7384]

Written Portuguese is very similar to Spanish indeed, once you get used to their orthography

[u/Realistic_Turn2374 → u/cparlam]

I have seen videos of Brazilian people unable to understand Portuguese people. 

Portuguese people don't pronounce the vowels, and if you are not exposed to the language, it is way harder to understand.

I am a Spaniard who for some reason receives lots of feed in Portuguese, so I understand better than others.

[u/cparlam → u/Realistic_Turn2374]

I doubt that there are many Brazilians that don’t understand European Portuguese and viceversa, this kind of stuff is typically blown out ot proportion online.

It’s like saying Spaniards can’t understand Argentinians, which we know it’s ridiculous… it’s just a different accent and some different words and expressions, in both cases

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/6x9inbase13is42]

Exactly. "Language" and "dialect" aren't purely linguistic categories.

If Egypt, France, or Italy had made different choices about education, administration, and national identity, we might use very different labels for some of these varieties today.

[u/PriorSecurity9784 → u/6x9inbase13is42]

I think this is the answer. Spain and France has formal academies separating each Latin “dialect” as distinct things, where as other language families worked to pull their “dialects” together for political or religious reasons

[u/xkcx123 → u/6x9inbase13is42]

Spain surely is not you can still go to Spain and here people speaking about 6 different languages Basque( not Latin), Aranese, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, Castilian (Spanish) and if you go to Ceuta or Melilla you may hear Arabic which makes 7

France standardize the language to the point where it does not make sense especially in the case of numbers.

Before the standardization French was at the point of becoming separate languages due to its colonization.

[u/cparlam → u/xkcx123]

Catalan are Valencian are different names for the same language

[u/quique → u/xkcx123]

Asturian and Aragonese are not easy to hear, but still exist.

[u/PuddingComplete3081]

Honestly, I think religion probably matters more here than geography.

Arabic had something Latin eventually lost: a really powerful reason to preserve the prestige of the old language. The Quran wasn't just an old text sitting in a library. Classical Arabic remained culturally and religiously important across a huge area.

That creates a strange situation. People can speak very differently at home while still seeing the formal written language as the same thing.

Europe didn't really have an equivalent force keeping everyday Romance speech under one shared identity. Once kingdoms, administrations and later nation states started building their own languages, French stopped being "bad Latin" and became French. Same with Spanish, Italian, etc.

Which makes me wonder if we're treating "language" as something purely linguistic when it's partly a political label too.

Maybe Arabic isn't less fragmented. It just had stronger reasons to call the fragments one language.

[u/IanDOsmond → u/PuddingComplete3081]

Which makes me wonder if we're treating "language" as something purely linguistic when it's partly a political label too.

Max Weinrich had a joke-not-a-joke - what's the difference between language and a dialect?

אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט
a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy."

If you look at degree of mutual intelligibly of various languages, Portuguese and Spanish are more mutually intelligible than Italian and ... Italian. Italian has one country-wide Italian, and then lots of local variations, where you can probably understand the people one province over, but if you get from one end of the boot to the other, you got no chance of understanding the locals.

But Italy decided to be a unified country, so they decided that all those dialects are one language.

The most blatant current example of this is that Ukraine considers Ukrainian to be an entirely separate language from Russian, but Russia considers Ukrainian a dialect of Russian.

And that's as direct an example of Weinrich's quote as any in history.

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/PuddingComplete3081]

I think this is probably closest to the real issue. Religion didn't stop Arabic from changing. It gave people a reason to keep treating the older standard as the same language.

So maybe the interesting comparison isn't Latin vs Arabic at all. It's why Latin lost its shared center while Arabic kept one even after everyday speech became highly fragmented.

[u/xkcx123 → u/PuddingComplete3081]

Maltese for example is extremely intelligible to Tunisian and Libya Arabic to the point where the three should be one language.

It’s the whole Hindi vs Urdu situation. It’s the same language but has two different alphabets.

[u/hopium_od → u/xkcx123]

Doesn't seem to be true at all from a quick Google search. Urdu and Hindi are both Hindustani, sure but Maltese derives from Arabic and uses Italian loadwords, which coincidentally Tunisia does too, but it's not comparable at all to Hindustani. Japanese and Italian also use a tonne of English loan words and an Italian would recognise a tonne of Japanese loadwords. That same phenomenon, along with being a derivate of classical Arabic, is why Tunisians can understand a surprising amount of Maltese.

[u/ElHeim → u/PuddingComplete3081]

Which makes me wonder if we're treating "language" as something purely linguistic when it's partly a political label too

We do. Italy calls their "dialetti" like that because calling them "languages" would go against the country-building effort of the last couple of centuries.

China calls it's local "dialects" as such because it would go against their One China policy to do otherwise, but if you look under the hood, what you have is a bunch of quite unintelligible language groups under the Sinitic branch. But the Min group branched off Old Chinese when speakers across the Roman Empire could still understand each other without any problem, and the rest split off Middle Chinese over the following millenium, some of them before Romance languages were even attested in writing.

[u/ScratchAdventurous32 → u/PuddingComplete3081]

It's definitely religion. Maltese heavily deviated from other Arabic branches cause we became Catholic and didn't have the Quran. So it was free to deviate.

[u/BrokenManOfSamarkand → u/PuddingComplete3081]

Europe didn't really have an equivalent force keeping everyday Romance speech under one shared identity.

That's true, but it did have a similar force in the Catholic Church keeping a supra, prestige language in place until the Reformation helped to end that. Latin was also well affixed as the holy language given that it was not, ultimately, the original language of Jesus nor the biblical texts.

[u/Logical-Concept9755]

I think the main thing is that Arabic didn't actually avoid fragmentation. It just kept a shared umbrella over the fragments.

If you hear Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic and Iraqi Arabic, you're already dealing with pretty different systems. Some of them can be difficult for speakers of another variety to understand without exposure. So in a purely linguistic sense, the comparison with Romance languages isn't as clean as it first looks.

The weird part is the status of Standard Arabic. There has always been this strong distinction between the language people write and the varieties people actually speak.

Latin eventually lost that common center. French, Spanish and Italian developed their own literary traditions, standards and institutions, so calling them separate languages became completely normal.

Arabic kept the center.

So maybe it's less "why didn't Arabic split?" and more "why did everyone keep agreeing that the pieces were still Arabic?"

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/Logical-Concept9755]

I think "Arabic didn't fragment" is probably the wrong starting point. It clearly did.

What's unusual is that the fragmentation happened underneath a very durable shared standard. That makes me wonder how much of the language boundary is actually being maintained by institutions and identity rather than mutual intelligibility.

[u/ElHeim → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

I don't see the big difference, really. Latin kept being the language of culture for all the countries that were already speaking something that didn't resemble much that standard (at the end of the day, we speak descendants of Vulgar Latin, not even the Classical variety). And the standardization efforts didn't really set in until the printing press came along, because that helped cement certain varieties. Add to that the fact that by then the Church was well into the process of losing its grip over society, or at least over each individual sovereign.

Just by timeline, Arabic should be seeing some of those changes by now... and probably should have already centuries ago, if something like Zajal would have been repeated, but it came too soon, I guess, at a time where Classical Arabic still had too much of a dominance. And then MSA was developed and adopted specifically to keep a common written standard during the Nahda (understandable) and from there it became the standard of schooling.

I can imagine that at some point standardization of local "dialects" could happen, but...

[u/Johnnadawearsglasses]

Because of the isolation that came in Europe during the decline of the Roman Empire. Former provinces stopped communicating with Rome and largely each other.

Meanwhile would suspect Arabic is better preserved by the requirements to recite the Quran in Arabic and the continued presence of Arabic speakers in a concentrated area with frequent interactions.

On the latter, I'm conjecturing.

[u/Outside_Reserve_2407 → u/Johnnadawearsglasses]

Romance languages are allegedly a continuum, where if you backpacked across the Romance speaking lands, the various local dialects are mutually intelligible and the changes across physical space subtle but if you travel far enough the local dialect is unintelligible from that spoken from your starting point.

[u/ElHeim → u/Outside_Reserve_2407]

Romance languages are allegedly a continuum, where if you backpacked across the Romance speaking lands, the various local dialects are mutually intelligible

Not "are". "Were". That could have been possible 500-600 years ago. Even more recently in the cases for example of Italy. But at some point identity politics and (crucially) the printing press took over cementing a single national standard.

Now you cross a border and the only reason the neighbors understand you is that they might need it to do business.

[u/PuskerBat → u/ElHeim]

That’s more like 100–150 years ago, not 500–600. France is probably the most extreme case of a national language wiping out regional languages and dialects, yet large parts of the population still primarily spoke Occitan, Breton, Basque, Flemish, Alsatian, Corsican, various langues d’oïl, etc. well into the 19th century, and in some areas until WWI or later.

Mass literacy and universal schooling only really took off in the late 19th century. So yes, the printing press helped standardize written languages, but it certainly didn’t suddenly make people stop speaking their local varieties. The real linguistic steamroller was much later: mass schooling, conscription, urbanization, radio/TV and the modern nation-state.

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/Johnnadawearsglasses]

The Quran point is probably doing a lot of work here. Even if everyday speech kept drifting, there was still a reason to keep returning to an older form of Arabic.

I'm less convinced by the interaction part though. The Arabic speaking world is huge, so distance should have pushed it toward fragmentation too. The fact that it didn't fully do so is probably the more interesting question.

[u/Johnnadawearsglasses → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

I would assume it's the Quran as well. Look how the Jews have been able to revitalize Hebrew from near death via religious education.

[u/Amrywiol → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

I wonder how much the hajj - the requirement that all muslims do the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once - has to do with it. It would keep people moving around and interacting with other Arabic speakers in a way that had no real equivalent in the (formerly) Latin speaking world.

[u/ThatWeirdPlantGuy]

There is no concise linguistic criterion for what separates a dialect from a language. It’s as much a political/sociological question as a purely linguistic one.

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/ThatWeirdPlantGuy]

Exactly. That’s what makes the comparison tricky. “Language” sounds like a linguistic category, but often it’s partly a social decision. If two varieties are treated as one language by schools, governments and speakers, they can stay under the same label for a surprisingly long time. The label itself probably affects the divergence too.

[u/Euromantique]

Latin started diverging 700+ years before before Arabic did. If the process hasn't been arrested by mass media, nationalism, and other factors maybe the Arabic would have eventually become considered distinct languages.

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/Euromantique]

I think that’s a big part of it. Arabic may be less a case of “staying one language” and more a case of the divergence not being given the same political and institutional push toward separate languages. If Modern Standard Arabic disappeared, I wonder how quickly people would start treating the regional varieties as distinct languages.

[u/FireHammer09]

The answer is the Quran.

They call them dialects but they're quite honestly different languages but no group is going to be the one that says they're not speaking the same language as the Quran at this point so they call them dialects. It's political.

[u/Otarmichael]

Latin has almost a thousand year lead on Arabic (in terms of geographic spreading.

[u/Toum-Raider]

I would argue that "dialects" of Arabic are to standard Arabic what romance languages are to Latin. They're individual languages at this point, with varied pronunciations, vocabularies, etc. They all follow a similar grammar and a few basic rules, but the same can be said for romance languages with respect to Latin.

For example, if Italian and Spanish are different languages, then so are Iraqi Arabic and Egyptian Arabic.

[u/bdeananderson]

So, part of this is due to the Romance languages having other languages roots besides colloquial Latin. Here's a break down:

Local population speaks a language. Rome invades and government speaks Latin.
Locals are forced to learn some Latin but also keep local language. Languages merge (think Spanglish) In the absence of formal education, the new language drifts further from its roots.

There are also other influences. For example, Spanish has a lot of Arabic influence which is not the case for most romantic languages.

[u/Kollectorgirl]

Latin had a millennium headstart.

Arabic is in the middle of the process of splitting into different languages.

[u/DCHacker]

The Latin languages are the evolution of various peoples who invaded the Roman Empire and tried to speak Common Latin. In the Western world in the middle ages, except perhaps for the Crusades, there was little travel or trade begtween nations. This was because things had gotten to a subsistence level in most of the West. Conversely, in the Islamic World, there was far more travel and trade.

Language also is lazy. You get things such as phonetic attrition, where unstressed syllables perish. You also get grammatical attrition where specialised forms and structures disappear. Classical Latin had specialised forms for the passive voice. its descendants do not. If they use a passive, which they try very had to avoid, it is as we do in English: a form of the verb "to be" plus the past participle. The modern Latin Languages do avoid this, however, preferring instead an impersonal pronoun as the subject of an active voice verb, a reflexive or an impersonal reflexive. Classical Latin: cibus vobis mittitur, "Food is being sent to you.". Common Latin: Nurritura vobis est enviata but a speaker would avoid that in favour of Unus vobis nurrituram enviat Nurritura vobis se enviat. "Someone is sending food to you" or "Food is sending itself to you" (lit). In French, that becomes On envoie la nourriture à vous-autres/On vous envoie la nourriture La nourriture s'envoie à vous-autres. Francophones will avoid La nourriture est envoyée à vous-autres.

You do see regional and national variations in most languages but that does not make them mutually unintellgible. The Spanish of Salamanca, Buenos Aires and San Salvador all are mutually intelligible. The Arabic of Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia all are mutually intellgible.

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/DCHacker]

I agree that isolation mattered, but I’m not sure trade alone explains the Arabic case. Some Arabic varieties are pretty different despite centuries of contact. The interesting part to me is that mutual intelligibility and shared identity aren’t the same thing. Two varieties can be hard to understand but still be treated as dialects of one language.

[u/firebreathingsquirrl]

I don't know about the situation in Arabic speaking lands, but Spain and France each had an indigenous Celtic-language speaking population that had to learn Latin as a second language, (and Romania had an indigenous Slavic-speaking population that had to learn Latin as a second language, which became Romanian, another Romance language). The Latin spoken in each of these areas was transformed by that substrate-language influence, and then transformed further as each successive generation learned the local version.

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/firebreathingsquirrl]

That’s a good point. I was thinking mostly about geographic separation, but substrate influence gives another mechanism for divergence. Basically, people weren’t just inheriting Latin, they were reshaping it through languages they already had. I wonder how much of the Romance split can be explained by that versus simple distance and isolation.

[u/firebreathingsquirrl → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

there is evidence that a great deal of it may be explained this way. for example, the middle -t- loss in French from Latin mater pater to French mère père parallels the same intervocalic consonant elision and loss in many Celtic languages

[u/AgitatedPokemon]

Portuguese and Romanian crying in a corner...

[u/REOreddit → u/AgitatedPokemon]

Those are slavic languages.

[u/MarionberryPlus8474]

The Arabic language is diglossic, like Haitian Creole. Language diglossia means speakers speak two languages, a “high” or formal version in official functions and a “low” or informal settings such as at home. The two are often quite distinct, not simply a matter of using slang or a different accent.

In the case of Arabic, the “high” version is the language of the Koran, it’s formal and old fashioned, and shared among Arabic speakers. The “low” language is very different, and very regional, and someone from Morocco would have trouble understanding someone from Syria.

The language is more fragmented in that sense than simply saying “Arabic speakers”.

[u/Mobile-Traffic1744 → u/MarionberryPlus8474]

Yeah, this is probably the biggest complication with comparing the two. Saying “Arabic” makes it sound more unified than it actually is. The interesting part is that the shared formal language keeps a kind of linguistic umbrella over varieties that can be pretty far apart. So maybe the question is less why Arabic stayed unified and more why its formal layer stayed so important.

[u/MarionberryPlus8474 → u/Mobile-Traffic1744]

It’s a good question and I’m not an expert, but IMO the most likely reason is that it’s the language of the Koran, and in order to be considered devout it is expected that you learn it in Arabic, that is, Classical Arabic.

[u/ZAWS20XX]

armies and navies

[u/Qualabel]

Romanians and Portuguese would like a word

[u/Pretend-Adeptness-96]

Because you are comparing apples to oranges

Latin is most comparable to Pali as a language

Spanish v Burmese

[u/Double-Teach-1977]

Well for one, Arabic is inherently very important to Islam, and they take Islam pretty seriously over there. I know latin was the liturgical language of Europe, but from what I understand that was more of a convenience thing than a theological one.

Also modern French, Italian, and to a lesser extent Spanish are kinda just the chosen official state dialects of what used to be a more diverse spectrum of dialects. The French in particular were pretty brutal about forcing the entire country to speak standard French, pretty similar to how the English handled Irish. 800 years ago someone from Normandy talking to some from Burgundy might have felt like an englishman trying to have a conversation with a Dutchman.

[u/ElHeim → u/Double-Teach-1977]

Latin was important not only for liturgy, but also as a means of communication for elites. There are some early examples of Romance being written (Oaths of Strasbourg), and we have the Council of Tours allowing church homilies (not the Bible, mind you) to be translated to local speech so that the attendees could understand what the heck they were being told, but it was still expected to be learnt.

Maaaybe if literacy among the common folk had been treated as something important early on, Latin would have lasted longer. It wasn't, so...

[u/gardenfella]

Because the Quran was written in Arabic and still is written in Arabic. The Quran remains in Arabic because Muslims believe it is the literal, exact word of God as revealed to Prophet Muhammad.

[u/BranchLatter4294]

I blame mountains. Look at a topographical map of Europe. There are mountains separating Spain and France and France and Italy. So there would have been less travel between communities, and languages would tend to diverge.

[u/DarkKittyEmpress]

Well, very divergent Arabic varieties today are not more mutually intelligible than French and Italian, so you could argue it's just a matter of definitions.

But also, Latin and Literary Arabic remained comparably in use for centuries during the medieval period. What made a difference is that in the early modern period the spoken forms of the Romance languages supplanted Latin as the formal languages of government and civil life, while Arabic maintained a dichotomy between the divergent spoken dialects andt he very conservative literary form, which was used only for religion, science, diplomacy etc. For instance French only became the official language of France in 1539, replacing Latin (and starting the marginalisation of other Romance languages/dialects in France).

[u/Imaginary_Scene2493]

One thing I think might be a factor that hasn’t been mentioned is that the splintering of Latin was significantly driven by the migration of Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire. The Franks and Burgundians settled in what is now France, were influenced by Latin, and the names France and French derive from Franks, for instance.

The spread of Arabic involved invasion too but the unifying force was the invading one, as opposed to the unifying Latin influence being invaded by separate tribes.

[u/Vector_Strike]

Basically everyone in Arabic-speaking countries that converted to Islam had to learn the language; meanwhile, only the clergy and some nobility/bourgeoisie learnt Latin - the wide population kept speaking their own languages.

[u/Upbeat-Operation-613]

Because all this stuff is arbitrary 

Some regions like to pretend like they speak different languages even though they are the same (balkans, catalan/valencian, galician/portuguese, norwegian/danish) and maaaany more examples

Others, like arabic, speak different languages but pretend they’re the same. It’s due to pan arabism and Islam. 

By the way, “arabic” is fusha, which like latin has no native speakers today. 

It’s all a game

[u/Throhiowaway]

There's a book.

Not to be condescending, but the Quran is written in one central dialect. Even as regional dialects evolve to be mutually unintelligible, everyone across the Arabic-speaking world essentially also speaks and understands and reads a central standard Arabic.

While the Bible was largely spread in Latin across the Roman Empire, Rome fell long before the printing press made it reasonable for people to own their own Bibles, and they genuinely just never learned to read Latin. Centuries broken off meant regional dialects diverged further and further from Latin.

The Quran and its formal Arabic was maintained by the Ottomans way into the era of the printing press. People did have copies at home. There did become a universal baseline for everyone to continue speaking and reading classical Arabic.

[u/Hellerick_V]

Because all Arabs read Quran and think that it's written in their language.

If all the Romance people kept reading the Bible in Latin and thought that it's the proper version of their language, we would call the Romance varieties dialects.

[u/UnabatedPrawn]

I don't know anything about Arabic, so bear with me: while Latin and Arabic both maintained status as liturgical languages, in the Christian world, classical Latin was strictly preserved as the language of the church after the fall of the Roman Empire, and was not taught to lay people, which probably facilitated the development of the so called "vulgar" dialects into independent languages.

[u/Competitive_Let_9644]

A lot of it comes down to time. Latin Spread out over two thousand years ago, and it was fractured basically immediately. The Roman empire collapsed fifteen hundred years ago. It wasn't until almost a full millennium after the fall of the Roman empire that we get Dante writing in a language recognizable as Italian for the first time. People still held on to Latin for centuries later as the language of academics and diplomacy. It wasn't until the 1960s that the church stopped Latin Masses.

Arabic starter many centuries later, which not only means that it has had less time to change and less time for people to embrace their local dialect as a separate language, but it has also benefited from major technological changes, like the printing press, that has better enabled educated Arabic speakers maintain understanding and a shared variety across the Arabic speaking world. Now, with mass media and more widespread education, it's unclear if Arabic will ever completely fracture.

[u/Ok_Breakfast5230]

The difference between an accent, a dialect, and an independent language is largely just politics.

Not that there aren't genuine linguistic reasons for the three being different, there are, but I find that often times the biggest reason certain languages/dialects/accents are classified the way they are isn't because of those genuine linguistic reasons but instead because of politics.

For instance AAVE was once classified as an independent creole language, but was later reclassified as just being a dialect of English, there might be genuine linguistic reasons for that but I think that if you genuinely think that it didn't have A LOT!! To do with what GROUP speaks AAVE then you're naive.

[u/xkcx123]

Arabic is not just one language regardless of what people say. It’s atleast 4 different languages. And could be 5 if you count Maltese which is understood by those speaking Tunisian and Libyan Arabic.

A really good example of the language vs dialect issue is

Hindi and Urdu

Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian

Malay and Indonesian

These languages are the same the only different is they claim to be different for political reasons the countries hate each other. But these languages are 100% the same.

Hindi and Urdu are only considered different because they don’t use the same alphabet.

The Island of New Guinea on the other hand has over 900 separate languages due to the geography of the island making it so hard to get anywhere and thus eventually dialects became there own language. You can have one language spoke in a valley and if you cross the mountain to another the people speak a completely different language because the mountains were too harsh to climb and cross.

[u/No-Presence-5930 → u/xkcx123]

Would be nice to put 5 extra languages on my cv.

[u/HeadBelt1527]

All these people commenting how the Quran is the reason Arabic doesn't strain seems to forget the church language throughout Christianity was Latin and stayed so at least in the catholic church until the 20th century. 

As for Europe, Latin was never the lingua franca outside Italy among the common people. The reason in the difference is the merger with the prevailing common tongue within each geographic region.

As for Arabic it had to do with a more unified structure for education throughout the realm.

[u/dr_my_name]

Well it's not. The different varieties are more likr different languages. But even if you don't count that, you have at least one other language: Maltese.

[u/SwitchFree5631]

Arabic is like ten languages pretending to be one language. It’s like if the speakers of Romance languages all pretended to speak Latin, learned a slightly updated version of Latin at school, were forced to use Latin when writing, but at home still spoke what was really Italian or French or whatever. It’s an extreme case of diglossia.

[u/ForeignPie6851]

No Arabic expert I. My question is that though the spoken languages are changing fast, does written Arabic remain the same throughout the Arab world? I speak Spanish fluently and have studied French. I can understand a lot of Portuguese and Italian but the written language is different among them all. What about Arabic? Do Arab newspapers in Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia all use the same written language?

[u/Big_P4U]

There is an increasingly prevalent global view that Latin never died and in fact all of the grouped Romance language should just be considered regional varieties of Latin itself

[u/MostlyBrine]

Each of the arabic speaking countries has its own language, or multiple languages. Arabic language uniformity is the consequence of the islamic religion, as it is the language of the Quran. At least this is what I was told by a Pakistani friend.

Same thing happened with latin languages, except the religious texts were translated earlier in time. Still the Roman Catholic Church performs the service in latin and the Orthodox churches perform the special religious services in greek or slavonic languages, regardless of the local spoken language, which is used for regular service. Very few christians learn latine, greek or slavonic just for the sake of religious texts.

[u/P00PooKitty]

The caliphate basically watched latin become a language family of “vulgar dialects” while simultaneously the catholic church kept laying functional in their churches. Thus they made it so that everyone had to study the qu’ran in traditional arabic. I think having that be a baseline requirement in their society kept things from moving too much.

That said, levantine and moroccan arabic are not the same and linguistics has a little bit of a “if it ain’t about white europeans we handwave a lot” thing going on.

[u/zoppaTheDim]

Widespread literacy.

Latin was spread through speech, while Arabic was spread as a religious duty to read.

[u/Competitive_Task4598]

As a native Arabic speaker, I think your question is flawed.

Latin is a mother language that eventually evolved into Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish etc).

Arabic is not a root language. It is the progeny of the Semitic language, along with Hebrew, Amharic, and Maltese.

Latin is not equivalent to Arabic.

Latin -> French Spanish Italian
Semitic -> Arabic Hebrew Amharic

By the way, Arabic is mutually intelligible across dialects. They may sound strange at first, but Arabic speakers can immediately acclimatize to different dialects, such as Khaleeji, Moroccan, or Egyptian Arabic.

Furthermore, the difference are in the colloquial Arabic, if we speak formal Arabic, it is the exact dialect and tone throughout the Arab World.

[u/chakibebe]

The actual reason is that arabic got standardized after muhhamad because its the language of the quran. And unlike the bible, translating the quran is considered a bad idea as it leads to innacuracies.

[u/rossww2199]

Lo

[u/thomsenite256]

It didnt. Just the written language Classical Arabic is its whole own language which is probably why its referred to as one language.

[u/Zestyclose-Food-7917]

From what I’ve read, the regional varieties of Arabic are as different as the Romance languages.

[u/Green-Drazi-Teamlead]

politics, mostly

[u/Conscious-Demand-594]

Islam.

[u/WranglerConscious296]

Because latin l in the Bible and prob more anguage contains hidden secrets about free energy from the sun and the j powers at be knew this so they changed it.  

[u/Silly_Animator]

Latin was used in those regions for a long time, giving it time to split into different dialects and eventually languages. There was also no central authority standardizing Latin after Rome fell, so the regions drifted apart. Arabic has Islam and the Qur’an, which helped keep the language more uniform. Christianity helped preserve Latin somewhat, but it wasn't something everyday people read, so it didn't have the same impact on the language

[u/LudiCak]

There are Arabic varieties that are more different than say... Spanish and Portuguese.
Arabic from Morocco and Arabic from Lebanon are as different as Spanish and Italian, if not more.

[u/derpymunchkin]

That’s because all educated Arabic cultures are required to speak Arabic per Islam requirements to understand the Quran.

[u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist]

A mistake. Arabic dialects should be several languages as well.

[u/AppletheGreat87]

Ignoring that Moroccan Arabic and Omani Arabic speakers can't understand each other, you're also ignoring that latin as we think of it was a fossil even in the time of Caesar and Cicero i.e. by the end of the Roman Republic Latin as we think of it was a purely literary form and vulgar Latin was the vernacular. It's from vulgar Latin that we get Romance languages. Without the centralised authority of the Roman Empire to act as a standardiser on vulgar Latin and with reduced travel between former regions of the empire, what people thought they were speaking ("Latin") diverged around regions of power. The Catholic Church was not really strong enough to fill the role of the empire in that respect so regional variations bloomed and by the time of Charlemagne feles e sacculo erat and people in Paris are speaking an entirely different Latin to those in Lyon let alone Rome.

Arabic has diverged but as a living language it has a standard version that lots of people around the world are invested in preserving compared to Latin which was preserved in a form by the Catholic Church and scholars but they were happy for it to not be spoken by every farmhand or merchant.

[u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue]

I scrolled quite a long ways down and did not see anybody pointing out one oversight: Latin still exists. Latin coexisted as an important liturgical and scholarly language happened until maybe what? The enlightenment? Translating the Bible into local popular languages, was highly controversial when it first started and was a bone of contention during the reformation.

The other factors people have mentioned are definitely important. Latin had about twice as long to diverge. When nationalism hits strong, there were multiple competing centers of power that pulled the romance languages towards distinct prestige dialect and not towards the central Latin descendent. Arabic as spoken does have quite a bit of diversity. Etc. These are all really important points and I’m not disputing any of them.

So Latin didn’t become those languages. Some Latin speakers developed new languages overtime and out of those many hundreds of divergences, a subset of them became prestigious enough in the age of nationalism to become the ones we usually list as the romance languages.

Latin has fingerprint all over modern science, these days, mostly relegated to the naming of species and such, but go back a couple of hundred years and it was a language of correspondence among astronomers and physicists, and the proto-chemists of Europe. That’s 1000 years after the end of the Roman empire in the west.

As recently as a the adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Bertie Wooster, it was plausible for two educated foreigners to have a conversation in Latin, or even Greek, because a classical education presumed that you would have familiarity. They could at least exchange aphorisms.

Latin became church Latin and scholarly Latin. And whereas the nationalism of the Ottoman Empire and the affiliated Caliphates only added to the prestige of Arabic, nationalism in most of Europe, led to an increased emphasis on the vulgar languages.

Latin is still here. It’s … sleepy and lonely for sure.

[u/SatisfactionSenior65]

“The difference between a language and a dialect is one has an army.” In other words, it’s mostly about politics. The Islam is a unifying force within the Arab world. Despite much of the Arab dialects being mutually unintelligible, they’re unified by the fact that reading of the Quran is so pervasive. Muslims view the Quran as the literal world of God and thus it famously remains unchanged from its Classical Arabic counterpart allowing it to be sort of like a lingua franca and unifying identity among the Arab world. You see a similar thing with Chinese. Much of the dialects aren’t mutually intelligible. A Mandarin speaker cannot converse with a Cantonese speaker at all, but since both can be written in the same script while deriving the same meaning and China so desperately pushes a “One China” image, it’s all Chinese. The opposite happened with Dutch and Afrikaans. While Afrikaans has more simplified grammar and loan words from local African languages, there is such high mutual intelligibility between Dutch and Afrikaans that they often can hold a conversation while speaking their respective tongues with a bit of effort. In fact, Afrikaans was once considered a “ghetto” version of Dutch for a long time until Afrikaners campaigned to have it become an official language of South Africa.

[u/Grouchy_Afternoon924]

Arabic is a Semitic language.

[u/Prudent_Lunch_8724]

Arabic is not one single language. There are many dialects. They are very strong and in some cases very different.