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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iraq
Index
Figure 7. Ethnic and Religious Distribution, 1988
Although the data are not absolutely reliable, the government
estimates that 76 percent of the people are Arab; 19 percent are
Kurds; while Turkomans, Assyrians, Armenians, and other
relatively small groups make up the rest. All but a small
percentage adhere to Islam. The Islamic component is split into
two main sects, Sunni and Shia, with the Shias by far the
majority. Officially the government sets the number of Shias at
55 percent. In the 1980s knowledgeable observers began to
question this figure, regarding it as low. Because the government
does not encourage birth control and the Shias, the least
affluent in society, have traditionally had the highest
birthrate, a more reasonable estimate of their numbers would seem
to be between 60 and 65 percent. All but a few of the estimated
3,088,000 Kurds are Sunni, and thus the Sunni Arabs--who
historically have been the dominant religious and ethnic group--
constitute a decided minority vis-รก-vis the Shia majority.
Almost all Iraqis speak at least some Arabic, the mother
tongue for the Arab majority. Arabic, one of the more widely
spoken languages in the world, is the mother tongue claimed in
1988 by over 177 million people from Morocco to the Arabian Sea.
One of the Semitic languages, it is related to Aramaic,
Phoenician, Syriac, Hebrew, various Ethiopic languages, and the
Akkadian of ancient Babylonia and Assyria.
Throughout the Arab world the language exists in three forms:
the Classical Arabic of the Quran; the literary language
developed from the classical and referred to as Modern Standard
Arabic, which has virtually the same structure wherever used; and
the spoken language, which in Iraq is Iraqi Arabic. Educated
Arabs tend to be bilingual--in Modern Standard Arabic and in
their own dialect of spoken Arabic. Even uneducated Arabic
speakers, who in Iraq are about 60 percent of the population, can
comprehend the meaning of something said in Modern Standard
Arabic, although they are unable to speak it. Classical Arabic,
apart from Quranic texts, is known chiefly to scholarly
specialists.
Most of the words of Arabic's rich and extensive vocabulary
are variations of triconsonantal roots, each of which has a basic
meaning. The sounds of Arabic are also rich and varied and
include some made in the throat and back of the larynx which do
not occur in the major Indo-European languages. Structurally
there are important differences between Modern Standard Arabic
and spoken Arabic, such as the behavior of the verb: the voice
and tense of the verb are indicated by different internal changes
in the two forms. In general the grammar of spoken Arabic is
simpler than that of the Modern Standard Arabic, having dropped
many noun declensions and different forms of the relative pronoun
for the different genders. Some dialects of spoken Arabic do not
use special feminine forms of plural verbs.
Dialects of spoken Arabic vary greatly throughout the Arab
world. Most Iraqis speak one common to Syria, Lebanon, and parts
of Jordan and--as is true of people speaking other dialects--they
proudly regard theirs as the best. Although they converse in
Iraqi Arabic, there is general agreement that Modern Standard
Arabic, the written language, is superior to the spoken form.
Arabs generally believe that the speech of the beduins resembles
the pure classical form most closely and that the dialects used
by the settled villagers and townspeople are unfortunate
corruptions.
Data as of May 1988
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