Fusha and the Gulf dialect
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Asked in 2025 how hard Yemeni Arabic is to understand, John Kiriakou surprised his interviewer by saying that Yemen is the one place where the language is spoken in its purest form.

The two years

When he was studying Arabic, he explains, the first year was fusha, high standard Arabic. The only place where that is spoken, he says, is Yemen.   His second year was khaleeji, the Gulf dialect. 

The consequence he reports is a small social one. When he was in Saudi Arabia, people asked him why he spoke Arabic like Shakespeare. He told them it was because he had been studying fusha, and they said, ah, okay. 

The argument underneath

Kiriakou uses his own training to press a complaint he returns to often: that the United States has simply never taken hard foreign languages seriously. He is not talking, he says, about learning Spanish in high school, but about Farsi, Arabic, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Tajik, Mandarin, Russian, Korean, all these hard languages. We just don't do it. 

He raises it as part of his answer to whether the American services are actually good at recruiting agents. Part of the problem, he says, is the languages.  The institutional side of the same complaint is treated in CIA language training and CIA Arabic hiring practices, and the Afghan case in Afghan languages.

See also

- CIA language training
- CIA Arabic hiring practices
- Afghan Languages
- Yemen
- CIA intelligence failures
- The Farm
