Within the genre of American Belly Dance we dance to the music of many cultures, countries, and languages.

In our Dream Dancers collection of music the lyrics range from all the Arabic dialects, Armenian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Greek, Farsi, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Certainly if you dance in the Egyptian Cabaret style with or without Saidi, if you’re dancing a Khaleegi number in a thobe, a Lebanese Cabaret or mountain dance, or a North African piece in Dishdasha or Melaya your music’s lyrics will be in Arabic. If you do not understand or are unwilling to mesh the ethnology of your music to the style you are dancing then you are betraying the heart of our dance form.

A dancer may have several different motivations for learning Arabic. You may wish to travel and study with dancers on their home turf. If you do this, you’ll be less disoriented and will please your teacher greatly if you can say a few words. Please – minfadlik; thank you – shukran; excuse me – la moakksa; good morning – sabah al kheir and goodbye – maasaleemi. Or, possibly the most useful, I don’t understand – ana ma bef bemsh.

If world traveling isn’t in the cards for you, you still may be hired to dance by Arabs and for an Arabic audience. Again, it’s nice to show respect for their language and I think it shows your respect for their own mastery of English as well.

I began studying Arabic through a desire to understand song lyrics better and I think that all Middle Eastern dancers would benefit from studying the lyrics of the songs we interpret. I had a sense of frustration listening to this music I loved so much, wanting to interpret it in dance but not being completely sure where the song was coming from lyrically. Every Egyptian dancer I’ve studied with has stressed the importance of this understanding. All the dancers I respect the most have addressed this aspect of the dance and it’s importance.

Many of us absorb an Arabic love song vocabulary over time. Hobb, ahebbak, habbeena, habibi, habbenaki, are all forms of the word for love – hobb.

Other words we hear frequently are noor, hayati, omri, leyla, jamila, zeina, helwa, ‘ayn, galbi – words pertaining to light or fire, life, the evening, sweetness, beauty, the eyes, the heart. Just knowing these few vocabulary words will help reassure you that you’re interpreting a love song.

Arabic may seem totally alien to an English speaker even one who has studied a second language like Spanish or French.

Arabic is a Semitic language, part of the Afro-Asiatic language family. English is a Germanic language and French and Spanish are Romance languages and these are part of the Indo-European family of language.

Approximately 200 million people speak Arabic today. Another 100 million speak languages that use the Arabic alphabet sometimes with slight variations to accommodate the other languages. It is the dominant Semitic tongue. Phoenician, Hebrew, the Aramaic that Jesus spoke and the Neo-Aramaic spoken in Syria today are all examples of Semitic languages living and dead.

These languages are tri consonantal; based on root words of 3 consonants for the most part. Those words that do not follow this pattern are probably very old remnants of languages preceding Semitic or they are more recent borrowings from the Classical Greek or the Colonial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries. These borrowings are quite rare. They especially seem so to and English speaker. We are so used to speaking our own motley language, which has borrowed and absorbed so many words from so many countries.

Arabic is written from right to left. The alphabet has 28 letters, consonants and long vowels. Usually only the Qu’ ran and textbooks show the extra notations used for the other vowels

The consonants give you the basic meaning of the word, the vowels within and various prefixes, suffixes and infixes will give different shades of meaning, tenses and number. If you know the root then you can get a hazy idea of meaning even if you don’t know the precise meaning of the word you’re hearing. Arabic nouns are either masculine or feminine. For example when you say “please” to a man you say minfadlak, to a woman minfadlik.

I think it’s worthwhile to learn the Arabic alphabet. Our own alphabet and that of Arabic are related. They are descendents of an alphabet first created by Semitic laborers and mercenaries in Egypt more than 3000 years ago. You can see the relationship in a few of the letters but the Arabic alphabet can seem quite strange at first. There is no letter for p or v, there are letters for sounds that we don’t have in English, and there are letters for sounds that are emphatic or not. Differences that can be very hard for us to hear.

You may be tempted to only learn conversational Arabic from tapes and CDs and avoid learning the alphabet but it can really come in handy. At a workshop recently I picked up a CD with a photo of a dancer that looked familiar to me. All the information on the CD was written in Arabic but I was able to read that the dancer was indeed Amani and look at the songs listed and see if any were familiar to me. Arabic is a cursive writing. There are no capitals and lower case letters but the letters may look quite different depending on their location in a word. If you know the alphabet you can look up word meanings in a dictionary.

Dialects include the most widely understood Egyptian – due to the preeminence of the Egyptian cinema of the 1940’s and on, the Arabic of the Maghreb, Levantine Arabic (spoken in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria), Iraqi Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, and others. Modern Standard Arabic or Modern Formal Arabic is the literate Arabic common to the entire Arab world. It is a descendant of Classical Arabic which is what the Qu’ran is written in.

The universal communication available now due to film and television and the Internet has slowed the divergence of the dialects. Arabic had been going the same route as Latin did after the fall of Rome – essentially the Romance languages are dialects of Latin. Modern technology guarantees that Arabs can communicate fairly well with each other wherever they are. A difference isthe Egyptian word for yes is Aiwa elsewhere they say Na’am.
Egyptians don’t pronounce their Q – it is a glottal stop, moon is Qamar – in Egyptian say Amar.

The teacher Raqia Hassan’s first name is usually spelled RAQIA but that Q is silent. In the Gulf the Q is pronounce as a very hard G. The letter J is pronounced as a hard G in Egypt.

The Arabic on International stations and La Jazeera are in Modern Standard Arabic.

I’ve brought examples today of my favorite conversational Arabic course. And the course in written Modern Standard Arabic I find the best.

Dr. Pimsleur was a linguist whose research lead to a teaching style that makes it much easier to learn to speak and understand any foreign language. Much more effective than the total immersion of Berlitz style classes and other methods.

We have a good Arabic teacher here. She teaches adult continuing education classes at OTC and is available for private tutoring. Henrietta Romman.

Alif Baa is available from Borders and is the first book in a really good course on Modern Standard Arabic.

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