History of the Spoken Lebanese

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What is the deference between a dialect and a language; 20 years ago no body had heard about Bosnian and Croatian as independent languages. Today they are languages and no longer a part of the Serbian language. All that was needed was a political decision. It was enough to make the change and we need that in Lebanon too.

Those propagating for the Arabic language claim that it is the mother language for all countries within the Arabic league, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east through the entire Mashriq and the gulf region.
A dialect of a language should be understood by people speaking other dialects of the same language, this is a general condition.
In the case of Lebanon, if one speaks Lebanese and never went to school and meet a Moroccan guy that also never went to school, the two will not be able to communicate. It is because the only lingual thing they have in common is the Arabic they learn in the school chair and hear on the news, not what their fathers and mothers speaks at home, then how can Arabic be a mother language?

We are among the few people in the world that speaks something and write something else. This is the case of all the Arabic writing people.

Before Christ, the people living on the Lebanese coast used to peak the Phoenician language and the people of the mountains used the Aramaic, later on the Aramaic survived and widely spread while the Phoenician died and melted in other languages including the Aramaic. During that time the Bekaa and Akkar and parts of the south were not included in the Lebanese entity. with all respect to what some people like to propagate about the establishment of Lebanon but the truth is that Lebanon has been existing as a kind of a state long before the French state and the Ottoman empire.

The people living in modern Lebanon spoke Aramaic Syriac when the Arab invasions came and all occupied areas started to be administrated in Arabic, of course not the Lebanese mountain witch is the historical Lebanon that didn’t fall in the hands of the Muslims until year 1305. Since Islam and Arabism started to spread in the Middle East from year 635 when the Arabs took Damascus and the Bekaa until 1305 when a foreigner had started to rule the Aramaic Lebanese people and mountain.

The mountain people continued to have a resistance and dreams of independence and self ruling; eventually we got rid of the occupying Muslim Mamluks and got back to rule themselves. Later on the Ottomans came and ruled the whole MENA region but even then they had a special position in the Ottoman Empire and were a non Arabic speaking people but in time the arabisation of the Aramaic language had started.

Deep in the 1870s many villages still spoke Aramaic. The big coastal cities lost to the Arabic long time before because of the trade and so on...

The French army together with local resistance of Lebanon pushed the Ottomans out and eventually when all nations were supposed to get their own states, the Christian Aramean Lebanese people also worked for that. Instead of being happy with the historical Lebanon from Zgharta in the north to Jezzine in the south, the big Maronite leaders wanted more, they got the French to help them include the Bekaa, the south, Akkar and Tripoli in this new state formation.
The historical Aramean Christian Lebanon was now called the ´´grand Liban´´ with Arab Muslim population in the mentioned regions. Since that day the spoken Lebanese got even more arabised,

This unwanted situation was created mainly because of the weak Christian leaders that thought more about their own economic interests than the ethnic identity of their people.

The new modern state of Lebanon got all its parties and institutions arabised. even many street signs and town names got arabised, like Ghazir, next to Jounieh, people could think it is Arabic, meaning a river with heavy running water. If you go to the village and ask the elder people, they would use the Aramaic word Ghzir. If you take away the fat7a it will mean the end of a hill in Aramaic. By a fast look to the view in the town you see a hill and not a river.

Until Lebanon will regain its Aramaic roots in the Lebanese spoken language we continue to struggle for our right to have our own Lebanese language written and official.