Jordanian

This guest post was written by Hossam Abouzahr, the man behind The Living Arabic Project (www.livingarabic.com), a compilation of multiple dialect and Fusha dictionaries that contains the largest Egyptian dialect dictionary and (what will hopefully soon be) the largest Levantine dialect dictionary. A half-breed (Arab-American), he found out that Arabic is actually beautiful after escaping from Arabic classes and meeting cool teachers who introduced him to the fun side of the language. ...

Today’s guest post includes a very exciting announcement made by our new friend Chris. Nisreen frustrated about the perennially high degree of humidity in her native New York This is Nisreen. Nisreen is a chronically lonely Syrian-American living in New York, with a Syrian father and a Palestinian mother. She is, in fact, Maha’s doppelganger – and Maha’s falling in love with her cousin out of sheer loneliness, and Nisreen’s parallel love story with her own paternal cousin, might well have been avoided if they’d only managed to meet one another instead of spending all their time looking woefully into a camera and monologuing about their respective misery. ...

بلا قافية “bila gafiya“ This is an extremely useful and wonderful little phrase brought to my attention by a friend in Jordan. The way he explained it, you use it when someone says something that could be misinterpreted, much like how English speakers use ‘That’s what she said.’ The example he gave was someone saying لانه صغير (‘li’anoo sa3’eer’ – because he/it is small) with the appropriate douchey response being بلا قافية. ...