Glossary
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), also called Fusha, is the standardized form of Arabic used in writing and formal speech, such as news broadcasts and official documents. Speakers use regional dialects in everyday conversation, and speech tools recognize formal Arabic more accurately than dialect speech.
Updated October 17, 20265 cited facts, each traced to its source
Also called MSA, Fusha.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the standard form of Arabic used in writing and in formal speech. It is the Arabic of news broadcasts, official documents, textbooks and most published books. Arabic speakers also call it Fusha, the formal form of the language that is shared across the Arabic-speaking world.
MSA is the formal form that media and official writing share
In a 2016 Interspeech paper, Al-Shareef and Hain describe MSA as the official language of spoken and written Arabic media 1. They set it against colloquial Arabic, the regional spoken varieties used in everyday conversation. A speaker often moves between the two: the same person may read a formal text in MSA and then talk with family in a local dialect.
Dialects are far from the formal form that speech tools expect
Speech tools hear sound, and a regional dialect can sound very different from the written standard. A 2025 study found that error rates for Arabic speech rise sharply on dialectal and accented speech, compared with Modern Standard Arabic 2. In practice, the same tool tends to be more accurate on formal Arabic than on dialect speech. If you dictate a formal letter, you are closer to the speech the tool learned from.
Dictation settings name countries, not MSA
Arabic dictation is usually set by country or region. Apple's Mac dictation list includes Arabic (Saudi Arabia) and Arabic (United Arab Emirates) 3, and Microsoft's speech table lists separate Arabic locales for Egypt and Morocco 4. The Arabic entries in these lists name countries and regions. The language setting you choose tells the recognizer which variant to expect, so check each tool's Arabic list before you dictate. Our guide to Arabic speech to text compares what each platform offers, and the question on which Arabic dialects dictation handles covers the choice of region.
Why MSA matters for dictation
Most Arabic text is written without its short-vowel marks 5, so a dictated paragraph usually looks like ordinary MSA without them. The marks decide how a word is read aloud, so a sentence can be spelled correctly and still be ambiguous. Read the draft back and check the words that could take a different reading. The entry on diacritics explains which marks matter and how they are lost.
Related terms
- Diacritics: the vowel and accent marks that Arabic text often omits.
- Dialect: a regional variety of a language, such as the Arabic spoken in a particular country.
- Accent: the way a speaker pronounces words, which differs from the variety of language they use.
- Code-switching: moving between two varieties or languages in one conversation.
Guides and questions that cover it
Evidence
Every number on this page, with where it comes from. Open a fact to see the exact words in its source.
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Related terms
- Dictation Languages, Accents and Voice TranslationThe topic this term belongs to
- AccentAn accent is the way a speaker pronounces a language, shaped by where they grew up, their first language or their community. Accents change pronunciation, not vocabulary, and speech recognition error rates can differ sharply from one accent to another.
- Character error rate (CER)Character error rate (CER) is the number of character insertions, substitutions and deletions needed to turn a recognizer's output into the correct text, divided by the number of characters in the correct text. It is the usual measure where words are not separated by spaces.
- Code-switchingCode-switching is the habit of moving between two or more languages within a conversation or a single sentence. Speech recognizers built around one language often misread the switched words, so mixed speech is harder to dictate than speech in one language.
- DiacriticsDiacritics are marks added to a letter, such as the acute accent in é, the tilde in ñ or the vowel marks in Arabic, that change how a letter sounds or which word it spells. Speech tools and everyday writers often leave them out, so a dictated word can come out spelled differently from what you meant.
- DialectA dialect is a regional or social variety of a language, with its own vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Speech recognition is usually less accurate on dialects than on the standard form, because labeled training data for dialects is often scarcer.
- Input method editor (IME)An input method editor (IME) is software that supports text input for characters that cannot be typed easily on a standard keyboard, such as many East Asian characters. Speech input can also be an input method, and Android allows only one input method to be enabled at a time.
- LocaleA locale is a language combined with a region, and sometimes a script, such as en-GB for English as used in the United Kingdom. Dictation and speech settings use locales because the same language can differ in spelling, punctuation and speech patterns from one region to another.
- Low-resource languageA low-resource language is one with little digital speech and text data for training speech recognition and other language tools. There is no fixed cutoff, and a language can be well resourced for one task and poorly resourced for another.
- Non-native speechNon-native speech is speech in a language that is not the speaker's first language, often called L2 speech or foreign-accented speech. Recognizers can transcribe read non-native English well, but they handle hesitations, repetitions and revisions differently, and results depend on the system.
- PinyinPinyin, also called Hanyu Pinyin, is the system that spells Mandarin Chinese syllables with the Latin alphabet and marks the tones with diacritics. People type Chinese by spelling the sound in Pinyin and choosing the character they want, and speech tools must choose among characters that share one Pinyin spelling.
- Right-to-left (RTL) scriptA right-to-left (RTL) script is a writing system, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu, whose letters run from right to left. Text that mixes these letters with digits or Latin words is bidirectional, so software needs a specific algorithm to order and display it.
- Speech translationSpeech translation converts speech in one language into the same meaning in another language, as text or as synthesized speech. Most systems first recognize the speech and then translate the text, so a recognition error carries into the translation.