Classical Arabic alone is nearly useless for everyday conversation in the Arab world.

Evidence

At first, communication was not easy. Though the syllabus and the courses I attended included modern history, my main interest was in the period that in European history is called medieval, a term not very appropriate to the great age of Arab and Islamic civilization. My language studies followed the same line. When I arrived in Egypt the only Arabic I knew was classical Arabic, which was about as useful for conversation as Ciceronian Latin would be in present-day Naples. But I managed to acquire some colloquial Arabic, and enrolled as an “auditor” in Cairo University. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 74

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the deep divide between classical/fusha Arabic and colloquial dialects — a point familiar from Arabic-language pedagogy discussions and the diglossia literature (Ferguson’s diglossia).

Related

• Western scholars of Arabic long studied the classical language over living dialects (similarity 0.91)
• Historians of the Middle East traditionally trained in four to five dead languages (similarity 0.82)
• Eighteenth-century French Arabic instruction read classics but ignored spoken language (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholars often spoke Arabic too classically for ordinary Arabs (similarity 0.79)
• British Arabic teaching before 1960 ignored spoken language entirely (similarity 0.79)
• Language relatedness alone cannot explain why Arabization succeeded in Egypt but failed in Iran (similarity 0.79)
• Most Muslims worldwide do not speak or understand Arabic (similarity 0.78)