This chapter offers a-state-of-the-art review of the status and use of the Arabic language in North America. The chapter consists of six sections. The first section is an introduction to the Arabic language, its diglossic situation, and the geographic distribution of its speakers. The second section presents a brief history of Arab-speaking immigrants in North America as well as their demographic and sociolinguistic background. The third section focuses on the acquisition, development, and attrition/loss of colloquial Arabic by child and adult heritage speakers of Arabic. The fourth section explores the acquisition of Standard Arabic by heritage Arabic speakers in college-level Arabic-language classrooms. This section also considers some of the main differences between heritage speakers and second language learners of Arabic. The fifth section examines factors influencing Arabic language maintenance and loss among heritage speakers, including sociolinguistic, socio-contextual, and socio-affective factors (e.g., language input, language use, language attitudes, identity sentiments, family support, and the sociopolitical situation of Arab immigrants). The sixth and final section discusses the future of Arabic in the United States based on current trends and proposes directions for future research.

Kassem Wahba argues for paying equal attention to the phonology of the dialects in the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language, noting, not without some frustration, that the conceptions of what constitutes Arabic or the legitimate study thereof were determined by the medieval grammarians of the language, who collectively defined what was to become the Arabic of formal writing and declamation, paying little heed to dialect variation in the language. Regardless, students of the language in the twenty-first century need to and want to learn how to use Arabic as it is spoken and written, which means, he argues, reconceiving how the phonology of Arabic is taught to include dialect variants as legitimate realizations of underlying historical forms.