Awzak Arabi
Awzak Arabi (Arabic عاوزك عربي, Latin chat script 3awzak 3arabi) is an Egyptian Arabic utterance meaning roughly "I want you Arab" or "I want you to be Arabic". It is formed from two ordinary words of the Egyptian colloquial register — the active participle عاوز ("wanting"), carrying the second-person object suffix ـك, and the nisba adjective عربي ("Arab" or "Arabic"). Because the adjective names both a people and a language, the phrase can be heard as wanting the addressee to be Arab or to speak Arabic, and this ambiguity is central to its use in speech, song and identity campaigns.
The phrase belongs to Egyptian Arabic, the most widely spoken vernacular variety of Arabic in Egypt and the most widely understood across the Arabic-speaking world, largely through a century of Egyptian cinema, music and teaching. Arabic itself is a diglossic language: a formal standard, Modern Standard Arabic, serves writing and official life, while local colloquial varieties such as Egyptian Arabic are the languages of everyday speech. The phrase is a purely colloquial construction, yet its second element, عربي, invokes the ethno-linguistic definition of Arabness that has given the Arabic language its political weight since the era of Arab nationalism.
Its vocabulary carries a long history. The root ع و ز from which عاوز derives signified need and privation in classical Arabic, and that etymology became the basis of a religious controversy over whether the colloquial word may be applied to God — a ruling in which Egypt's Dar al-Ifta nonetheless acknowledged that Egyptians had shifted the word's meaning to plain desire. In modern Egypt the identity dimension has been institutionalised: the presidential "Speak Arabic" initiative, launched in 2019, promotes Arabic and Egyptian identity among the country's large diaspora, while media campaigns and education protocols extend the effort to new generations.
The phrase also lives in popular culture: in pop songs built on the عايزك formula, in Egyptian rap, in a poem and a Coptic hymn, and in the Arabic-language music and bilingual artists that circulate globally on short-video platforms. The articles below trace its linguistic components, its historical roots, the institutions and figures that promote or contest it, and the debates — over colloquial versus standard, dialect versus language, and who counts as Arab — that give a two-word utterance its outsized significance.