"There are about 20 Arab dialects in Algeria," the judge said.
And Arab dialects differ so much that a Syrian will struggle to understand the Arabic of a Moroccan.
Early Arab tribal groups like the Qedarites spoke early Arab dialects, but as the Arabic alphabet had not yet been developed, they used the Aramaic alphabet to write.
He taught me some rudiments and helped me understand, without even knowing it, that this Jewish-Arab dialect was a language of emotion, a language for family and laughter.
One of the many contradictions of this cinematic brouhaha is that the film tries hard to be culturally authentic: a teacher was brought in to coach the actors, including some Arab Israelis, in Egyptian dialect.
Arabs speak regional dialects as their mother tongue, and the differences between dialects can be significant enough to cause mutual unintelligibility.
Aramaic civilization and its peoples were gradually absorbed by the Arabs with Arabic dialects in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq in particular exhibiting the influence of Aramaic.
Those negotiations in late 2010 in Doha involved community members and legal experts from more than six Arab countries each with different dialects.
They described a ferocity on the part of the gunmen, some of them speaking in dialects from other Arab countries, as though the very sight of the church's interior had enraged them.
And although there are around 22 dialects in the Arab world, Yamli can deal with multiple different phonetic spellings.
