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.

As mentioned in the textbook, there are many borrowed words across different languages that have similar yet different pronunciations. One example would be the word lemon [lemən] pronounced as leh+muhn in English. I found out that this word originates from the Arabic word ليمون or līmūn which means a yellow citrus fruit. Another English word that originated from Arabic is coffee [kɑːfi]. This comes from the arabic word قهوة or Kahwa. The middle and ending of the words are different however the beginning sound [Ka] is the same. I also find it interesting that not only does the pronunciation change between languages, it also changes between the dialects of the language as well. For example, in standard Arabic, it is pronounced Kahwa, however in my Egyptian dialect we don’t pronounce the beginning the same. Instead we say Ahwa. So I think its very interesting how pronunciations of the same word differentiate between different dialects as well as different languages.

During my early years in elementary school, I remember how difficult it was to learn two languages at a very young age. I was born in Egypt, and Arabic, being my first language, made learning English grammar very challenging, not to mention pronouncing words. One thing I will always remember is when I would ask the teacher, “Can I use the bathroom?” and they would always jokingly respond, “I don’t know, can you?” That used to irritate me as a child learning a new language because they knew exactly what I meant, yet they enforced grammatical rules that confused me. Additionally, I recall in fourth grade during math class when my teacher would get upset if I added “and” between large numbers, such as ‘one hundred AND one’ or ‘two thousand AND twenty.’ She would always correct me and explain that there’s no “and” when pronouncing these numbers.