Lebanon Culture & Language

Lebanese culture is Arab, Mediterranean and Levantine, layered over a Phoenician inheritance the country is proud of, and it exports far beyond its size.

The alphabet

The Phoenicians of these ports carried a consonantal alphabet of about twenty-two letters around the Mediterranean, and the Greeks adapted it. Every alphabet in Europe descends from it, which is a reasonable claim to the most consequential thing ever exported from this coastline. Byblos gave Greek its word for book, and through it the word bible.

Music

Fairuz is the towering figure — a singer whose morning broadcasts are a daily ritual across the Arab world and who kept performing through the civil war. The Rahbani brothers wrote for her, and the Baalbek International Festival stages performances among the Roman temples.

Writing

Khalil Gibran, born in the Qadisha valley, wrote The Prophet, one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century. Amin Maalouf and Elias Khoury write from and about the same country.

Food

One of the world’s great kitchens. Mezze as a long procession of small dishes — hummus, moutabbal, tabbouleh that is mostly parsley, kibbeh, fattoush, makanek — then grilled meat, and arak with water and ice. Tripoli is the place for sweets.

Baalbek, and the scale of it

The Roman sanctuary is not simply large but anomalous: the podium beneath the Temple of Jupiter includes worked blocks weighing around eight hundred tonnes, and one still lying in the nearby quarry is heavier again — among the largest stones ever cut by hand anywhere. Why the Romans built at this scale in a provincial town is still argued over, and standing under the six surviving columns makes the question feel urgent.

Wine

Made in the Bekaa for thousands of years, and the modern industry is small, serious and worth seeking out.

Arabic is the official language, in a Levantine dialect. What makes Lebanon distinctive is how much French and English are woven through ordinary speech — a sentence mixing all three is entirely normal, and the greeting hi, kifak, ca va is the standing joke about it.

French is widely spoken, a legacy of the mandate and of the French-language school system, particularly among older and Christian communities. English has overtaken it among younger Lebanese and dominates in business and tourism.

A visitor with either French or English will manage everywhere.

Armenian is spoken by a long-established community, particularly in the Bourj Hammoud quarter of Beirut.

Useful Arabic: marhaba for hello, shukran for thank you, min fadlak for please, yalla for let’s go, and habibi, which is used constantly and means far more than its dictionary sense.