Editor's Note: This article is the substance of a paper delivered as a Mont Follick Lecture on 13 March 1974 with the title 'More than a Matter of writing with the learned, pronouncing with the vulgar: Some Preliminary Observations on the Arabic Koine'. As such, it will be included in a forthcoming volume in the Mont FoZZick Series (Manchester U.P.). For permission to print it here we are grateful both to the author and to Professor W. Haas of the Department of General Linguistics in the University of Manchester. For technical reasons, mainly typographical, the author's system of transcription--essentially that used in his Teach Yourself Colloquial Arabic (London, E.U.P., 1962)has had to be modified and, as a result, differs markedly from that to be employed in the Mont Follick volume. It will, however, be readily understood by Arabists since it is a system to which they are accustomed. (N.B. /a/ represents a back open vowel.) Finally, readers' attention is drawn to the author's 'Forthcoming Research on the Arabic Koine: A Pilot Project at Leeds' in BRISMES Bulletin II,i (1975). Grammars abound that prescribe for us the way to write Arabic. Written Arabic enjoys great prestige among the 115,000,000 or so speakers of this major world language, such that many Arabs, not least noticeably among cultural elites, may indulge a somewhat chimerical desire for present written norms to replace those of the greatly divergent, often mutually unintelligible vernacular Arabics of the several Arab countries. The label 'Modern Standard Arabic' (MSA) has been applied to the written language of, say, contemporary literature, journalism, television and radio newscasting, scientific and technological writing, administration, and diplomacy. Disregarding certain historical changes that have taken place between Classical Arabic (CA) and MSA, and also ignoring the interesting variation that is observable among individuals and regions in their renderings of MSA on the highly formal occasions of its functional appropriateness in speech, we can say for practical purposes that MSA shares most of its morphology and syntax with the classical language of the Qur'an and canonical literature of Islam and that its prestige as a model of eloquence and excellence is thereby further enhanced. But MSA is not a spoken language; it is nobody's mother-tongue, and the man who wants to talk at all times like a book or newspaper is a decided oddity. Many, perhaps most of the purposes of speech, including notably the familial, homely, and casual, are served for the people of a particular Arab country by their own regional vernacular or 'colloquial' Arabic and, in the important case of Egypt, the colloquial usage of the cultured classes of the capital city provides spoken norms for the whole country. Yet, when we come to consider the spoken Arabic that is used in answer to an educated man's full range of needs in the daily round of speaking and hearing, we find ourselves acquainted in only very general fashion with the facts of even particular, well-known cases like that of Egypt, and hardly at all with those appertaining to interchange between nationals of different countries. The interplay in everyday speech between MSA and vernacular, and indeed between Arabic and foreign languages--not to mention the frequent incorporation of Egyptian forms in the speech of non-Egyptians --is greatly in evidence and equally in ignorance. Linguists have found it fairly easy to describe vernaculars but have always resorted when doing so to an unconfessed purism, editing out without acknowledgment the prestigious, 'literary'-cum-vernacular forms of the language