Arabic in the lead-up to the arab spring: fusion or diffusion

Abstract

This article aims to place the Arabic language in its recent historical context and proposes to describe the situation of Arabic in the period preceding and leading to the Arab Spring from the perspective of the degree to which Arabic language change and variation are moving in the direction of more fusion or diffusion. By diffusion I mean a situation in which divergences among the dialects of one language continue to grow and fragment, causing them eventually to develop into separate and largely mutually unintelligible systems