Omar M. From Eastern to Western Arabic

Washington: Foreign Service Institute, 1974. — VIII, 47 p.This book is intended for Americans who have a good command of an Eastern Arabic dialect, and who now wish to learn a dialect of Western Arabic. We will use the Levantine dialect as our «base» (with reference to other Eastern dialects when appropriate), and compare it with the Moroccan dialect.While Moroccan, or North African, Arabic may appear at first to be virtually unintelligible to a speaker of Eastern Arabic, learning the correspondences at the sound level, as well as the basic grammatical changes and key words, leads rapidly to an ability to «get along» in it. You will find that speakers of Western Arabic have much less difficulty understanding you than you have understanding them; thus, your greatest problem will be in the comprehension of what you hear, and you can adapt your own speech more gradually. The features discussed will be those in the Moroccan dialect which are different, misleading, or confusing for a speaker of Eastern Arabic.Two basic factors account for the great divergence of Eastern and Western Arabic:
The indigenous languages underlying Western Arabic were Berber, as opposed to Semitic languages in the Levant. Many of the «strange» features found in Moroccan can be traced to the influence of the Berber languages.
Differences are reinforced, and new changes introduced, when any «mother» language is spread over great geographical distance. The passage of more than one thousand years since this original diffusion has also contributed to the situation.
In general, however, the similarities far outweigh the differences, and you will soon adapt your «ear» to Western dialects. The farther east the dialect, the closer it is to Eastern Arabic.