# Fusha and the Gulf dialect > **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou. > > Cite as: "Fusha and the Gulf dialect," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/fusha-and-the-gulf-dialect/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia. *John Kiriakou's account of his own Arabic training — a first year in fusha, high standard Arabic, followed by a second year in khaleeji, the Gulf dialect — and what he reports of both: that Yemen is the only place pure fusha is spoken, that Saudis asked him why he spoke Arabic like Shakespeare, that the Gulf dialect is marked by a hard J other Arabs dislike, and that the Maghreb defeats him entirely.* - **First year:** Fusha — high standard Arabic - **Second year:** Khaleeji — the Gulf dialect - **Where fusha is actually spoken:** Yemen, per Kiriakou the only place - **How he describes fusha:** 'Almost like Shakespearean English' - **The result in Saudi Arabia:** 'People asked me why I spoke Arabic like Shakespeare' - **Mark of the Gulf dialect:** A hard J the other Arabs dislike - **Dialects he cannot follow:** Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and above all Libya - **His wider complaint:** The United States has never taken hard foreign languages seriously 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. [1] [2] His second year was khaleeji, the Gulf dialect. [2] He gives the sequence the same way elsewhere — *"Fussa is what I studied that first year. And then um uh Khaliji dialect, the Gulf dialect"* — and defines the first of the two by analogy: fusha is high standard Arabic, *"almost like Shakespearean English."*[3] Asked whether that is what the Jordanians speak, his answer is no: *"it's what the Yemenes speak."*[3] 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. [2] He also claims the aptitude rather than only the training. Asked flatly whether he was fluent in Arabic: *"I was fluent in Arabic. I have a, I have a knack for foreign languages and they recognized that early on, so they took advantage of it."*[4] ## In the classroom The pace of the first year is the detail he returns to. There were three students in his classroom at the CIA language school, next door to a Spanish class of six. On the last day before the Christmas break one of the women from the Spanish class came in shouting *"three, three, three"* — on a scale of zero to five, three being conversationally fluent, scored in reading, writing and speaking. Kiriakou's reaction: *"Oh my god, we haven't finished learning the alphabet yet."* They had started the last week of August. In April he had his first dream in Arabic, and *"it wasn't gibberish. It was real Arabic. I'll never forget it."*[5][6] The method he describes was built out of broadcast material: they began by watching Sesame Street in Arabic, graduated by degrees to Voice of America news bulletins — which are in fusha — and also watched soap operas and films.[7] Two of his three teachers were Lebanese and one was Egyptian, which he offers as the reason his own Arabic is sometimes taken for Egyptian; he says he never has trouble being understood in Egypt.[8] His advice to a beginner is that the writing is not the obstacle it looks like, because *"Arabic is very mathematical in its construct"* — the first word of every sentence is the verb, and once the brain is trained to that, *"it just all comes naturally."* What it does require is patience: *"don't get discouraged if you start learning. Just accept the fact that it's going to take a long time."*[9][10] ## Why the dialects hold together Kiriakou describes Arabic as possibly the language with the biggest geographical and cultural range of any, and says that from one end of the Arabic-speaking world to the other *"they can't understand a single word the other guy is saying."* Two things hold it together. The writing is the same everywhere, and everybody understands fusha *"because that's what you learn in school."* And beyond that there is the broadcast accident: most people also understand Egyptian and Syrian dialect *"because all of the movies are made in Damascus and all the soap operas are made in Cairo."*[11] He dates that division of labour to the 1990s and draws the same conclusion about which dialect travels: the soap operas were filmed in Egypt and so were in Egyptian dialect, *"which is very unique"*, while the films were made in Damascus in Syrian dialect, *"which is more broadly understood, and it's softer. It's less harsh than both Egyptian and Gulf dialect."*[12] ## What marks the Gulf dialect The distinguishing feature he names is a consonant. In the Gulf they use a hard J, so that the Arabic word for the Gulf itself is pronounced *khalij*; everywhere else in the Middle East the J is soft. The hard J runs across the peninsula — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — and *"the other Arabs don't like that hard J. But it's a Gulf thing."*[13][14] (The auto-caption renders the word inconsistently within a single sentence, as both *khalish* and *Khalij*; the second is the form the surrounding explanation requires.) Asked which regions are hardest to follow, he does not hedge: *"Oh my god. Yes. I can't understand a word that they say in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya, but especially Libya."* And he generalises the last of those beyond himself — *"No Arab outside of Libya can understand a single word that the Libyans are"* saying.[14] ## 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. [15] 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. [15] The institutional side of the same complaint is treated in [CIA language training](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-language-training) and [CIA Arabic hiring practices](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-arabic-hiring-practices), and the Afghan case in [Afghan languages](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/afghan-languages). ## See also - [CIA language training](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-language-training) - [CIA Arabic hiring practices](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-arabic-hiring-practices) - [Afghan Languages](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/afghan-languages) - [Yemen](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/yemen) - [CIA intelligence failures](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-intelligence-failures) - [The Farm](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-farm) ## Sources 1. John Kiriakou – US Espionage and Foreign Policy (2025-12-17), at 23:48. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pirxcMhK8&t=1428s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-12-17-pete-a-turner-john-kiriakou-us-espionage-and-foreign-policy/ 2. John Kiriakou – US Espionage and Foreign Policy (2025-12-17), at 24:20. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pirxcMhK8&t=1460s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-12-17-pete-a-turner-john-kiriakou-us-espionage-and-foreign-policy/ 3. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-09), at 41:07. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8vskJZ_mE&t=2467s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-09-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 4. Episode 76 - John Kiriakou (2019-12-23), at 06:36. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud43563fbe7&t=396s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-12-23-one-tough-podcast-with-bo-dietl-episode-76-john-kiriakou/ 5. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-09), at 40:04. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8vskJZ_mE&t=2404s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-09-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 6. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-09), at 40:35. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8vskJZ_mE&t=2435s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-09-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 7. Maduro's Capture - CIA Led? Deadliest Day for the CIA? I Going Deeper w/ John Kiriakou (2026-01-06), at 12:30. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qFZKC6Eaes&t=750s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-06-deep-focus-maduro-capture-cia-deadliest-day/ 8. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-09), at 42:08. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8vskJZ_mE&t=2528s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-09-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 9. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-09), at 42:39. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8vskJZ_mE&t=2559s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-09-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 10. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-09), at 43:11. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8vskJZ_mE&t=2591s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-09-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 11. DeProgram Show with Ted Ra (2025-08-09), at 41:38. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-8vskJZ_mE&t=2498s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-08-09-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra-deprogram-show-with-ted-ra/ 12. Maduro's Capture - CIA Led? Deadliest Day for the CIA? I Going Deeper w/ John Kiriakou (2026-01-06), at 13:00. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qFZKC6Eaes&t=780s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-06-deep-focus-maduro-capture-cia-deadliest-day/ 13. Maduro's Capture - CIA Led? Deadliest Day for the CIA? I Going Deeper w/ John Kiriakou (2026-01-06), at 13:30. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qFZKC6Eaes&t=810s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-06-deep-focus-maduro-capture-cia-deadliest-day/ 14. Maduro's Capture - CIA Led? Deadliest Day for the CIA? I Going Deeper w/ John Kiriakou (2026-01-06), at 14:00. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qFZKC6Eaes&t=840s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-01-06-deep-focus-maduro-capture-cia-deadliest-day/ 15. John Kiriakou – US Espionage and Foreign Policy (2025-12-17), at 32:37. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pirxcMhK8&t=1957s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-12-17-pete-a-turner-john-kiriakou-us-espionage-and-foreign-policy/ --- From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/fusha-and-the-gulf-dialect/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt