Tuta-Tuta is a website that shares popular ‘foreign/non-Arabic’ children's books translated into ‘colloquial/spoken’ Egyptian Arabic (a’amiya). All translations are written in rhymes/prose.
The translated books under the “Books” tab can be experienced in one of three different forms:
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Visual: by watching a video narration of the story, including the book illustrations, on the Tuta-Tuta youtube channel.
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Audible: by listening to the stories streamed on the website.
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Readable/Written Text: you can read the book to your child yourself by downloading the transcripts of the translated text. You can print, cut, and stick the translations onto the pages of the original English book (or to be folded out). Please contact me at for the password to open the PDF files. I just ask if you can kindly first fill in the questions on the "Poll" tab.
Tuta-Tuta is an effort to popularize reading to Egyptian Children in the spoken Egyptian Arabic dialect; the language that children comprehend effortlessly. In the Arab world, almost all children's books are written in ‘classical/literary’ Arabic, fusHa, a language children only learn in school and command after several years of schooling.
To read more about this phenomenon, known as 'Language Diglossia', and how it impacts reading to young children, please refer to the paper at the bottom this page: “The Limitations of Reading to Young Children in Literary Arabic: The Unspoken Struggle with Arabic Diglossia”, published in February 2019 in the journal Theory and Practice in Linguistic Studies.
