Talk:Varieties of Arabic

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ə	This article contains nonstandard pronunciation information which should be rewritten using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Please see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation) for help.

No, no, no - the whole point of calling it "Varieties of Arabic" was to avoid the language/dialect controversy. Otherwise we'll have instant edit wars between Lebanese who say their speech is a separate language and Lebanese who say it's not. - Mustafaa 22:28, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry. I'll move back. Isomorphic 22:29, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't understand though - if it's controversial, why does the article use the word "dialect" throughout? Isomorphic 22:32, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Good point - I've fixed that... My own sympathies are solidly with the "dialect" camp (hence my original word choice), but I've seen enough supporters of the opposite side to anticipate edit wars (rapidly degenerating to rehashes of the Lebanese civil war, or of Israeli propaganda about Arab illiteracy) once they find it. Mustafaa 22:42, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

OK, makes sense now. Interesting article, by the way. Isomorphic 22:45, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Picky little point: It's a little jarring that the article title is not given in bold anywhere in the first paragraph, as is standard Wikipedia convention. I don't trust that I could do this without introducing inaccuracies, as I don't know anything about the subject. - dcljr (talk) 08:01, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Great expansion - nice work, Benwing! My only quibble is with "The dominant order is subject-verb rather than verb-subject": I'm not sure that's entirely true. In Algerian Arabic, I think verb-subject is the commonest order for intransitive verbs (though SVO is the order for transitives.) However, I'm not 100% sure; reclassicization is hard to filter out sometimes. - Mustafaa 23:57, 11 July 2005 (UTC)