Blog 4

Over the past 10 plus years there has been a shift in the way Egyptians speak. I spoke to my parents about this and they told me that the way they speak now compared to how they used to speak as kids has changed significantly. The biggest difference that they noticed was the strong influence other languages have on our dialect. More specifically English. Instead of using the Arabic name of some objects a lot of Egyptians will call the item by its english name with the Arabic pronunciation. So it sounds very close to Arabic, however the word itself is in English. This is common especially in cities that have many tourists. Another significant change that my parents mentioned was that we like to call certain items by their brand names rather than their actual names. For example, we call any soda “Pepsi” or with their accent “Bepsi”, even if the soda is a different brand. This is very interesting because as a bilingual speaker, I don’t notice sometimes how common it is for Egyptians to use English words in their dialect.

Leave a Reply