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Bilmasri
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In this episode of the podcast, we spoke with Nesrin Amin, the founder, and host of the Bilmasri blog and podcast. Bilmasri is a blog & podcast dedicated to the Egyptian dialect, its sounds, structures, vocabulary, and the culture behind it. You can download episodes of the Podcast from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and others and check out the blog at Bilmasri.com
Welcome to the Forensy Podcast. I'm your host, Alex Sorin. Forency is a podcast about Near Eastern history, language, and culture, and is brought to you by forensic.us, the premier language learning website for intermediate to advanced learners of Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian. In this episode of the podcast, we spoke with Nasrin Amin, the founder and host of the Bilmasri blog and podcast. Bilmasri is a blog and podcast dedicated to the Egyptian dialect, its sounds, structures, vocabulary, and the culture behind it. You can download episodes of the podcast from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and others, and check out the blog at bilmasri.com. I had a great time speaking with her, and I hope you enjoy the show. Thanks for joining me today.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_02So let's start with where you grew up.
SPEAKER_00Where did I grow up? Well, I was born in Egypt. So my parents are both Egyptian, but we did travel a lot a lot throughout my childhood and youth. So we I lived uh a couple of years in Nigeria, a couple of years in Brazil, Germany. Am I missing something? Yeah, Algeria, a bit before I went to university in Germany. So and then between all these, we lived in Egypt. So most of my childhood was spent in Egypt.
SPEAKER_02Okay. It's a pretty good background getting culturally diverse. Where in Egypt?
SPEAKER_00In Cairo.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So besides Egyptian Arabic being your native tongue, what's been your relationship with the language personally and professionally?
SPEAKER_00Well, I love languages generally, and obviously Arabic is not the easiest language to learn. So growing up, it wasn't my favorite language. I loved learning languages generally, but I really got into Arabic at university level where I studied translation. So I had to engage myself more with the language, understand how it works, and so on. And even though I hadn't spent that much time in Egypt, I think I built my Arabic language to a level that I got really proud of. And then I continued translating for a number of years, and then I taught Arabic at Exeter University in the southwest of England for five years before I moved to Cambridge seven years ago. And I continue to work with languages but in different capacities, not teaching at the moment.
SPEAKER_02When you're studying translation, so first off, where did you study translation?
SPEAKER_00In Germany, in Bonn. In Germany.
SPEAKER_02When it comes to translating Arabic, what is the focus usually on? Is it on modern standard Arabic? Is there a translation focus on dialects? How does that work?
SPEAKER_00No, well, I would say more than 90% of the time it's the modern standard Arabic. So translating from dialect would only happen if it's like a recorded conversation, for example. But if it's a written text, then it's almost always going to be modern standard Arabic. And obviously translating into Arabic is always going to be modern standard Arabic. I've never been asked to translate into a dialect.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So it's the the modern standard Arabic is just the language that's used in written communication for most of the time, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And we might get into this in a bit, but that kind of goes into the different purposes of whether to study modern standard Arabic or dialect or where to put your focus. There's different purposes for both, and it's not really an either or type of thing.
SPEAKER_00Sure, yes, yes. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02So tell everyone who may not be familiar with your podcast, Bil Masli, what it is and why you started it.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so Bil Masli podcast, I started it just a few months ago, so early this year. It is a blog and podcast, and it is dedicated to the Egyptian dialect. The reason I started it, well, there was a personal reason and a reason for my basically my target audience. So my personal reason is that I wanted to do something related to teaching again. So I haven't been teaching for a number of years. Originally I wanted to do something very ambitious. I wanted to do like a full Egyptian Arabic course online, but it felt a bit too ambitious given that I have a full-time job and and I didn't have like a business model in my head. So then I narrowed it down and I decided to narrow it down in a way that it targets intermediate to advanced learners of modern standard Arabic. So having taught Arabic at university level before, and we were kind of instructed to focus entirely on modern standard Arabic. And the students would go for a year abroad where they would learn the dialect of the country that visit they visited, but as soon as they came back to us, we were instructed to just focus on the Fushad, Modern Standard Arabic. And I felt that was very restricting because obviously the dialects are the living language that any Arab would have as their mother tongue. And so I thought when I thought of doing this blog that there is some lack of resources when it comes to uh dialects. When you look online, especially free resources, obviously there are paid resources, but when you look at free resources, they're often very much they stop at the introductory level, so like the greetings, how to order something in a restaurant, how to do this and that. But then once you get to this intermediate advanced level, you're kind of left on your own. So you have to resort to authentic material online like movies or like TV talk shows and so on, but it's not so easy to get from this basic level to that advanced level. So my podcast and blog is meant to kind of bridge that gap and talk the learners through the Egyptian dialect, reading text in Egyptian dialect slowly, then talking them through it, how the Egyptian Arabic compares to the Foshat, the modern standard Arabic, how it differs, and so on. And like looking at vocabulary structures, idioms, proverbs, all that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_02Right. And I think we kind of started forensic for the exact same reason because there was a lack of intermediate to advance resources for modern standard Arabic in general, once you get out of university, so it you know the journey doesn't stop there. You have to continue to maintain and advance your skills. And a lot of students who come out of university, even if they take three years of Arabic, have trouble reading a news article in its entirety, even if it's a a small news article. And that's a paralyzing feeling. So that's kind of how we got started. And it sounds like you're doing something similar with dialects, but I think what you said about there being a lack of resources for dialect, I think it's it's even worse than that. I think there's almost nothing. I mean, there's there's textbooks, but like you said, they take you through a very beginner level. And it's a textbook that's trying to teach you a living language, which is always tough. So the curriculum has to be ongoing and changing all the time too, and relevant to people's lives. And I find like so when I'm when I'm studying dialect, I have to pretty much create my own curriculum.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And it's really, it's really tough.
SPEAKER_00It's really tough, yeah. And it's it seems unfair because it's kind of a bit sort of unique compared to other languages, like where you see a written text and then you hear people speak and you sort of understand what they're saying because you learn the written text. In many languages it's the case, but in Arabic it's not at all. So you can learn to read to the highest level, but then you talk to a taxi driver and you have no idea what they're saying. So it's yeah, it's a really difficult jump to make.
SPEAKER_02Right. And in universities too, like you said, I mean, uh, it's been a long time since I was in university studying dialect, but I don't think it's changed that much from what I've heard, and that it's still treated as an elective of sorts. You know, you take a semester of a class of Arabic, you know, and and once a week of dialect.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I hope it's changing now. And like I know, for example, Cambridge University here, they teach the modern standard Arabic and Egyptian dialect side by side at almost equal level. So I hope things are changing gradually and there's more awareness now in academic circles of the importance of teaching the dialect as well as the modern standard Arabic. Just not right to give the students this one-sided experience and deny them this wealth of dialects.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell, how much pushback is there among Arabic professors in higher education? I mean, because I know that like there are some purists who teach modern standard Arabic and grammar and which is really important for modern standard Arabic, but it I remember there being there was uh definitely a push and pull between teachers who were, you know, modern standard Arabic purists and and others who thought it was important to integrate the Arabic.
SPEAKER_00I think things are changing now. Like I said, like so seven years ago when I was in Exeter, we were really it was really very strict about and we never even questioned it much. And in the meantime, I've been, you know, going to conferences with Arabic teachers, and gradually like it's become more and more acceptable to say we have to do both, we have to do both. Like at the start, when someone said that, people would say, How dare you? You know, this is the language of the Quran, you can't just teach the dialect as if it's equal to the Fusha. But then you have to make the distinction between are you teaching native speakers or are you teaching non-native speakers? Because when it comes to native speakers, obviously we're going to teach them modern standard Arabic because dialect they can learn at home. But the non-native speakers don't have that advantage of having someone at home to speak to. So it's really the awareness is growing very much of the importance of that.
SPEAKER_02And why is that changing? Is it because just generally teachers are coming around to it, or was there an actual tangible drop in numbers and enrollment in Arabic courses?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I'm not sure that there was a drop in enrollment, but I think there was more awareness among people that are respected at an academic level who spoke about this, who raised this issue, and it's just being discussed more and more. And maybe also we heard what the students were saying because I'm sure that a lot of students expressed their frustration more and more, and it was something that needed to be heard. Right. So I'm interested.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's kind of even how word gets around about our website, forensic, also, is that the students are frustrated that they're not learning things they feel like they should be learning, and they take forensic and show it to their teachers, and they're like, gotta be using this. And the teachers then check it out, and some come around to it, some don't.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02That's really interesting. What kind of responses have you been getting from people after launching the podcast?
SPEAKER_00Well, very very positive responses. I'm really, really happy. So uh even though it's it's not been very long, and obviously it's still growing, but all the feedback I did get was very positive, and a lot of people saying, This is exactly what was missing, this is what I've been looking for. So someone just to slowly talk me through the language and how it works and this slow reading. And so um, yeah, I've been very, very happy with the feedback I got so far.
SPEAKER_02What are some of the most I know this is a hard question, but what are the some of the most prominent features of the Egyptian dialect that separate it from modern standard Arabic? Just anything that pops into your head of differences that stand out to you the most? And it's usually like this across the board with dialects, not Yeah, yeah, it is across the board.
SPEAKER_00And obviously, different dialects differ in different ways from the Fosha. So the dialects of the Levantine, Syrian, Jordanian, and so on, I feel are closer to the Fosha than the Egyptian dialect. The Egyptian dialect is very widely understood because of the media, movies, um, songs and so on that are very popular across the Arab world, but it is not very close to the fusha in terms of how it sounds. But what I've been trying to emphasize in the blog and podcast is that there are a lot of similarities, and we have to see those similarities even when they're not obvious. So something that's very, very different in Egyptian Arabic is how the verbs sound compared to the fusha compared to modern standard Arabic. For example, how we negate a verb, for example, if I can think of an example, I have not seen him in Fusha is lam arahu, lam arahu in Egyptian is mashuftuhoosh, which is just a completely different, completely different word. Sounds like a different language. But if we dissect it and then we see like meh is a fusha negation, it's just not the one that's most commonly used in the past tense. So mah shuft is a perfectly valid word, shef, but it's not the one maybe most commonly used in standard Arabic. And then shufto hoosh, and then we have this shah in the end, which comes from the word shay meaning thing. So if we start to dissect it, we start to see that it's actually all coming from the fosha, but then we've used it in a different way. We merge the words, we merge the sounds in a different way, and uh so it's more of a sound thing and how we kind of have played with the fosha than it's being a completely different language. Obviously, sometimes we have words that come from Italian and Greek and Turkish and ancient Egyptian and all that, which are not Fosha, not standard Arabic at all, but in the end it's just odd words here and there, but the structure is usually based on standard Arabic.
SPEAKER_02Is that negation, so the SH negation, which is very common in Palestinian Arabic is also is it as widespread in Egyptian as it is amongst Palestinians, or can it be used on and off? Could you just say mashufto instead of mashufto ish?
SPEAKER_00No, no, it's it is as widespread, yeah. So we use it in all negation, I would say. So we either say mishba'amil, I don't do mishbaamil or ma'baamil sh. So the shah is there in any case, either it's part of the mish or at the end of the verb.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, it's uh and do you can you remove the meh and just say amethish?
SPEAKER_00No, no. So it's different in obviously the tense, but there's always the meh somewhere. So if I say future tense, I would say mish ha mil. So it's either the mish or the mah and then the ch after the the verb.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So there is a small difference from Palestinian dialect, then where if you want to say, like, don't worry, you you know, you can say khfish and not add the the mah to Oh yeah, yeah, no, we do we do always have the mah there. So you touched on something that was that I wanted to ask you also about Egypt's really rich and ancient history and diversity also, you know, whether that's the Coptic population or even until fairly recently, historically speaking, you know, one of the largest Jewish populations in the Middle East.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02So you mentioned about some different words that are incorporated into Egypt with Egyptian dialect, whether that's ancient Egyptian Greek or Italian or French or English. What are some of those outliers that that exist?
SPEAKER_00Oh dear. Yeah, so we have a lot of vocabulary that comes from Italian and Greek. I think they had a big influence in like the 20th century early 20th century. So we say tarabeza for table, for example, which comes from Greek, um fossolia, beans. Oh dear, when I start thinking now, it's hard to think of examples. But one of uh my favorite words is the word tuz, which is a word that you say when you're just not happy with something, you say tuz, like damn it, or whatever. So tuzifi means like just may he go to hell or something. It's kind of a mild F word, sort of. And and that comes from Turkish, from the word for rice in Turkish. Tuz means rice in Turkish, and the story goes, which I'm I can't 100% say with certainty that this is what the story is, but that rice was very cheap. There were no taxes on rice, basically. So when it passed by the customs, they would say tus because there's no customs on rice. So it was just like something that's insignificant. So that's where it came from. So it's a very odd story, but then it became a typical Egyptian word that you hear all the time.
SPEAKER_02And are there dialects within dialects in Egypt? So as you go from the city to the countryside or to Sinai or even the Cairo dialect differing maybe from the dialect that people speak in Alexandria. Is that a thing?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. So we kind of the most significant uh distinction we make is between the Delta, which is like the Nile Delta from Cairo to Alexandria, and then the south of Egypt, or upper Egypt, we call it, Saidi. Their dialect is quite different from Egyptian. And obviously, the more south you go, the more different it becomes, and then it becomes really close to Sudanese Arabic in the south. Then in the west we have a dialect that's very close to Libyan Arabic, and then in Sinai it's like the Bedouin Arabic, which would be maybe similar to Jordanian Bedouin Arabic. So yeah, it's quite distinctive.
SPEAKER_02As you get closer to Sudan, what are some if you could give a couple examples, if you could just pick a verb and say how it's pronounced differently in Egyptian compared to Sudanese?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I'm afraid I'm not very good at that at all. I wouldn't. But obviously the thing that people know about Egyptian Arabic is that we say the ghee for the j. So the letter j is pronounced g. We say like in Egypt, it's pronounced g, but really it's not in Egypt. It's in the north of Egypt. Uh so in the south they pronounce it j. Maybe consonants like are pronounced more strongly. I have to say, like, I'm not very I understand it maybe from watching TV shows where they have characters coming from upper Egypt, but I would not be able to speak in it at all. So it's not my yeah, not my field.
SPEAKER_02No worries. So one feature of dialect generally that I find interesting is the incorporation of English words and phrases as a stylistic feature and also a way to show off your education. And you see this a lot in Jordan and Lebanon and and also in modern Hebrew, by the way, in Israel's when someone's they're purposely injecting an English phrase or word in the middle of speaking Arabic as a stylistic feature. Is that something that's found in Egypt also?
SPEAKER_00Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it's kind of a status symbol. If you took like half broken Arabic with a bit of English, uh bit of French here and there is something that people like to boast about. But then also there are some words that have crept into the language. So even if someone is someone's English is quite basic, especially things related to computer and internet, for example, and we have a kind of a way of Arabizing it in a way. So nobody, for example, the words for to save a document, for example, nobody uses the Arabic word. We say isaiev, which is save turned into an Arabic verb, sayy, or my computer is frozen, it's you know, it's freezing. I would say hannig from hang. It's hanging, it's hennig. Oh, it's funny. And a lot of things like that where it just, yeah, you wouldn't even hear the English words anymore. But and words, you know, like feedback or whatever. It's just crept into the language and already, people love the word already because there is no like perfect equivalent in Egyptian Arabic or in Arabic. So even if you don't speak any English at all, you will still say, uh already, I'm alto ilwegab or whatever.
SPEAKER_02So that's fine. Yeah, I like how cancel has crept in, so like leish cancel it.
SPEAKER_00Definitely. Yeah, same here, same in Arabic. So yeah, cancilt, cancelled meah, I cancel the meeting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That one's good. Also, like SMS, so like texting and SMS it.
SPEAKER_00Oh no, what do we say? I can't even I don't even know. Thing is, me living abroad for so long, it's been more than 20 years since I've lived in Egypt, I go on holidays and so on, but obviously there's a language emerging and developing all the time that I'm not really grasping. So the younger people, like everywhere in the world, you know, they're inventing words all the time. And so, you know, it's hard to keep up if you're not living there.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And I find out, oh, so and then I say a word, they say, Oh come on, this word like died 10 years ago. Why are you still saying it? So yeah, it's uh it's weird how words are just and some a lot of them are kind of emerging from English, and yeah.
SPEAKER_02Where do you stand on that in terms of do you do you think that's important to incorporate into dialect instruction is incorporating some English in there so that it sounds you know natural and smooth?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it's not a matter of important or not important. It's just it happens. And if it if it happens, you have to accept it. You know, you you can't stand there and say, no, no, we cannot allow this. You know, uh we're not the Academie Française or whatever this language is a living thing and you have to accept it. And obviously sometimes it annoys me if words are emerging all the time that I'm not understanding, but if they are useful, they will survive. If they're filling some kind of gap that wasn't, you know, that wasn't filled properly before, then great. And if they are superfluous, they will die out a few years later. And so just we just have to let the language do what it does. It's just the way it is.
SPEAKER_02How do you come up with the topics for your podcast?
SPEAKER_00Oh, it takes some thinking every week because I don't want to be repetitive. I don't want it to become boring. So at the start I said I'm going to read news stories in Egyptian Arabic. And I thought, no, let's, you know, it first of all, the language is going to become repetitive. There's some expressions that are never going to come up if I only read news stories. So I started with that, and then I went to the last one I did was I took an Egyptian novel that's obviously written in Standard Arabic because all respectable novels are written in standard Arabic. That may be changing too though. And I Egyptianized a passage, so a page. Um and I read that out because it had the dialogue, it had a kind of language that's interesting, and I could easily transfer that back into Egyptian Arabic because obviously in real life people would have been speaking in Egyptian Arabic. And I've tried different things. I've read kind of like people's memories about Ramadan, so that it gave me an opportunity to talk about Ramadan related language, the traditions, and so on. So yeah, I try different things every time, and it's still a work in progress. So I hope I can still come up with different ideas. Yeah, we'll see how it goes.
SPEAKER_02Well, I'm looking forward to it. So I think this is a good place to wrap up. And anyone who's interested in in checking out your podcast can check out the Bilmasri podcast. That's B-I-L-M-A-S-R-I on Apple Podcasts, um, all other podcasting forms also.
SPEAKER_00Different, yeah, different platforms, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then also the blog, of course, so bilmasri.com.
SPEAKER_00Bilmasri.com. And if they want, also there's the idioms page I have. So on Instagram and Facebook, Bilmasri Idioms, where I have like clips from movies showing different Egyptian idioms, how they're used, and then I explain in detail how to use this idiom and yeah, the different meanings that it can have. So that may be interesting too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and that that's key as well in terms of just mastering a dialect and being able to use idioms appropriately without overdoing it, but also using it you know in the right the right context.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02So thanks so much, and I wish you the best of luck.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much for having me. Thanks.