Explanation: Arabic has maintained a great literary continuity through the centuries, in part due to the importance of the Quran as the literal written word of the Divine. A translation of the Quran is only a commentary - nothing more - meaning that written Arabic has had a sort of 'hard standard' that has bound together diverse locales with a common written form of the tongue.

Native Arabic speaker here. Can confirm.

Although it’s not always as easy as it sounds because many words and expressions from back then aren’t relevant/in-use. Also, reading poetry from the pre-Islamic era is significantly more difficult. We still have volumes of literature (specifically poetry) that predate Islam.

The reason the language is so resilient is the use of the Quran as a reference (all translations of it aren’t considered Quran, but commentaries), and the fact we have institutes dedicated to maintaining and standardising the language as part of the Arab League (ALECSO and its subsidiaries, etc). Also, all nations of the Arab League enforce a rule that stipulates that the governments, newspapers, media/TV, and academia are required to use Modern Standard Arabic for official business across all member countries.

Regional dialects are kind of hard to understand at first, but generally speaking, we do understand each other regardless of the dialect if the two parties communicating work at it long enough. The hardest dialects to understand are from them pesky Moroccans/Tunisians with their French-every-other-word bastardisation of the language, but we figure it out eventually.

Edit: and I’m not bashing Moroccans/Tunisians/Algerians. We love you guys! ❤️

Edit: spelling, grammar

Persian look of signature superiority

Watch me read a 900 year old text for fun

My work focuses on digitally processing texts from between 15th and 17th century in German. It's a pain and i look with envy to my colleagues working in English and French (around the same time). On the other hand, i like the challenge. :-)

"understanding it all" eh~

I think I read somewhere that Chinese readers are able to read 2000 year old texts with relatively little difficulty.

Meanwhile: Chad Greek-Orthodox priest

I know nothing about arabic, but in my opinion it's the prettiest script.

Read it all, maybe. But understand?