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Iraq
The People
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-á-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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