Languages of Muslims

Languages of major Muslim groups

However, there is no single "Muslim language" per se, as Islam, the faith of Muslims, is shared by people of many different ethnicities and languages:

• Iranians speak Farsi
• Afghanistan has three major languages, Pashtu, Dari[?] and also Farsi, each belonging to ethnic groups (tribes) with the same names.
• The most populous "Muslim country" in the world is Indonesia. The CIA World Factbook 2000 lists languages as: Bahasa Indonesia, English, Dutch, local dialects, the most widely spoken of which is Javanese[?].
• Turkish people speak Turkish, a language from a very different language group than Arabic.
• Morocco: Besides the official Classical Arabic[?] being used by official bodies, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries, Moroccan-Arabic is the 'language of the street'. It is grammatically simpler, and has a less voluminous vocabulary than Classical Arabic. As in Algeria, most Moroccan-Arabs live in the north of the country. Other Moroccan languages are Berber (Rif-Berber[?], spoken by people from the Rif-mountains and Tifinagh[?], spoken by the Tuareg people.
• Tifinagh can also be heard in Algeria, as well as Kabyle[?], spoken by the Kabyle Berbers in the north-east of Algeria. (Note: historically speaking the Kabyle people are Christians). Another Algerian language is Chaoui[?], spoken by the Chaoui, south-west of the Kabyle region.
• Nigeria: primarily Hausa, but some Yoruba[?] and Igbo[?] speakers are also Muslim.
• Pakistan: Urdu
• Bangladesh: Bengali
• Malaysia: Malay
• Philippines: primarily Maranao[?], some Tagalog speakers are Muslims.
• Albania: Albanian, or Shqiptarë
• Bosnia: Bosnian, a dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language
• Sudan: primarily a Sudanese dialect of Arabic
• Somalia: Somali[?]
• Libya: Arabic
• Tunisia: Arabic
• Yemen: Arabic
• Iraq: Arabic
• Syria: Arabic, some Syriac
• China: A variety of languages are spoken by Chinese Muslims. Uighurs in Xinjiang speak the Uighur language[?] while the Hui minority generally speak Mandarin Chinese.
• ?

The Arabic language has many different 'branches'. Whether these are to be considered mere dialects or separate languages is a question of debate. The fact is, that it is not self-evident that all Arabic-speaking people understand each other when they speak. Each Arab country has developed its own variant of Arabic.

The Arabic spoken in Egypt is very well understood by most Arabic-speaking people. One of the reasons for this is the flourishing Egyptian film industry. Their films are watched by millions of people in the Arabic-speaking world. Another reason may be the leading rôle of the Al-Ahzar University in Cairo in theological issues and in the intellectual world. However, this does not mean an Egyptian will easily understand for instance an Arabic-speaking Moroccan. There many differences, not only in idioms, but in pronunciation and spelling as well. Egyptian Arabic is closer to Classical Arabic than Moroccan-Arabic is.