[7] There are also no agreed set of linguistic criteria which distinguish CA from MSA;[7] however, MSA differs most markedly in that it either synthesizes words from Arabic roots (such as سيارة car or باخرة steamship) or adapts words from foreign languages (such as ورشة workshop or إنترنت Internet)[romanization needed] to describe industrial and post-industrial life.
Written Classical Arabic underwent fundamental changes during the early Islamic era, adding dots to distinguish similarly written letters and adding the tashkīl (diacritical markings that guide pronunciation) by scholars such as Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali and Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi to preserve the correct form and pronunciation of the Quran and to defend the Arabic language against linguistic corruption.
[10] Napoleon introduced a printing press in Egypt in 1798; it briefly disappeared after the French departure in 1801, but Muhammad Ali Pasha, who also sent students to Italy, France and England to study military and applied sciences in 1809, reintroduced it a few years later in Boulaq, Cairo.
[10] The Western–Arabic contacts and technological developments in especially the newspaper industry indirectly caused the revival of Arabic literature, or Nahda, in the late 19th and early 20th century.
[10] Another important development was the establishment of Arabic-only schools in reaction against the Turkification of Arabic-majority areas under Ottoman rule.
Most printed material in the Arab League—including most books, newspapers, magazines, official documents, and reading primers for small children—is written in MSA.
[citation needed] Additionally, some members of religious minorities recite prayers in it, as it is considered the literary language.
[clarification needed] Muslims recite prayers in it; revised editions of numerous literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times are also written in MSA.
[citation needed] The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia – the use of two distinct varieties of the same language, usually in different social contexts.
[12] This diglossic situation facilitates code-switching in which a speaker switches back and forth between the two dialects of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence.
[citation needed] However, the exigencies of modernity have led to the adoption of numerous terms which would have been mysterious to a classical author, whether taken from other languages (e. g. فيلم film) or coined from existing lexical resources (e. g. هاتف hātif "caller" > "telephone").
On the whole, Modern Standard Arabic is not homogeneous; there are authors who write in a style very close to the classical models and others who try to create new stylistic patterns.
[citation needed] Reading out loud in MSA for various reasons is becoming increasingly simpler, using less strict rules compared to CA, notably the inflection is omitted, making it closer to spoken varieties of Arabic.
[8] MSA tends to use simplified sentence structures and drop more complicated ones commonly used in Classical Arabic.
[citation needed] In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, French is the language of higher education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM),[21] while in the Gulf region it is English.