Localization in Modern Standard Arabic

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the official language used in all Arabic countries. In this paper we describe an investigation of the uniformity of MSA across different countries. Many studies have been carried out locally or regionally on Arabic and its dialects. Here we look on a more global scale by studying language variations between countries. The source material used in this investigation was derived from national newspapers available on the Web, which provided samples of common media usage in each country. This corpus has been used to investigate the lexical characteristics of Modern Standard Arabic as found in 10 different Arabic speaking countries. We describe our collection methods, the types of lexical analysis performed, and the results of our investigations. With respect to newspaper articles, MSA seems to be very uniform across all the countries included in the study, but we have detected various types of differences, with implications for computational processing of MSA.