ajp and apc disabled

The major problem of Arabic, is that standard Arabic actually has no native speakers, they all speak varieties. However these varieties are rarely written as is, and the official written language is "standard Arabic", but official verbal communication is supposed to be in standard Arabic (while it is not). In fact spoken Arabic as such is just a "macrolanguage" with good mutual understanding between all varieties. Only a few varieties have a written de facto "standard" (attested in litterature and common public communication) that frequently deviates from the standard (which is used only for some religious purpose, or in very formal documents, using some administrative "jargon", written in a form that parties or signatories agreed on to use for their international affairs, while at home or in medias they communicate with the local varieties or some mix of them, different as well from the vernacular varieties used by people in diferent subareas). So these vaeireties can also been seen as "sociolects": people change their level of language using one varity or the other depending with whom they speak or write. And when writing, there's still lot of variations, they don't necessarily use the formal "standard" variety (which is defined specifically in each region for local use such as education, but only where there's a reliable national or local academic/terminologogic standard body, or an influent local organization or media, or when it is used in international organizations, like documents published by the United Nations or the Red Crescent using a "negociated" common terminology acceptable and clear enough for all parties; thus, this is not really an unified "standard", unless the macro-language is reduced to a "most common" subset, whose coverage may expand over time by improvement of education and development of medias; but this is still not true for the "macrolanguage" as a whole and "standard Arabic" is left to be defined and will be evolutive). In practice, translations made for the "macrolanguage" [ar/ara] are effectively targetting this "standard" Arabic (so that we don't need the [arb] variant)

As well there's some form of creolisation with other native languages with which they are (or were) in contact, such as English, French, other Indo-European languages (including Iranian language), Nilo-Saharian languages, Nigero-Congolese languages, Malayo-Polynesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages.

Classifying all these varieties is difficult. That's why most written text tend to use a model formal form based on "Standard Arabic" which is a modernized variant of old Coranic Arabic texts (but annotated with variable phonologies depending also on interpretations).

The ISO 639 attempted to subclassify them, but the classification is evolutive, unstable and may no longer be pertinent. We have the same case with the varieties of "Chinese" (complicated there by the fact that the written form does not fully transcribe the actual phonology, it is a vehicular medium allowing people that do not understand each other by speech to have a common written form).

But here in TWN we just have to work on written text, not really the oral language that may have many more differences than what is written. ISO 639 focuses on the oral language much more than what we need for translating written messages... And Arabic does not require using a full notation of the phonology (unless this has consequences creating semantic ambiguities, but generally these can be solved by choosing more appropriate terms, and there's rarely the need then to transcribe distinct translations for many variants: that's the role of a "macrolanguage", even if that written common form may look somewhat too formal, less natural than what people use more commonly).

Those varieties however are enabled if there's a clear community support for developping them distinctively, and that's the case for Egyptian, Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan. It may be possibly for Sudanese, it is not clear for Levantine, Mesopotamian/Arabian/Gulf variants, where Standard Arabic is largely favored on the public scene, for strong political and religious reasons: other variants in this region are perceived negatively as "dialects", sometimes pejoratively for refering to "uneducated" people (and these people may fear developing or maintaining these variants, they often don't have any local official support for their efforts, or their efforts may be exposed to attacks or erasure, as being "incorrect" or "unnecessary", or worse perceived as "offensive", "deviant", "heretic", and so on, and when using Wikimedia policies they could as well be erased for "lack of notoriety" or "lack of references").