The differences between languages and dialects is a source of huge debates, but when it comes to modern Arabic, most of the linguistics - who are by the way non Arabs, and are not affected by our ideological debates - believe that the variations in vocabulary and grammar between the Arabic dialects spoken nowadays are not enough to make them languages, which is somehow different than the Maltese, for example, which was based on the Arabic spoken in North Africa but it's a standalone language now.