ABSTRACT
Arabic is the native language of over 300 million people across the Middle East and North Africa. Such differences between Jewish and non-Jewish varieties of Arabic are not limited to simple matters of pronunciation, but rather can go deeper into the structure of the language. For example, the basic pronouns can have different forms. The differences between Jewish and Muslim Arabic dialects within the same city are roughly comparable to what we find in many American cities, in which black and white communities frequently speak recognizably different varieties of English, even though the two varieties are mutually intelligible. Muslim Arabic speakers rarely write their local spoken dialects. Jewish Arabic speakers very often wrote Arabic as well, but since they normally did so using Hebrew letters, they were less bound by the norms of standard written Arabic. Jewish Arabic dialects, some of which had been in use for over a thousand years, continued to flourish well into the 20th century.
