Ammon – The Arabic dialect has more speakers than all other languages in France, making it the second most widely spoken language after French, and ahead of 72 regional languages in the country.
According to the classification of the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), the Arabic language ranks directly after French and before regional and non-regional languages, known as “the languages of France,” according to what Le Figaro newspaper reported.
Although the country’s official language is French, as stated in the constitution since 1992, it nevertheless coexists with 72 regional languages and seven non-regional languages, represented in the Arabic dialect, Amazigh, Yiddish, Romanian, Western Armenian, Jewish-Spanish, and sign language. As the website of the French Ministry of Culture indicates, they are “minority languages spoken by French citizens on the territory of the Republic, long enough to be part of the national cultural heritage.”
In his statement to Sky News Arabia, the educational coordinator at the Arab World Institute in Paris, Taref Abu Al-Jamal, explained that “the Arabic dialect or the ‘spoken language’ has become a cultural heritage because it is linked to the history of France with the countries of North Africa and the Maghreb. Therefore, it is a reflection of the history of relations.” Political, cultural and emotional relations between Arabs and France for centuries.
This positioning of the Arabic dialect constitutes, according to French media, “a precedent in the history of France,” “in light of the decline of regional languages, globalization, and immigration. The Arabic dialect has more speakers than the number of speakers of all regional languages combined.”
According to the estimates mentioned in the article, there are between three and four million speakers of the Arabic dialect in France.
These numbers regarding the number of Arabic speakers remain inaccurate because, according to Abu Jamal, “French law generally prohibits any religious, ethnic, or even linguistic statistics so that they are not used in a sectarian or racist manner, and the matter depends on estimates only.”
The superiority of the Maghreb dialect
On the other hand, the “Le Figaro” article considers that the absence of belonging to a specific country is what gives the Arabic dialect a special status as “the language of France.” He stressed that the Arabic dialect mainly takes the Maghreb form in France, in addition to Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian.
But the educational coordinator at the Arab World Institute in Paris believes that “dialects fall within one language. This is why the dialects spoken in France are colloquial languages that all fall within the Arabic language.”
It seems that Jean Cellier, in his book “The History of Languages”, which the article considered a reference, had a different opinion. He wrote that the Arabic dialect, mainly oral, is not codified and is very flexible. It includes a variety of dialects whose speakers do not necessarily understand each other. Thus, “the distance between the dialects of the Arabian Peninsula and the dialects of Morocco will be equivalent to the distance between Portuguese and Romanian.”
“Sky News”
