Review: The Fundamentals of Lebanese Grammar

Lebanese is considered to be a dialect of a broader group of Levantine Arabic dialects. Much ink has been spilled discussing and debating the connection these languages have with Arabic, in particular with Lebanese because of a number of nationalistic, religious and historical reasons which we won't go into here. Suffice it to say, that for all practical purposes, the spoken dialects are related to but nevertheless quite distinct from the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA, often treated as synonymous with Classical Arabic) used throughout the Arabic-speaking world for formal communication and writing.

With each region of the Arabic-speaking world having its own dialect or dialect group, each more or less close to the others and to MSA, the Arabic learner is often confronted with a couple of choices: 1) whether to learn MSA or a spoken dialect, or both, and 2) which, if any, dialect to learn. From what I've seen, most courses teaching a dialect have tended to default to Egyptian as it is a broadly understood one, thanks to Egypt's cultural impact throughout the Arabic-speaking world. It also happens to have been arguably the most attractive Arabic-speaking country for tourists. But there are courses available for the other dialects, especially Moroccan (the North African dialects are so different as to be essentially unintelligible to Levantine speakers) and Levantine. So if you wanted to travel to Lebanon, the natural choice would of course be to study the Levantine dialect, usually with one of the Levantine varieties such as Syrian.

And here is the problem, and I say this having had some experience trying to learn using "Levantine" course materials: Levantine is clearly a group of very close and mutually intelligible dialects, but the differences between the dialects are not insignificant. Indeed, even within tiny Lebanon there are a range of accents and dialect words and structures used hyper-locally. So if your aim is to learn Lebanese, then while learning Syrian, say, would work, it is not quite the same as learning Lebanese. Several times over, while trying out simple phrases in Syrian dialect to a Lebanese speaker, I was told that I would be understood, but that's just not how Lebanese people speak. It's hard for me to judge, but I guess it is akin to learning English from a Yorkshireman when you really want to speak to folks from Glasgow.

Now given the paucity of serious pedagogical resources for Lebanese, choosing from one of a number of available courses on Levantine Arabic and adapting later when needed is a reasonable strategy, and one which you are bound to have to do no matter what language you learn as you travel through the places where it is spoken and encounter its geographical variations. But should Lebanese materials be available it makes sense to use them. So I was excited to find this book, as it is a serious (and successful, in my view) attempt at writing a Lebanese grammar.

Not everyone likes grammar books. I understand why, too: learning grammar for its own sake is not usually productive, and many people find grammars to be arcane, difficult to read and understand and lacking real-world application. For my part, I think they have a place if one keeps in mind that grammar books are not manuals, they are reference books. So while I don't think that reading a grammar book should be anyone's priority, they can provide many useful answers to questions you might have during your study of a language. I have found them useful to clear up confusion in my native language (English) as well as in foreign languages I have studied.

(I would even go so far as to say that if you are learning two foreign languages which are distinct from your native language but similar to each other, you should get a grammar book for the weaker language written in the language you are stronger in. I have had this experience myself trying to learn Spanish after having already achieved a decent level in French. The languages are so close that often their similarities can lead to confusion whenever there are differences, and inevitably you end up getting things mixed up. The Spanish grammars and manuals written in English presume you speak English, obviously, but do not presume you know another Romance language, whereas my Spanish materials written in French address the similarities and differences explicitly, because the writers are aware that a French speaker will inevitably make many mistakes by transferring their knowledge of French to Spanish.)

So grammars can in general be useful, if you understand their limitations and accept that they are only a small part of the puzzle of learning a language. But how useful can a grammar be for a language that lacks standardisation, such as Lebanese? Surprisingly enough, despite the chaotic nature of the Lebanese dialect, despite that Lebanese people themselves often disparage their own language, sometimes don't even consider it to be a language worthy of the name, and even despite Lebanese people employing words and entire phrases from English and French with such wild abandon that one wonders whether they can really be said to be speaking any kind of Arabic at all, Kline demonstrates that there is indeed a great deal of regularity in the language. While there is considerable latitude in usage, there is still a notion of things being "wrong" or at least awkward that is broadly shared among all speakers. Once you have this kind of regularity and expected speech patterns, a grammar becomes self-evidently justifiable. In short, you cannot just throw words together and expect to be understood, a fact which implies a grammar is present, even if the native speakers might not be able to express its rules. And that last point is precisely why a book like this is so useful.

Finally, many would argue that you should study MSA and pick up a dialect in parallel. I think this would be ideal in some ways, as for all that Lebanese is distinct from Arabic, it is still very close to it and continually informed by Arabic loan words and phrases. Arabic remains the official language in Lebanon and the language of literature, religious services, most written and much audiovisual media, and almost all Lebanese speakers have also learned Arabic from a young age, many (though not all) being educated primarily in it. So to communicate with complete ease in Lebanese society some knowledge of Arabic would be needed. But as students, especially ones who have limited time to devote to the task, sometimes we need to be realistic. After all, if our goal is complete ease then we should probably also learn French, which many people still speak at home and are educated in at school, and possibly even Armenian since there is a significant and old Armenian community living in Lebanon, and why not Syriac too, so you can join the Maronite Church….

Besides time, the grammatical differences between Lebanese and Arabic are so great that a Lebanese grammar is justified even if you do learn Arabic. You should learn what you want to learn based on whatever time and energy you have, but if you want to learn Lebanese well, then you will have to study it on its own terms.

So now that I've motivated the need for a Lebanese grammar, let's look at this one, the only one of its type and scope I'm aware of.

This is not strictly the only Lebanese grammar book I've seen, but it is the only one I've seen that convinced me, from the samples available on Amazon and on Taylor and Francis's websites, that it was worth spending money on. For many of the available manuals and grammars there are no samples available, and for those that have them I have usually been left unimpressed. The influencer generation has produced its fair share of questionable materials, often expensive and difficult to asses without spending the (sometimes considerable) money first, and written by people who in some cases may not really be qualified. Some of the older manuals and grammars are outdated, limited in scope, or make no use of the Arabic script—more on which later.

Kline isn't just some young hopeful looking to make a living off of YouTube, but a serious student of the language who has noticed a gap in the literature. (And perhaps in the market, though I doubt he will sell very many copies.) While I cannot tell whether or not he holds an academic position (he does have an ORCID however), his approach is scholarly, which may not appeal to everyone but it confers some real advantages. For one, he is not from Lebanon, and has had to learn the language the hard way, and consequently has a deeper understanding of the internal workings of the language than most native speakers would. This becomes abundantly clear in his writing, which contains many explanations of rules that I can guarantee you most Lebanese would not even be aware of (many I've spoken with claim that there are no rules in Lebanese, a claim which is manifestly untrue). This is a common enough phenomenon in foreign language teaching: native speakers do not necessarily make the best teachers of their own language. This is even more the case with Lebanese, where some speakers would not even deign to think it is worth teaching in the first place! His view of the language is from above, as it were—he is an outsider peering in, describing what the Lebanese themselves do with their language, rather than what he or anyone else thinks they ought do.

His scholarly approach also means that he doesn't merely describe the dialect in its own terms, but makes connections with Arabic where appropriate. This would presumably make the book even more useful to students of Arabic, but even for those who, like me, find Arabic interesting but have not committed to learning it, this approach provides valuable and interesting insights. It bears repeating that although the languages are distinct, you cannot really expect to learn Lebanese without learnign something about Arabic as the two mutually interact. In terms of phonology, too, he is careful to suggest pronunciations using a Latin script (based on the script many Lebanese still use in texting and social media posts) but not to fix them with the vowel diacritics (harakat) when written in Arabic script. This omission can make reading the Arabic script a little more challenging, but it makes sense for a couple of reasons: one is that, as he shows with a nifty diagram, the number of vowel phonemes in Lebanese is greater than that in Arabic and cannot accurately be described by the traditional Arabic diacritics; second, the vowels shift a lot among different Lebanese speakers, even in one area, so fixing them would imply making pronunciation choices which the author seems to have wanted to avoid, even though he does provide a guide with the Latin script. Occasionally, he will add a note on pronunciation where neither the Arabic nor Latin scripts convey it fully. He is sometimes very specific, such as in the chapter on Active Participles where he explains that the vowel sound, though usually rendered as an i or an e, is really "more akin to an ı, which is a close back unrounded vowel" (page 122)—further evidence of his scholarly approach. Of course, if you find this kind of detail he provides off-putting, you can safely skip it an continue reading on.

In all honesty, notwithstanding his arguments, I would have liked to have had the diacritics, which other authors have chosen to add (I'm thinking of the Lingualism series of books), but the Latin script means that only rarely are you left wondering about the pronunciation. Both scripts together seems to work well, one reinforcing the other, as his Latin script convention does not reliably identify long vowels, for example. Be that as it may, recall that in Arabic the diacritics are not usually written in anyway, and since this is a grammar and not a manual it would be unfair to criticise Kline to have omitted them. And anyway, pronunciation as a whole is best learned by listening carefully, not from a book.

Kline provides a number of fascinating historical and etymological glimpses into what makes Lebanese what it is, sometimes making reference to the earlier Semitic languages spoken in the Lebanon prior to the introduction of Arabic, as well as to the influence of other foreign languages on the Lebanese lexicon. This isn't a book about language evolution though, so these excursions are limited, though tantalising. One of the most interesting insights to me was the effective phonological equivalence of the m and b verb prefixes in the indicative present tense. According to Kline, the m, which only comes in front of the third person plural verbs, is really a b, but because it is always followed by an n in these verbs, the digraph bn is almost indistinguishable from mn in pronunciation. Identifying the closeness of these sounds is interesting, but it is also useful for learners to hone their listening and ultimately their pronunciation. Another passage is emblematic about what is both so interesting and mysterious—and interesting because it is mysterious—about a primarily spoken language like Lebanese, where Kline discusses the usage of the future markers ra7/رح, la7/لح and 7a/حى, firstly explaining how it is "plausible" that la7 is just an alternative pronunciation of ra7, and secondly that understanding why speakers choose to use 7a instead of eithher ra7 or la7 "requires further linguistic research" (page 105). To some students these details may seem to be superfluous, potentially distracting even, but I really appreciate them. They are brief, and telling of the state of linguistic understanding of the language. And they are useful, as they help to bind seemingly disparate concepts together as you strive to learn them.

The numerous examples are yet another example of Kline's scholarly—indeed empirical—approach, and provide useful context. Formalised languages like Arabic, or French, say, are usually presented according to a set of rules established long ago, which form a de facto ideal towards which students and native speakers alike are encouraged to strive, even if the reality of the spoken and written word is somewhat different. Lebanese being anything but formalised, Kline has apparently derived his grammar from recording and analysing what speakers actually say, and inferred his Grammar from these data. He sometimes uses his knowledge of Arabic to show when the two are similar or differ, but refrains from using it as a model for Lebanese, quite appropriately treating it on its own terms, which he does without any hint of polemic. Despite their copious quantity throughout the book, I still feel that in some sections we could do with perhaps a few more examples, especially for prepositions, where not all of them are shown in context.

Using such varied examples provides a greater range of speech patterns than if a native-speaking author invented the examples all on their own. On one or two occasions when I provided some such sentences to a Lebanese speaker, they found the expressions confusing or unintelligible. This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that they had not lived in the country for a long time, or that their community did not share those speech patterns (it could be a result of typographical errors too, but they are usually easy to spot so I think it unlikely, and this book isn't the only place I have seen this phenomenon play out). I mention this to underline that there is no single standard, and that languages evolve in any case, so a recent (this grammar was published in 2003, and includes examples using the Arabic word for COVID-19), broad-range work is valuable to have. Consider too that if within Lebanese there is so much variation, imagine trying to learn a Damascene dialect only to then travel to Lebanon—the distance between what you would actually use in day-to-day speech in Beirut would be greater still! Which is nicely illustrated by another welcome attribute of the book, being the the section on features particular to regional varieties.

I think Kline does a good job of systematising the content. There are several chapters devoted to verbs which are the heaviest to read through, and these chapters make up the bulk of the book. This is fair enough really, as Arabic verbs are difficult to wrap one's head around, and there is a lot of material to go through. He provides copious examples for most verb types.

Although Kline makes a point of informing the reader that he has written the Grammar from the perspective of an English speaker, making use of English grammatical classes to describe how Lebanese forms are used, the verb types are themselves presented as they would be for Arabic. The ten verb forms are presented in order, with their sub-forms (defective, hollow, and so on), and he highlights "Lebanised" verbs (borrowed from other languages but made to fit Lebanese verb conventions). For each form, Kline provides explanations with detail which I have not seen elsewhere, not even in the otherwise useful (and complementary) book Levantine Arabic Verbs (which despite the title is based, for once, on Lebanese). Presumably you would read many of these explanations in a good Arabic grammar, but there are enough differences to make this a worthwhile exercise. I do appreciate his thoroughness, however I do wish the descriptions were written and grouped in such a way that the reader could more easily identify the differences between the forms before launching into the tables.

The table of contents doesn't provide subheadings, and the index is in English only. I would have liked to have had an Arabic one for the Arabic grammatical terms. The index could be enlarged significantly, as it can be difficult to find all the sections covering the different functions of a given word or particle (such as for 3nd/عند, which can operate either as a preposition or as a modal verb) or even just to find different use cases of a specific preposition, particle or morpheme, say.

The book is modest in size, coming in at a bit over 200 pages. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it keeps the book focused on the "Fundamentals" of the title. Perhaps with a few extra examples and a good index it might increase in volume a little, but I think the few extra pages would result an enormous gain in utility.

I've had teachers who were reluctant to write Lebanese using the Arabic script because they in fact never do, instead doing what many of their compatriots do: write Lebanese using Latin characters in text messages or social media posts, reserving Arabic script for Arabic itself and, depending on their education, preferring French or English in any case for more formal writing. I can certainly understand the logic here, indeed there is no single, codified way to write Lebanese in any script at all, so it seems unnecessarily complicated to impose the Arabic script onto a language which is essentially oral anyway.

I do nevertheless prefer to have the Arabic script as at least an option, for a number of reasons. First of all, although Lebanese is rarely written outside of social media, there is a small body of literature written using the Arabic script, and furthermore there is still more written in the related Levantine dialects. The added value is that you can then read material written in Syrian or Jordanian, say. Egyptian seems to be the most developed in this regard in modern times, even with a Wikipedia site written in that dialect. Though it does not come under the Levantine dialects, it is nevertheless broadly understood by Lebanese speakers and is still fairly close.

A great deal of signage is written in Arabic, and proper names of people and places are obviously going to be found written in Arabic. Whether one chooses to pronounce these with a Lebanese accent or not, it is helpful to be able to read signs. In Lebanon, most major signage is also in French, sometimes even English, and nowadays most roadside advertising and restaurant menus in the chic areas of Beirut are written exclusively in English. But get out of the more cosmopolitan centres, or go to another Arab country, and you will almost certainly need to know the script. Some informal writing of Lebanese is also done using Arabic script—think, for example, of graffiti.

Certain grammatical features are also better represented by Arabic script, which can make the student's task of identifying grammatical function a little easier; others are, to be fair, clearer in Latin script, so having both is ideal (the ta marbouta, ة, is a perfect encapsulation of both of these situations, where to a novice each script imparts useful and complementary information). Either way, learning Arabic script inevitably leads to learning about conventions used in Arabic as well as in Lebanese, so you go some (very small) way towards that ideal of knowing Arabic as well as Lebanese. Indeed, if you then decide to learn Arabic, or if you already know or are learning Arabic, it makes a lot of sense to use the Arabic script as the connections between the languages are much clearer.

Though there is no written standard for Lebanese, there is at least a standard for Arabic, which informs the way Lebanese is written when using this script. There is no such standard for the Latin script, with different conventions being used by different speakers and different pedagogical books, and in different eras. Some of these are radically different, being informed mainly by the speaker's preference for French or English, but even within those tendencies each speaker will tend to apply the alphabet in their own home-spun, probably (but not necessarily) internally inconsistent manner. The net result is that you are more likely to find consistency in the Arabic script than with a Latin-based script.

I don't wish to push my argument too far, however. If you really don't want to learn the Arabic script, I think you'll be fine. I would simply say that it will be far and away the least of your struggles when learning Lebanese, and the benefits outweigh the cost. For all that many of the Lebanese people I know would not consider writing Lebanese in Arabic script, others seem to think that it would be absurd to write it any other way. Getting comfortable with both approaches will at the very least give you access to more written materials, some being exclusively written in one or the other script.

One reason why I have avoided some materials is their omission of Arabic script, since I really do feel like something is missing if it is not included. I have a phrase book which omits the Arabic script in the short grammar section at the beginning, and although the transcription into a Latin (really French, in this case) alphabet is effective, occasionally it is vague in such a way as to obscure word connections, and fastidious in a way that obscures patterns; both would have been clearer, I think, if the Arabic script had been included. Kline's choice of including both is therefore a wise one, as it not only serves the needs of those who prefer one or the other script but, arguably, surpasses both by providing both, since they are complementary and one arguably should be familiar with the two.

One thing I feel is missing is a discussion on concordances of verbs and their prepositions. For example, we are told that 3ala/على means on, at or to, but from this book you would have no idea that it is used with the verb dawwar/دوّر—"to search"—to mean "to search for". Another example: when should bi/بِ be used with the verb ballash/بلّش—"to begin"? A survey of this nature would presumably belong to a "Comprehensive Lebanese Grammar" rather than one of the Fundamentals (arguably these pairings are a question of syntax and vocabulary rather than of grammar), but prepositions are often the trickiest part of a language's basic elements to get right. The very short chapter on prepositions would therefore be the first one I would like to see expanded, even if only the most commonly encountered pairings of verbs and prepositions were included. I have found the Levantine Arabic Verbs book I mentioned earlier useful for some of this, but it is far from comprehensive in this regard either.

While I'm gathering my wish list, a little more on the history of the language and perhaps even a section on how Lebanese differs from other Levantine dialects (neither need be comprehensive) would be of interest to me personally, but they would justifiably be considered outside the scope of the book.

Kline's writing is accessible and engaging enough, though occasionally the wording could be lightened up a little, in particular when providing a list of exceptions in verb forms where he writes, for example on page 101, in long form "second-person feminine, second-person plural, and third-person plural" to indicate which conjugations carry a sound change. While I am in general against overusing abbreviations, I think a shorthand for these passages, which are frequent in the verb sections, would make them more easily digestible—e.g. 1p for "first-person plural". This is not to say that the writing is unclear—far from it, he is careful to be precise in what he says—only that the connections between words on the page and concepts can be a bit more smoothly presented in these situations.

The tables are of great help, though I do feel they could be prettier. I am a big believer in Edward Tufte's approach to making information as easily ingestible as possible through good design, and I think some subtle formatting changes to the line styles and line justification to bring related terms closer together, and distinguish unrelated ones more, would be welcome. This is a very minor quibble, but this is a review after all, not a panegyric.

The book has a number of helpful notes placed at the end of each chapter. It would be better if they were at the bottom of the page, and in some cases if they were included inline, as they are sometimes quite useful observations whose relegation to the end of the chapter does them no justice.

Typographical errors are unfortunately a bit more frequent than they ought to be, but are mostly trivial. Sometimes much graver editing mistakes can be observed, suggesting a cut and paste gone awry, or simply a poor proof read. I hope these will be fixed in a future edition, though they do not detract from my conclusion that this is a genuinely useful, thoughtfully produced and much needed book for anyone studying this dialect.

I bought the paperback version of the book (directly from Routledge/Taylor and Francis) and it features one of those rubberised "soft touch" finishes on the cover. I despise these, as they feel a bit gross, especially as they pick up dirt and are hard to dust off, and they don't slide easily between the neighbouring books on the bookshelf. I also question their longevity, as I have seen a number of remote controls and computer peripherals finished with a similar texture where the rubberised finish disintegrates into a sticky goo over time. I have another book like this which I covered with thick wrapping paper, and I may do the same with this. I do wish that the publishers would just bind the book with either of the traditional glossy or matte card to spare me the trouble. (And by the way, how is it that the hardcover version is almost four times as much?) Otherwise the size is practical and the text legible.

Incidentally, I don't understand why when you buy a book in hard copy you don't get a complementary e-book version as well. I'm obviously not going to buy the book twice, but it would be handy to have a searchable electronic version, which could help alleviate the limitations posed by the sparse index. I stil believe a reference book like this is more useful in print, but offering the electronic version with it would sweeten the deal and would cost the publisher nothing. This is not unique to this publisher, nor to the medium of books—music on vinyl or CD should always come with an MP3 download code nowadays, but it feels like this practice is actually getting less common than it once was.