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In Lebanon, most people communicate in the Lebanese variety of Levantine Arabic, but Lebanon's official language is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). French is recognized and used next to MSA on road signs and Lebanese banknotes. Lebanon's native sign language is the Lebanese dialect of Levantine Arabic Sign Language. English is the fourth language by number of users, after Levantine, MSA, and French. Most Armenians in Lebanon can speak Western Armenian, and some can speak Turkish. Lebanon exists in a state of diglossia: MSA is used in formal writing and the news, while Lebanese Arabic—the variety of Levantine Arabic—is used as the native language in conversations and for informal written communication. When writing Levantine, Lebanese people use the Arabic script (more formal) or Arabizi (less formal). Arabizi can be written on a QWERTY keyboard and is used out of convenience. Mutual intelligibility between Lebanese and other Levantine varieties is high, while MSA and Levantine are mutually unintelligible. Despite that, Arabs consider both varieties of Arabic to be a part of a single Arabic language. Some sources count Levantine and MSA as two languages of the same language family. Statistics According to Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024), these languages have the most users in Lebanon: Levantine Arabic – 5,230,000 Modern Standard Arabic – 4,780,000 French – 2,530,000 English – 2,130,000 Western Armenian – 261,000 Turkish – 189,000 Diglossia and local varieties' classification Lebanon—and the Arab world in general—exists in a state of diglossia: the language used in literature, formal writing, or other specific settings is very divergent from that used in conversations. Lebanon's official language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), has no native speakers in or outside Lebanon. It is almost never used in conversations and is learned through formal instruction rather than transmission from parent to child. MSA is the language of literature, official documents, and formal written media (newspapers, instruction leaflets, school books), and in spoken form, it is mostly used when reading from a scripted text (e.g., news bulletins) and for prayer and sermons in the mosque or church. Levantine, conversely, is spoken natively and used in conversations, TV shows, films, and advertisements. This diglossia has been compared to the use of Latin as the sole written, official, liturgical, and literary language in Europe during the medieval period, while Romance languages were the spoken languages. Levantine—specifically its Palestinian dialect—is the closest Arabic variety to MSA, but Levantine and MSA are not mutually intelligible. They differ significantly in their phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax, and exposure to MSA in the early childhood of native speakers of an Arabic variety results in a linguistic system that behaves like that of bilinguals. Levantine speakers often call their language ‏العامية‎ al-ʿāmmiyya, 'slang', 'dialect', or 'colloquial' (lit. 'the language of common people'), to contrast it to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic (‏الفصحى‎ al-fuṣḥā, lit. 'the eloquent'). They also call their spoken language ‏عربي‎ ʿarabiyy, 'Arabic'. Alternatively, they identify their language by the name of their country, such as ‏لبناني‎ libnāni, 'Lebanese'. ‏شامي‎ šāmi can refer to Damascus Arabic, Syrian Arabic, or Levantine as a whole. Lebanese literary figure Said Akl led a movement to recognize the "Lebanese language" as a prestigious language instead of MSA. Most people consider Arabic to be a single language. The ISO 639-3 standard, however, classifies Arabic as a macrolanguage and Levantine as one of its languages, giving it the language code "apc". Code-switching and loanwords Code-switching (alternating between languages in a single conversation) between Levantine, MSA, French, and English is very common in Lebanon, often being done in both casual situations and formal situations like TV interviews. This prevalence of code-switching has led to phrases that naturally embed multiple linguistic codes being used in daily sentence, like the typical greeting "hi, كيفك؟ Ça va ?", which combines English, Levantine and French. Code-switching also happens in politics. For instance, not all politicians master MSA, so they rely on the Lebanese Levantine Arabic. Additionally, many words used in the Lebanese dialect of Levantine have been borrowed from French, such as telfizyōn (French: télévision , meaning 'television'), balkōn (French: balcon , meaning 'balcony') and doktōr (French: docteur , meaning 'doctor'), and from English, such as CD, crispy, hot dog, and keyboard, with some phrases and verbs being altered to follow the syntax of Levantine Arabic, instead of English. For example, shayyik comes from the English word 'check', and sayyiv comes from the English word 'save'. Minority languages Western Armenian is used between the Armenians in Lebanon, who fled to Lebanon between 1895 and 1939 for multiple reasons, most notably the Armenian genocide. In 2015, Armenians made up around 4% of Lebanon's population. Their mother tongue remains widespread, and some Armenians in Lebanon can also speak Turkish, more than a century after their ancestors left Turkey. Some Kurds fled to Lebanon from violence and poverty in Turkey, but they are now dispersed in Lebanon and have largely abandoned Kurdish languages. Kurds in Lebanon were estimated at 70,000 in 2020, and Kurmanji's users at 23,000. Syriac Aramaic is also spoken as a first language in some Lebanese communities such as Syriac Catholics, Syriac Orthodox and Assyrian Lebanese. It is also used in liturgies in other communities such as Maronite Catholics. Usage Conversation Lebanon's native language, Levantine Arabic, is the main language used in conversations. MSA, despite being Lebanon's second language by number of users, is almost never used in conversations, while English and French are, even between some native speakers of Levantine. Levantine Arabic Sign Language is Lebanon's native sign language, and Lebanon's deaf population is estimated at 12,000. Oral media Many public and formal speeches and most political talk shows are in Lebanese, not MSA. In the Arab world, most films and songs are in vernacular Arabic. Egypt was the most influential center of Arab media productions (movies, drama, TV series) during the 20th century, but Levantine is now competing with Egyptian. As of 2013, about 40% of all music production in the Arab world was in Lebanese. Lebanese television is the oldest and largest private Arab broadcast industry. Most big-budget pan-Arab entertainment shows are filmed in the Lebanese dialect in the studios of Beirut. Moreover, the Syrian dialect dominates in Syrian TV series (such as Bab al-Hara) and in the dubbing of Turkish television dramas, which are both aired in Lebanon. With the release of Secret of the Wings in 2012, Disney began re-dubbing and dubbing its films in MSA, instead of Egy.... Discover the Kristen Strassel popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Kristen Strassel books.