[simonask]

I don’t think anybody said that Arabic has suffered a complete standstill, and it has doubtlessly evolved significantly.

But if you compare it with basically any other major language, it’s clearly much, much more conservative. If you are a native English speaker, understanding English from 1,000 years ago is like learning a completely different language. If you are a native speaker of Italian, you cannot understand a text in Latin without significant training. This is true for all European languages other than Icelandic.

Chinese is pretty similar, even though the written language is slightly more stable.

So in comparison, Arabic is incredibly conservative.

[decimalenough]

There is no one "Arabic". Yes, formal modern Arabic (fusha) is based on (but not identical to) the classical Arabic of the Quran, but nobody speaks this in real life. The actual Arabics are the 20-odd spoken languages, many of which are effectively different languages at this point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic

A rough equivalent in both time and space is how the Vatican continues to use Latin, but the rest of the Roman Empire has splintered into Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc.

[slibhb]

> but nobody speaks this in real life

They speak it on tv and it's written in newpapers. They learn it in schools. Educated Arabs code switch into Fusha all the time. Islamist leaders (e.g. Nasrallah) speak Fusha in their broadcast speeches.

It's also pretty hard for foreigners to learn an ammiyya (outside of immersion). "Studying Arabic" almost always means Fusha.

I agree with you that "the actual Arabics are the 20-odd spoken languages". In a healhier culture, Fusha wouldn't exist or would have the same cultural place as Latin in the Western world.