There is something embarrassing about Egyptian Arabic. So much so that, outside Egypt where Arabs are concerned, if at all possible, I've made a habit of pretending not to be Egyptian. It is the only way to stop other Arabs from trying out their Egyptian Arabic on me. Or (supported by decades of experience with a race whose chauvinism has frequently identified it with the Pharaohs) assuming that, should they speak to me in their own dialect or some simplified version thereof, I would not understand a word they said. But believe me, there are many reasons not to want non-Egyptians to key into Egyptspeak.
What comes out of their mouths, for one thing, is not so much Egyptian as Egyptian TV Arabic. The two are significantly different and the latter is particularly annoying: imagine the average Brit trying, for the duration of the conversation, to sound like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Because they have heard and more or less understood it so often, they think they know Egyptian Arabic; it eventually becomes hard not to tell them that they actually sound like children speaking it, that they're using the wrong words or the wrong grammatical constructions, that their accents interfere with the flow of a particular expression or that their own dialects are showing up anyway. But even when, by some fluke, you end up with someone who has a reasonable command of Egyptian - someone who has lived in Egypt, say - then you keep asking yourself why it should be they, not you, who is automatically expected to adjust.
Eagerness to try out Egyptian Arabic applies to Levantine Arabs who find it amusing. One Palestinian friend of mine, on first coming to Egypt, felt he was "trapped in a soap opera". Maghrebis have a rather different experience of the whole thing, and when they speak Egyptian Arabic, it is very much under duress. I remember a Moroccan poet who, speaking simplified standard Arabic to a group of Egyptian writers in Fes, leant over my shoulder and whispered, "Egypt is like an egg with a steel shell. Unless you are already inside it, there is no way you could possibly interact." An exasperated Tunisian, referring to the well-known saying that "Egypt is the mother of the world", once cried out, "For God's sake, doesn't the mother of the world have children? Surely they cannot be identical to her..."
And so it continues - but not for long. Now that the media is increasingly rich with dialects, notably Syrian, there is definite reason to believe that Egyptian Arabic will no longer be taken for granted. And then what will Egyptians do?
