Why are the different Arabics classified as dialects when Romance languages that are more similar like Catalan Castillian and Galician are considered different languages?

Answer 1

My parents both speak arabic, but i don't know a lot about romance languages. In some Middle East and north african countries, they all speak the same exact language. Its just that they migt have different words for something. Like say in Syria, their hello might be different than in Egypt.

Answer 2

There are two major answers: Writing and Politics.

The differences between the Catalan and Aragonese, for example, are roughly the same as the differences between Algerian and Egyptian Arabic and the differences between Catalan and Galician are roughly equivalent to the differences between Iraqi and Moroccan Arabic, so the idea that one pair is different languages and another pair a dialects has no grounding in linguistics as a science (if we use the spoken languages exclusively).

Writing: Typically if two spoken languages use the same writing system, they are classified as one language. A good example would be how Mandarin and Cantonese are both considered "Chinese" because they are written using the same ideographic characters. However, speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese would not understand each other at all. The difference, though, between the Chinese case and the Arabic case is that Chinese is written in ideographs whereas Arabic is written with a phonetic alphabet (abjad). Just as "4" can be read as "four", "vier", "arba", "quattro", etc. a Chinese character can be read in diverse ways. Arabic is like English in that "four" is pronounceable only one way because it contains the letters "f", "o", "u", and "r". In Arabic, though, only the formal or proper dialect of Arabic, called "Fus-ha" is written and the dialects are entirely oral. The reason for this odd behavior will be discussed in the "Politics" section.

Politics: Arab countries, since the rise of Pan-Arab Nationalism and Islamism, have wanted to project back into the past to a united Arab Empire. As a result, they have not embraced the hallmarks of their own national identities. They want to be more Arab than Algerian or more Arab than Lebanese. Holding on to "Fus-ha" as a literary tongue connects them as if they were still one Arab Empire as opposed to 22 states with very different political histories, ethnic make-ups, religious percentages, and government preferences. Therefore, considering all of the different Arabics to be dialects or flavors of one Arabic language as opposed to around 20-40 distinct languages promotes this idea of Arab unity. As a result, nobody has tried in the Arab World to write down the various dialects in the way that Valencians and Galicians wrote manifestos on how to read and write their own languages in the 1920s and 1930s. In Spain, different Spaniards take pride in their differences and uniqueness, recalling the traditions of how they chose to be united politically, but not culturally.