Spoken Egyptian Mini-Course: Negating in Spoken Egyptian

Welcome to my blog. In this blog, I provide different articles about spoken Egyptian and Egypt. In today’s article, we learn about negating in spoken Egyptian. We will learn how to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and learn essential structures with the same function as the word ‘not’ in English.

Tools for negating in spoken Egyptian

Negation in spoken Egyptian is very easy. Like any language, specific vocabulary words exist for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. You can even choose from different versions. For instance, ‘yes’ in spoken Egyptian have two widely known translations, and you can select the word you like. Likewise, ‘no’ has three different correspondent words in Egyptian. Let’s explore these variations together.

In Egyptian, we say two common words for ‘yes’:

‘aah اه’ and ‘aywa أيوة’

Likewise, we say three common words for ‘no’

‘laa لا, ‘la2 لأ’ and ‘la2aah لأه’

‘mesh مش’ and ‘ma ما’ give the meaning of ‘Not’ in English. Using either of these two words, however, requires some care and is coupled with a specific form. When negating in spoken Egyptian, we use two principal forms that give the same function as the word ‘not’ in English. Each form has its own usage. Egyptians use the first form, with ‘mesh’, more with nouns and some verbs. On the other hand, the second form, with ‘ma’, is only used with verbs. Let’s explore these two forms in more detail and give an example for each form:

Method #1: Negation with ‘mesh مش’

The first method of negation in the Spoken Egyptian dialect of Cairo is with the keyword ‘mesh’, which means ‘not’ in English.

Example

ana mesh Ahmad أنا مش أحمد (I am not Ahmed)

All you need to do for negating in spoken Egyptian is to add the word mesh before the noun or verb (An exception: verbs in the past tense don’t use ‘mesh’. Therefore, we use the structure #2 (ma) instead.) I will explain this in the next paragraph.

Method #2: Negation with ‘ma ما’

The second method for negating in Egyptian is to use the negating article ‘ma ما’. This method is usually for negating only verbs. In addition, ‘ma’ is coupled with a suffix attached to the verb. Let’s have an example:

ana ma ba7ebesh el-samak أنا ما بحبش السمك (I don’t like fish)

In this example, ‘ma’ negates the verb ‘ba7eb’ (I like), which comes in the b-imperfect tense. In addition to ‘ma’, there is also a suffix attached to the verb, -esh

(You can also negate this verb with ‘mesh’: ana mesh ba7eb el-samak)

ma yenfa3sh ما ينفعش (no way)

Here, ‘ma’ precedes the verb ‘yenfa3’ in simple present, which also has a corresponding suffix of ‘-sh’

(similarly, sometimes Egyptians negate this with ‘mesh’ – mesh yenfa3 (present) , mesh hayenfa3(future)

---

So in this article, we learned the affirmation and negation articles and two effective ways of negating in spoken Egyptian. For more profound knowledge about this topic, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and join my free course.

Did you find the article useful? Write me in the comments.