Languages of Lebanon

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 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:


 * 1) Levantine Arabic –
 * 2) Modern Standard Arabic –
 * 3) French –
 * 4) English –
 * 5) Western Armenian –
 * 6) Turkish –

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, 'slang', 'dialect', or 'colloquial' (lit. 'the language of common people'), to contrast it to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic ( , lit. 'the eloquent'). They also call their spoken language, 'Arabic'. Alternatively, they identify their language by the name of their country, such as, 'Lebanese'. 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 (French: télévision, meaning 'television'),  (French: balcon , meaning 'balcony') and   (French: docteur , meaning 'doctor'), and from English, such as , , , and , with some phrases and verbs being altered to follow the syntax of Levantine Arabic, instead of English. For example, comes from the English word 'check', and  comes from the English word 'save'.

Armenian
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.

Kurdish
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.

Aramaic (Syriac)
Aramaic (Syriac) dialects are also spoken as a first language in some Lebanese communities such as Syriac Catholics, Syriac Orthodox and Lebanese Assyrians. Classical Syriac is also used in liturgies in other communities such as Maronite Catholics.

Arabic Sign
The Lebanese dialect of Levantine Arabic Sign Language is the main sign language of Lebanon, and Lebanon's deaf population is estimated at 12,000. Sign languages in the Arab world share some signs, but they are significantly different from each other. They are, therefore, considered to compose a language family (Arab sign-language family), rather than a single language. A "unified Arabic Sign Language" was artificially created by the Council of Arab Ministers of Social Affairs (CAMSA), a committee within the Arab League. It aims "to meet the needs of integration of deaf persons into society" by giving them a similar language situation to that of hearing people. The language is used in schools for the Deaf in some Arab countries, including Syria, and during news bulletins of Al Jazeera Arabic, which displays a simultaneous interpreter who translates from MSA to the unified Arabic Sign. Deaf signers of an Arabic Sign Language negatively view the unified language, because they cannot understand it from mutual intelligibility alone, and if it replaces the Arab Deaf community's sign languages, unified Arabic sign could bound the expression of their identity.

Oral 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.

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 Egyptian, and in March 2013, Disney and pan-Arab television network Al Jazeera made a deal allowing the latter to distribute some of Disney's MSA-dubbed shows and films. The release of Frozen with an MSA dub and without an Egyptian one caused a controversy in the Arab world.

Lebanese zajal and other forms of oral poetry are often in Levantine.

Typically, news bulletins are in MSA. On the popular television network LBCI, Arab and international news bulletins are in MSA, while the Lebanese national news broadcast is in a mix of MSA and Lebanese Arabic. Lebanese TV station OTV and some radio stations that cover news of the Armenian diaspora in Lebanon broadcast daily news bulletins in Armenian.

Lebanon used to have two francophone television stations, but they were shut down in the mid-1990s. Show hosts on television networks that are traditionally affiliated with Christians, such as MTV and LBCI, tend to use more English and French words than hosts in networks owned by Muslims, such as Future TV, Al-Manar, and NBN.

Writing and scripts
Unlike Levantine, Modern Standard Arabic has a standardized spelling in the Arabic script and is typically used in literature, official documents, newspapers, school books, and instruction leaflets. In formal media, Levantine is seldom written, except for some novels, plays, and humorous writings. Subtitles are usually in MSA, sometimes translating Arabic dialects to MSA. Most Arabs struggle to write MSA correctly. On social media and when texting, they use their native variety, either in the Arabic script or Arabizi. Arabizi combines the Latin alphabet with Western Arabic numerals to make up for sounds unavailable with the Latin alphabet alone. The numbers are visually similar to the Arabic character they represent. For example, 3 represents "". Especially among younger generations, Arabizi is commonly used on social media and discussion forums, SMS messaging, and online chat. Arabizi initially evolved because of the lack of digital support for Arabic letters, but it is now used to save time switching keyboards and, for typists who are not proficient in an Arabic keyboard, save time typing. A 2012 study found that, when writing in Levantine on Facebook, Arabizi is more common than the Arabic script in Lebanon, while the Arabic script is more common in Syria. Several studies have reported that the complexity of Arabic orthography slows down the word identification process, but Arabizi is not always read faster than the Arabic script, depending on vowelization, the reader's gender, and other factors.

In the 1960s, Lebanese poet Said Akl—inspired by the Maltese and Turkish alphabets— designed a new Latin alphabet for Lebanese and promoted the official use of Lebanese instead of MSA, but this movement was unsuccessful.

Education
Between 1994 and 1997, the Council of Ministers passed a new National Language Curriculum that required schools to use either English or French in natural sciences and mathematics. In general, school students are exposed to two or three languages: MSA and either French, English or both. Students' native language, Levantine, is not taught in schools, although MSA-medium lessons are often taught in a mix of MSA and Levantine with, for instance, the lesson read out in MSA and explained in Levantine. Foreign language teachers, such as English and French teachers, also commonly code-switch to Levantine.

Although all language teachers face difficulties, especially in low socio-economic schools, MSA teachers' teaching resources are inferior to those of English and French, focusing mostly on classical books, as other resources are rare. Many young Lebanese struggle with basic MSA reading and writing skills, while Syrian refugees in Lebanon transitioning from the MSA-centric Syrian education system to the English- and French-centric Lebanese system struggle with English and French. They are therefore often placed several grade levels below their age level, causing negative consequences on their psychosocial well-being.

The number of students learning in English is increasing, while those learning in French is decreasing: In 2019, 50% of school students studied in French, compared to 70% twenty years prior to that, and 55% of French-educated students chose to go to English-medium universities. Lebanon's brain drain is high, and its job market is weak. Foreign language proficiency, therefore, is highly beneficial to Lebanese graduates, as it helps them find jobs abroad.

Government and law
Following its independence in 1943, Lebanon's official language changed from French and MSA to just MSA. Today, MSA is the official language, while French is a recognized one. Lebanon's national anthem and all government-related announcements, documents, and publications are in MSA. French is also used, alongside MSA, on road signs, the Lebanese lira and public buildings. Lebanese Arabic—the variety of Levantine Arabic—is used in courtrooms, but in order to record court proceedings, the judge restates in MSA what the suspect has said, and the court recorder handwrites the judge's translation. This process, according to a report funded and led by the World Bank, "risks an edit or an omission in the restatement by the judge."

Brands and businesses
Email communication and announcements in professional job settings are mostly through English. Of Lebanon's 34 radio stations, 11 have either French or English names. Using photographs from 2015, a 2018 study of the linguistic landscape of Lebanon's capital, Beirut, found that the Arabic script is only used in 20% of storefront's primary text (store's name) and 9% of secondary text (other information, such as opening hours). The Armenian script was absent.

History
Starting in the 1st millennium BCE, Aramaic was the dominant spoken language and the language of writing and administration in the Levant— where Lebanon is. Because there are no written sources, the history of Levantine Arabic before the modern period is unknown. In the early 1st century CE, a great variety of Arabic dialects were already spoken by various nomadic or semi-nomadic Arabic tribes in the Levant. These dialects were local, coming from the Hauran—and not from the Arabian Peninsula— and related to later Classical Arabic. Initially restricted to the steppe, Arabic-speaking nomads started to settle in cities and fertile areas after the Plague of Justinian in 542 CE. These Arab communities stretched from the southern extremities of the Syrian Desert to central Syria, the Anti-Lebanon mountains, and the Beqaa Valley. The Muslim conquest of the Levant (634–640 ) brought Arabic speakers from the Arabian Peninsula who settled in the Levant. Arabic became the language of trade and public life in cities, while Aramaic continued to be spoken at home and in the countryside. The language shift from Aramaic to vernacular Arabic was a long process over several generations, with an extended period of bilingualism, especially among non-Muslims. Christians continued to speak Syriac for about two centuries, and Syriac remained their literary language until the 14th century. In its spoken form, Aramaic nearly disappeared, except for a few Aramaic-speaking villages, but it has left substrate influences on Levantine. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century reduced the use of Turkish words due to Arabization and the negative perception of the Ottoman era among Arabs. With the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon (1920–1946), the British protectorate over Jordan (1921–1946), and the British Mandate for Palestine (1923–1948), French and English words gradually entered Levantine Arabic.