Varieties of Arabic - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Arabic language
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

is a Semitic language characterized by a wide number of linguistic varieties

Variety (linguistics)

In sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard variety itself...

within its five regional forms. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. The Arabic of North Africa, for example, is often incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant

Levant

The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

or the Gulf Region. Within these broad regions further and considerable geographic distinctions exist, within countries, across country borders, even between cities and villages.

Another major distinction is to be made between the widely diverging colloquial spoken varieties, used for nearly all everyday speaking situations, and the formal standardized language, found mostly in writing or in prepared speech. The regionally prevalent variety is learned as the speaker's native language

First language

A first language is the language a person has learned from birth or within the critical period, or that a person speaks the best and so is often the basis for sociolinguistic identity...

, while the formal language is subsequently learned in school. The formal language itself varies between its modern iteration (often called Modern Standard Arabic or MSA in English) and the Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...

that serves as its inspiration, though Arabic speakers typically do not make this distinction.

Further substantial differences exist between Bedouin

Bedouin

The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...

and sedentary speech, the countryside and major cities, ethnicities, religious groups, social classes, men and women, and the young and the old, to list only some. These differences are to some degree bridgeable. Often, Arabic speakers can adjust their speech in a rich variety of ways according to the context and to their intentions - for example, to speak with people from different regions, to demonstrate their level of education or to draw on the authority of the spoken language. This is particularly true at a time of increasing human development

Human development (humanity)

Human development in the scope of humanity, specifically international development, is an international and economic development paradigm that is about much more than the rise or fall of national incomes. People are the real wealth of nations...

and globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

Language mixing and change

Arabic is characterized by a wide number of varieties; however, Arabic speakers are often able to manipulate the way they speak based on the circumstances. There can be a number of motivations for changing one's speech: the formality of a situation, the need to communicate with people with different dialects, to get social approval, to differentiate oneself from the listener, when citing a written text, to differentiate between personal and professional or general matters, to clarify a point, and to shift to a new topic, to name but a few.

An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect

Prestige dialect

In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community. The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society...

. This refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities, depending on the context. This is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a prestige variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the prestige dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities. Moreover, in certain contexts, a dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language - this is the case in Bahrain, for example.

Language mixes and changes in different ways. Arabic speakers often use more than one variety of Arabic within a conversation or even a sentence. This process is referred to as Code-switching

Code-switching

In linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...

. For example, a woman on a TV program could appeal to the authority of the formal language by using elements of it in her speech in order to prevent other speakers from cutting her off. Another process at work is 'leveling', the "elimination of very localised dialectical features in favour of more regionally general ones." This can affect all linguistic levels - semantic, syntactic, phonological, etc... The change can be temporary, as when a group of speakers with substantially different Arabics communicate, or it can be permanent, as often happens when people from the countryside move to the city and adopt the more prestigious urban dialect, possibly over a couple of generations.

This process of accommodation sometimes appeals to the formal language, but often does not. For example, villagers in central Palestine may try to use the dialect of Jerusalem rather than their own when speaking with people with substantially different dialects, particularly since they may have a very weak grasp of the formal language. In another example, groups of educated speakers from different regions will often use dialectical forms that represent a middle ground between their dialects rather than trying to use the formal language. Take, for example, this case of a recorded conversation between educated Arabs from the Gulf, Baghdad, Cairo and Jerusalem. To express the existential 'there is' (as in, 'there is a place where...'), Arabic speakers have access to many different words:

Gulf: /aku/
Baghdad: /aku/
Cairo: /fiː/
Jerusalem: /fiː/
Modern Standard Arabic: /hunaːk/

In this case, /fiː/ is most likely to be used as it is not associated with a particular region and is the closest to a dialectical middle ground for this group of speakers. Moreover, given the prevalence of movies and TV shows in Egyptian Arabic, the speakers are all likely to be familiar with it.

Note that sometimes a certain dialect may be associated with backwardness and will therefore not carry 'mainstream prestige' - yet, it will continue to be used as it carries a kind of 'covert prestige' and serves to differentiate one group from another when necessary.

Regional varieties

The greatest variations between kinds of Arabic are those between regional language

Regional language

A regional language is a language spoken in an area of a nation state, whether it be a small area, a federal state or province, or some wider area....

groups. These can be divided in any number of ways, but the following typology is usually used:

Arabian Peninsula (Khaliji Arabic) group includes:

Gulf Arabic

Gulf Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken around the shore of the Persian Gulf such as in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman...

Baharna Arabic

Najdi Arabic

Najdi Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken in the desert and oases of central Saudi Arabia.There are four major groups of Najdi Arabic.1. Northern Najdi, spoken in Zulfi, Qaseem and Jabal Shammar regions of Najd....

Omani Arabic

Omani Arabic is a variety of Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in the Hajar Mountains of Oman and in a few neighboring coastal regions. It was formerly spoken by colonists in Kenya and Tanzania, but most or all of them have shifted to Swahili.- References :* -External links:*...

Hejazi Arabic

Hejazi Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken in the western region of Saudi Arabia...

Shihhi Arabic

Shihhi Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Musandam Peninsula of Oman.-References:*...

Dhofari Arabic

Dhofari Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in Salalah, Oman and the surrounding coastal regions .-References:*...

Yemeni Arabic

Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of Arabic varieties spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia, and northern Somalia...

Mesopotamian group includes:

Iraqi Arabic

Iraqi Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible Arabic varieties native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into eastern and northern Syria, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in respective Iraqi diaspora communities.-Varieties:Iraqi Arabic has two major varieties...

North Mesopotamian Arabic

North Mesopotamian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken north of the Hamrin Mountains in Iraq, in northwestern Iran in northern Syria, and in southeastern Turkey...

Bedawa Arabic

Syro-Palestinian group includes:

Levantine Arabic

Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...

Judeo Arabic

Mediterranean Sea or Cypriot Arabic

Egyptian group includes

Chadic Arabic

Sudanese Arabic

Sudanese Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken throughout northern Sudan. It has much borrowed vocabulary from the local languages . This has resulted in a variety of Arabic that is unique to Sudan, reflecting the way in which the country has been influenced by both African and Arab cultures...

Nubi Arabic

Juba Arabic

Darfuri Arabic

Sa'idi Arabic

Sa`idi Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken by Sa'idis south of Cairo, Egypt to the border of Sudan. It shares linguistic features both with Egyptian Arabic, as well as Sudanese Arabic. Dialects include Middle and Upper Egyptian Arabic...

Egyptian Arabic

Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....

Maghrebi Arabic group includes on the North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...

n coast of the Mediterranean sea:

Moroccan Arabic

Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...

Tunisian Arabic

Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...

Algerian Arabic

Algerian Arabic is the variety or varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. In Algeria, as elsewhere, spoken Arabic differs from written Arabic; Algerian Arabic has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates, and many new words and loanwords borrowed from French, Turkish and...

Libyan Arabic

Libyan Arabic is a collective term for the closely related varieties of Arabic spoken in Libya. It can be divided into two major dialect areas; the eastern centred in Benghazi and Bayda, and the western centred in Tripoli and Misrata...

Hassaniya Arabic

Hassānīya Arabic

Hassānīya is the variety of Arabic originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes, who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and the Western Sahara between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has almost completely replaced the Berber languages spoken in this region...

Saharan Arabic

Algerian Saharan Arabic is a structurally distinct variety of Arabic spoken by an estimated 100,000 people in Algeria, predominantly along the Moroccan border with the Atlas mountains range. It is also spoken by about 10,000 people in neighbouring Niger.-External links:**...

These large regional

Regional language

A regional language is a language spoken in an area of a nation state, whether it be a small area, a federal state or province, or some wider area....

groups do not correspond to borders of modern states. In the western parts of the Arab world

Arab world

The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...

, varieties are referred to as الدارجة ad-dārija, and in the eastern parts, as العامية al-`āmmiyya. Some of these varieties are mutually unintelligible

Mutual intelligibility

In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort...

from other forms of Arabic due to wide distances over time that created divergences in phonologies. Varieties west of Egypt are particularly disparate, with Egyptian Arabic speakers claiming difficulty in understanding North African Arabic speakers, while North African Arabic speakers understanding other Arabic speakers only due to the widespread popularity of Egyptian Standard and to a lesser extent, the Lebanese popular media. One factor in the differentiation of the varieties is the influence from other languages previously spoken in the regions, which have typically provided a significant number of new words, and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order. Examples are Turkish and English in Egypt, French in North Africa and Syria, and English and Hebrew in Israel. However, a much more significant factor for all five dialect groups is, as Latin among Romance languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

, retention (or change of meaning) of the classical language form of Fus'ha Arabic used in the Qu'ran.

Examples of major regional differences

The following example will illustrate similarities and differences between the literal, standardized language, and certain major urban dialects:

True pronunciations differ; transliterations used approach an approximate demonstration. Also, Literary Arabic

Literary Arabic

Modern Standard Arabic , Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standard and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech....

pronunciation

Arabic phonology

While many languages have numerous dialects that differ in pronunciation, the Arabic language is more properly described as a continuum of varieties. This article deals primarily with Modern Standard Arabic, which is the standard variety shared by educated speakers throughout Arabic-speaking regions...

differs regionally.

Variety	I love reading a lot	When I went to the library	I only found this old book	I wanted to read a book about the history of women in France.
Literary Arabic Literary Arabic Modern Standard Arabic , Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standard and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech....
Tunisian Tunisian Arabic Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...
Egyptian Egyptian Arabic Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
Lebanese Lebanese Arabic Lebanese or Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages, and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic...
Iraqi Iraqi Arabic Iraqi Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible Arabic varieties native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into eastern and northern Syria, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in respective Iraqi diaspora communities.-Varieties:Iraqi Arabic has two major varieties...
Saudi
Kuwaiti Kuwaiti Arabic Kuwaiti Arabic is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Kuwait. Though it shares the majority of its' features with most Gulf dialects, it also exhibits largely phonetic features that are unique to the dialects of Iraq as well.-See also:* Varieties of Arabic...

For the sake of comparison, consider the same sentence in German and Dutch:

German: Ich lese sehr gerne. Als ich in zur Bibliothek ging, fand ich nur dieses alte Buch, obwohl ich ein Buch über die Geschichte der Frau in Frankreich hatte lesen wollen.
Dutch: Ik lees zeer graag. Toen ik naar de bibliotheek ging, vond ik slechts dit oude boek, hoewel ik een boek over de geschiedenis van de vrouw in Frankrijk had willen lezen.

Some linguists do argue that the varieties of Arabic are different enough to qualify as separate languages in the way that French and Italian or German and Dutch do. However, as Reem Bassiouney points out, perhaps the difference between 'language' and 'variety' is to some degree political rather than linguistic.

Other regional differences

"Peripheral" varieties of Arabic located in countries where Arabic is not a dominant language (e.g., Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

, Iran

Iran

Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

, Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

, Chad

Chad

Chad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...

, and Nigeria

Nigeria

Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...

) are particularly divergent in some respects, especially vocabulary, being less influenced by classical Arabic. However, historically they fall within the same dialect classifications as better-known varieties. Probably the most divergent of non-creole Arabic varieties is Cypriot Maronite Arabic

Cypriot Maronite Arabic

Cypriot Arabic, known as Cypriot Maronite Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Maronite community of Cyprus. Most speakers are situated in the capital, Nicosia, while others are located in Kormakitis and Limassol...

, a nearly extinct variety heavily influenced by Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

.

The Maltese language

Maltese language

Maltese is the national language of Malta, and a co-official language of the country alongside English,while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic...

is a Semitic language descended from Siculo-Arabic

Siculo-Arabic

Siculo-Arabic was a variety of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. It is extinct in Sicily, but it has developed into what is now the Maltese language on the islands of Malta....

whose vocabulary has acquired a large number of loanwords from Sicilian

Sicilian language

Sicilian is a Romance language. Its dialects make up the Extreme-Southern Italian language group, which are spoken on the island of Sicily and its satellite islands; in southern and central Calabria ; in the southern parts of Apulia, the Salento ; and Campania, on the Italian mainland, where it is...

and Standard Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

. Maltese only uses a Latin-based alphabet and is the only Semitic official language within the European Union

European Union

The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...

.

Arabic-based pidgin

Pidgin

A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...

s, with a small, largely Arabic vocabulary that lacks most Arabic morphological features, have been widespread along the southern edge of the Sahara through the present day; the medieval geographer al-Bakri records a text in one (in a place probably corresponding to modern Mauritania) in the 11th century. In some areas, especially around the southern Sudan, these have creolized

Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...

; see the list below.

Dialects vary within regions as well, on a smaller level. For example, within Syria, the Arabic of the city of Homs is recognized as different from that of the capital, Damascus, though both can be considered 'Levantine' Arabic. In Morocco, the Arabic of the city of Fes is considered different from Arabic spoken elsewhere in the country.

Formal vs. vernacular speech

Another major difference between varieties of Arabic is that between the standardized formal language, primarily found in writing, media or in prepared speech, and the vernacular, spoken dialects, used for most situations. The formal language is referred to as اللغة الفصحى al-lugha al-fuṣḥā, and itself diverges between its modern iteration (often called Modern Standard Arabic or MSA in English), used in writing, media or in prepared speech, and the Classical Arabic that serves as its inspiration. The latter is the language of the Qur'an and is rarely used except in reciting the Qur'an, or quoting older classical texts. Arabic speakers typically do not make this distinction. The development of Modern Standard Arabic dates to the beginning of the 19th century, and was the result of a laborious process of modernizing the Classical language.

Colloquial and formal Arabic certainly do overlap; as a matter of fact it is very difficult to find a situation where one type is used exclusively. For example, MSA is used in formal speeches or interviews. However, just as soon as the speaker diverts away from his well-prepared speech in order to add a comment or respond to a question, the rate of colloquial usage in this speech increases dramatically. How much MSA versus colloquial is used depends on the speaker, the topic, and the situation - amongst other factors. At the other end of the spectrum, public education, as well as exposure to mass media, has introduced MSA elements amongst the least educated so it would be equally difficult to find an Arabic speaker whose speech is totally unaffected by MSA. This linguistic situation in general is sometimes referred to as diglossia.

The notable Egyptian linguist, Al-Said Badawi, made the following distinctions in 'levels of speech' regarding the mixing of vernacular and formal Arabic in Egypt:

فصحى التراث fuṣḥā al-turāth, ‘heritage classical’: The Classical Arabic of Arab literary heritage and the Qur'an. This is primarily a written language but it is heard in its spoken form on at the mosque or in religious programmes on TV.
فصحى العصر fuṣḥā al-‘aṣr, ‘contemporary classical’: This is what Western linguists call Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a modification and simplification of Classical Arabic created for the modern age; it has consequently coined a great deal of new words, both from using lexical material native to Arabic and by borrowing words from other, chiefly European, languages. Aside from being principally a written language, it is also read aloud from text. Highly skilled speakers can also produce it spontaneously, though typically in extremely formal contexts; this is particularly common in talk
Talk show
A talk show or chat show is a television program or radio program where one person discuss various topics put forth by a talk show host....

and debate programs on pan-Arab TV networks such as Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...

and Al Arabiya
Al Arabiya
Al Arabiya is a Pan-Arabist Saudi-owned Arabic-language television news channel. Launched on March 3, 2003, the channel is based in Dubai Media City, United Arab Emirates, and is majority-owned by the Saudi broadcaster Middle East Broadcasting Center ....

, as it is understood throughout these networks' target market.
عاميات المثقفين ‘āmiyya al-muthaqqafīn, ‘colloquial of the cultured’: This is vernacular language heavily influenced by MSA which can be used for serious discussion but is generally not written. It also includes a high quantity of foreign loanwords, chiefly relating to the technical and theoretical subjects it is used to discuss. This is used by well-educated people, principally on the TV, and can frequently be understood by Arabic-speakers outside the speaker's country of origin. It is also becoming the language of instruction at universities.
عاميات المتنورين āmiyya al-mutanawwarīn ‘colloquial of the basically educated’: This is the everyday language that people use in informal contexts, and that is heard on TV when non-intellectual topics are being discussed. It is characterized, according to Badawi, by high levels of borrowing.
عاميات أميين āmiyya al-'ummiyyīn, ‘colloquial of the illiterates’: This is very colloquial speech characterized by the absence of influence from MSA, but also relatively little foreign borrowing, with the result that the lexicon is almost entirely derived from Classical Arabic.

Almost everyone in Egypt has access to more than one speech register, and people often switch between them, sometimes within the same sentence. This scheme generally corresponds to the linguistic situations in other Arabic-speaking countries as well.

The spoken varieties of Arabic have occasionally been written, usually in the Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...

. Vernacular Arabic was first recognized as a written language contrasting with Classical Arabic in 17th century Ottoman Egypt

Ottoman Egypt

Ottoman Egypt covers two main periods:* Egypt Eyalet 1517–1867 under direct rule of the Ottoman Empire.* Khedivate of Egypt 1867–1914 as autonomous tributary state of the Ottoman Empire....

, as the Cairo elite began to trend towards colloquial writing. A record of the Cairo vernacular of the time is found in the dictionary compiled by Yusuf al-Maghribi

Yusuf al-Maghribi

' was a 17th century lexicographer active in Cairo. He is the first author to treat Egyptian Arabic as a dialect distinct from Classical Arabic, compiling an Egyptian-Arabic word list, the , which survives in a unique manuscript kept at St...

. More recently, many plays and poems, as well as a few other works (even translations of Plato) exist in Lebanese Arabic

Lebanese Arabic

Lebanese or Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages, and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic...

and Egyptian Arabic

Egyptian Arabic

Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....

; books of poetry, at least, exist for most varieties. In Algeria

Algeria

Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

, colloquial Maghrebi Arabic was taught as a separate subject under French colonization, and some textbooks exist. Mizrahi Jews

Mizrahi Jews

Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahiyim, , also referred to as Adot HaMizrach are Jews descended from the Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus...

throughout the Arab world who spoke Judeo-Arabic dialects rendered newspapers, letters, accounts, stories, and translations of some parts of their liturgy in the Hebrew alphabet

Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...

, adding diacritics and other conventions for letters that exist in Judeo-Arabic but not Hebrew. The Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

was advocated for Lebanese Arabic

Lebanese Arabic

by Said Aql, whose supporters published several books in his transcription. Later, in 1994, Abdelaziz Pasha Fahmi, a member of the Academy of the Arabic Language

Academy of the Arabic Language

There are several bodies that are called Academy of the Arabic Language:#Academy of the Arabic Language in Damascus : Oldest, founded in 1919#Jordan Academy of Arabic : Founded in 1924...

in Egypt proposed the replacement of the Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

with the Latin alphabet. His proposal was discussed in two sessions in the communion but was rejected, and was faced with strong opposition in cultural circles.

Sociolinguistic variables

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...

is the study of how language usage is affected by societal factors, e.g., cultural norms and contexts (see also Pragmatics

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...

). The following sections examine some of the ways that modern Arab societies have an impact on how Arabic is spoken.

Religion

The religion of an Arabic speaker is sometimes involved in shaping how he speaks Arabic. Of course, as is the case with other variables, religion cannot be seen in isolation. It is generally connected with the political systems in the different countries. It should be noted that unlike is often the case in the West, religion in the Arab world is not usually seen as a individual choice. Rather, it is matter of group affiliation: one is born a Muslim, Christian, Jew, Suni or Shiite, and this becomes a bit like one's ethnicity. Religion as a sociolinguistic variable should be understood in this context.

Bahrain provides an excellent illustration. A major distinction can be made between the Shiite Baharnas, who are the oldest population of Bahrain, and the Sunni population that began to immigrate to Bahrain in the eighteenth century. The Sunni form the majority of the urban population. The ruling family of Bahrain is Sunni. The colloquial language represented on TV is almost invariably that of the Sunni population. Therefore, power, prestige and financial control are associated with the Sunni Arabs. This is having a major impact on the direction of language change in Bahrain.

The case of Iraq also illustrates how there can be significant differences in how Arabic is spoken on the basis of religion. (Note that the study referred to here was conducted before the American occupation of the country.) In Baghdad, there are significant linguistic differences between Arabic Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the city. The Christians of Baghdad are a well-established community, and their dialect has evolved from the sedentary vernacular of urban medieval Iraq. The typical Muslim dialect of Baghdad is a more recent arrival in the city and comes from Bedouin speech instead. In Baghdad, as elsewhere in the Arab world, the various communities share MSA as a prestige dialect, but the Muslim colloquial dialect is associated with power and money, given that that community is the more dominant. Therefore, the Christian population of the city learns to use the Muslim dialect in more formal situations, for example, when a Christian school teacher is trying to call students in the class to order.

Pre-Islamic varieties

Ancient North Arabian
Ancient North Arabian
Ancient North Arabian is a language known from fragmentary inscriptions in modern day Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, dating to between roughly the 6th century BC and the 6th century AD, all written in scripts derived from Epigraphic South Arabian...
- Safaitic
  Safaitic
  Safaitic is the name given to an Old North Arabian dialect, preserved in the form of inscriptions which are written in a type of South Semitic script. These inscriptions were written by bedouin and semi-nomadic inhabitants of the Syro-Arabian desert...
- Lihyanitic
- Thamudic
  Thamudic
  Thamudic is an Old North Arabian dialect known from pre-Islamic inscriptions scattered across the Arabian desert and the Sinai. Dating to between the 4th century BC and the 3rd or 4th century AD, they were incorrectly named after the Thamud people, with whom they are not directly...
- Hasaitic
  Hasaitic
  Hasaitic is an Old North Arabian dialect attested in inscriptions in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia at Thaj, Hinna, Qatif, Ras Tanura, Abqaiq in the al-Hasa region, Ayn Jawan, Mileiha and at Uruk....
Ancient South Arabian
Old South Arabian
Old South Arabian is the term used to describe four extinct, closely related languages spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. There were a number of other Sayhadic languages , of which very little evidence survived, however...
- Sabaean
  Sabaean language
  Sabaean , also known as Himyarite , was an Old South Arabian language spoken in Yemen from c. 1000 BC to the 6th century AD, by the Sabaeans; it was used as a written language by some other peoples of Ancient Yemen, including the Hashidites, Sirwahites, Humlanites, Ghaymanites, Himyarites,...
- Minaean
  Minaean language
  The Minaean language was an Old South Arabian language spoken in Yemen between 1200 BC and AD 100. The main area of its use may be localized in al-Jawf part of North-East Yemen, first of all in the Wadi Madhab...
- Qatabanian
  Qatabanian language
  One of the four better documented languages of the Old South Arabian sub-group, Qatabanian was used in Yemen between 800 BC and 200 AD, mainly in the Kingdom of Qataban.-References:...
- Hadramautic
  Hadramautic language
  One of the four known dialects of Old South Arabian, Hadramautic was spoken in what is known as present-day Yemen between 100 BC and 600 AD, in particular, but not exclusively, in the area known as Hadramawt....
Nabataean language
Nabataean language
The Nabataean language was a form of Aramaic and was the language of the Nabataeans of Iraq and Syria.In the early Islamic era and probably before, the Arabians referred to the sedentary Aramaeans of southern Iraq and southern Syria as Nabat...
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...

Western varieties

Maghrebi Arabic
- Koine
  Koine language
  In linguistics, a koiné language is a standard language or dialect that has arisen as a result of contact between two mutually intelligible varieties of the same language. Since the speakers have understood one another from before the advent of the koiné, the koineization process is not as rapid...
  
  s
  - Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
    
    (ISO 639-3:ary)
  - Algerian Arabic
    Algerian Arabic
    Algerian Arabic is the variety or varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. In Algeria, as elsewhere, spoken Arabic differs from written Arabic; Algerian Arabic has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates, and many new words and loanwords borrowed from French, Turkish and...
    
    (ISO 639-3:arq)
  - Tunisian Arabic
    Tunisian Arabic
    Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...
    
    (ISO 639-3:aeb)
  - Libyan Arabic
    Libyan Arabic
    Libyan Arabic is a collective term for the closely related varieties of Arabic spoken in Libya. It can be divided into two major dialect areas; the eastern centred in Benghazi and Bayda, and the western centred in Tripoli and Misrata...
    
    (ISO 639-3:ayl)
- Fully pre-Hilalian
  - Jebli Arabic
  - Jijel Arabic
    Jijel Arabic
    Jijel Arabic is a dialect of Arabic spoken specifically in the Jijel Province in northeastern Algeria, but traces of it reach parts of the neighboring provinces of Skikda and Mila...
  - Siculo-Arabic
    Siculo-Arabic
    Siculo-Arabic was a variety of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. It is extinct in Sicily, but it has developed into what is now the Maltese language on the islands of Malta....
    
    (extinct)
    - Maltese language
      Maltese language
      Maltese is the national language of Malta, and a co-official language of the country alongside English,while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic...
      
      (ISO 639-3:mlt)
- Bedouin
  - Saharan Arabic
    Saharan Arabic
    Algerian Saharan Arabic is a structurally distinct variety of Arabic spoken by an estimated 100,000 people in Algeria, predominantly along the Moroccan border with the Atlas mountains range. It is also spoken by about 10,000 people in neighbouring Niger.-External links:**...
    
    (ISO 639-3:aao)
  - Hassaniya Arabic
    Hassānīya Arabic
    Hassānīya is the variety of Arabic originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes, who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and the Western Sahara between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has almost completely replaced the Berber languages spoken in this region...
    
    (ISO 639-3:mey)
Andalusian Arabic (extinct)

Central varieties

Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....

(ISO 639-3:arz)
Sa'idi Arabic
Sa'idi Arabic
Sa`idi Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken by Sa'idis south of Cairo, Egypt to the border of Sudan. It shares linguistic features both with Egyptian Arabic, as well as Sudanese Arabic. Dialects include Middle and Upper Egyptian Arabic...

(ISO 639-3:aec)
Sudanese Arabic
Sudanese Arabic
Sudanese Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken throughout northern Sudan. It has much borrowed vocabulary from the local languages . This has resulted in a variety of Arabic that is unique to Sudan, reflecting the way in which the country has been influenced by both African and Arab cultures...

(ISO 639-3:apd)

Northern varieties

North Mesopotamian Arabic
North Mesopotamian Arabic
North Mesopotamian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken north of the Hamrin Mountains in Iraq, in northwestern Iran in northern Syria, and in southeastern Turkey...

(ISO 639-3:ayp)
Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...

(Eastern Arabic)
- North Levantine Arabic
  - North Syrian Arabic
    North Syrian Arabic
    North Syrian Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in Northern Syria. This dialect is spoken mainly in the region of Aleppo. It is a variant of Levantine Arabic.-External links:*...
- South Levantine Arabic
  - Syrian Arabic
    Syrian Arabic
    Syrian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in Syria.-History:Syrian Arabic proper is a form of Levantine Arabic, and may be divided into South Syrian Arabic, spoken in the cities of Damascus, Homs and Hama, and North Syrian Arabic, spoken in the region of Aleppo. Allied dialects are spoken in...
  - Palestinian Arabic
    Palestinian Arabic
    Palestinian Arabic is a Levantine Arabic dialect subgroup spoken by Palestinians and the majority of Arab-Israelis. Rural varieties of this dialect exhibit several distinctive features; particularly the pronunciation of qaf as kaf, which distinguish them from other Arabic varieties...
  - Lebanese Arabic
    Lebanese Arabic
    Lebanese or Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages, and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic...
- Bedawi Arabic
  Bedawi Arabic
  Bedawi Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by Bedouins mostly in eastern Egypt, and also in Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Syria...
  
  (ISO 639-3:avl)
- Cypriot Maronite Arabic
  Cypriot Maronite Arabic
  Cypriot Arabic, known as Cypriot Maronite Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Maronite community of Cyprus. Most speakers are situated in the capital, Nicosia, while others are located in Kormakitis and Limassol...
  
  (ISO 639-3:acy)
Iraqi Arabic
Iraqi Arabic
Iraqi Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible Arabic varieties native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into eastern and northern Syria, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in respective Iraqi diaspora communities.-Varieties:Iraqi Arabic has two major varieties...

(ISO 639-3, Mesopotamian acm)
- qeltu-varieties
  - Baghdad Arabic (Jewish)
- gilit-varieties
  - Baghdad Arabic
    Baghdad Arabic
    Baghdad Arabic or the Baghdadi Arabic is the Arabic variety spoken in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. During the last century, Baghdad Arabic has become the lingua franca of Iraq, and the language of commerce and education...
Khuzestani Arabic
Khuzestani Arabic
Khuzestani Arabic is a dialect of Arabic spoken in the Iranian province of Khuzestan. It is an Iraqi Arabic dialect and contains many Persian loanwords.-References:*...

Southern varieties

Gulf Arabic
Gulf Arabic
Gulf Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken around the shore of the Persian Gulf such as in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman...

(ISO 639-3:afb)
Bahrani Arabic (ISO 639-3:abv)
Najdi Arabic
Najdi Arabic
Najdi Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken in the desert and oases of central Saudi Arabia.There are four major groups of Najdi Arabic.1. Northern Najdi, spoken in Zulfi, Qaseem and Jabal Shammar regions of Najd....

(ISO 639-3:ars)
Hijazi Arabic (ISO 639-3:acw)
Yemeni Arabic
Yemeni Arabic
Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of Arabic varieties spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia, and northern Somalia...
- Hadhrami Arabic
  Hadhrami Arabic
  Hadhrami Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Hadhrami people living in the . It is also spoken by many Hadhrami emigrants who migrated from to East Africa , South-east Asia and, recently, to the other Gulf countries...
  
  (ISO 639-3:ayh)
- Sanaani Arabic
  Sanaani Arabic
  Sanaani Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in north Yemen. It is a variety of Yemeni Arabic.-References:*...
  
  (ISO 639-3:ayn)
- Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic
  Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic
  Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in south Yemen and Djibouti. It is a variety of Yemeni Arabic.-References:*...
  
  (ISO 639-3:acq)
Dhofari Arabic
Dhofari Arabic
Dhofari Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in Salalah, Oman and the surrounding coastal regions .-References:*...

(ISO 639-3:adf)
Omani Arabic
Omani Arabic
Omani Arabic is a variety of Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in the Hajar Mountains of Oman and in a few neighboring coastal regions. It was formerly spoken by colonists in Kenya and Tanzania, but most or all of them have shifted to Swahili.- References :* -External links:*...

(ISO 639-3:acx)
Shihhi Arabic
Shihhi Arabic
Shihhi Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Musandam Peninsula of Oman.-References:*...

(ISO 639-3:ssh)

Peripheries

Central Asian Arabic
Central Asian Arabic
Central Asian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and currently facing extinction. It was once spoken among Central Asia's numerous settled and nomadic Arab communities, which inhabited areas in Samarqand, Bukhara, Qashqadarya, Surkhandarya , and Khatlon...
- Tajiki Arabic
  Tajiki Arabic
  Tajiki Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by a few thousand people in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Language use is declining. There is no diglossia with Standard Arabic. It is a variety of Central Asian Arabic.-References:*...
  
  (ISO 639-3:abh)
- Uzbeki Arabic
  Uzbeki Arabic
  Uzbeki Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by a few hundred people in the Bukhara province of Uzbekistan. Few members of the ethnic group now speak Arabic. There is no diglossia with Standard Arabic. It is a variety of Central Asian Arabic.-References:*...
  
  (ISO 639-3:auz)
Shirvani Arabic
Shirvani Arabic
Shirvani Arabic was a dialect of Arabic that was once spoken in what is now central and northwestern Azerbaijan and Dagestan . Arabic was spoken in this region since the Muslim conquest of the South Caucasus at the beginning of the 8th century...

(extinct)
Chadian Arabic
Chadian Arabic
Chadian Arabic is one of the regional colloquial Arabic languages. "Shuwa Arabic" properly refers only to its Nigerian dialects, and even then, it is a term not used by the speakers themselves...

(Baggara, Shuwa Arabic) (ISO 639-3:shu)
Nigerian Arabic

Sectarian varieties

Judeo-Arabic (ISO 639-3:jrb)
- Judeo-Iraqi Arabic
  Judeo-Iraqi Arabic
  Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by Jews living or formerly living in Iraq. 99% of all speakers now live in Israel. Speakers are older adults....
  
  (ISO 639-3:yhd)
- Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (ISO 639-3:aju)
- Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic
  Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic
  Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by Jews formerly living in Libya. Most speakers now live in Israel and Italy. Most speakers are over 40...
  
  (ISO 639-3:yud)
- Judeo-Tunisian Arabic
  Judeo-Tunisian Arabic
  Judeo-Tunisian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by Jews living or formerly living in Tunisia. 99% of all speakers now live in Israel. Speakers are older adults and the younger generation has only a passive knowledge of the language....
  
  (ISO 639-3:ajt)
- Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (ISO 639-3:jye)

Creoles

Nubi Creole Arabic
Nubi language
The Nubi language is a Sudanese Arabic-based creole language spoken in Uganda around Bombo, and in Kenya around Kibera, by the descendants of Emin Pasha's Sudanese soldiers who were settled there by the British colonial administration...
Babalia Creole Arabic
Sudanese Creole Arabic (Juba Arabic)

Country-based varieties

Algerian Arabic
Algerian Arabic
Algerian Arabic is the variety or varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. In Algeria, as elsewhere, spoken Arabic differs from written Arabic; Algerian Arabic has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates, and many new words and loanwords borrowed from French, Turkish and...
Bahraini Arabic
Chadian Arabic
Chadian Arabic
Chadian Arabic is one of the regional colloquial Arabic languages. "Shuwa Arabic" properly refers only to its Nigerian dialects, and even then, it is a term not used by the speakers themselves...
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
Emirati Arabic
Iraqi Arabic
Iraqi Arabic
Iraqi Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible Arabic varieties native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into eastern and northern Syria, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in respective Iraqi diaspora communities.-Varieties:Iraqi Arabic has two major varieties...
Jordanian Arabic
Jordanian Arabic
Jordanian Arabic is a set of dialects of Levantine Arabic that are originated in the Jordanian Kingdom and are spoken by Jordanians. Jordanian Arabic has a Semitic language structure, with lexical influence of English, Turkish and French. It is spoken by more than 6 million people, and understood...
Kuwaiti Arabic
Kuwaiti Arabic
Kuwaiti Arabic is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Kuwait. Though it shares the majority of its' features with most Gulf dialects, it also exhibits largely phonetic features that are unique to the dialects of Iraq as well.-See also:* Varieties of Arabic...
Lebanese Arabic
Lebanese Arabic
Lebanese or Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages, and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic...
Libyan Arabic
Libyan Arabic
Libyan Arabic is a collective term for the closely related varieties of Arabic spoken in Libya. It can be divided into two major dialect areas; the eastern centred in Benghazi and Bayda, and the western centred in Tripoli and Misrata...
Hassaniya Arabic
Hassānīya Arabic
Hassānīya is the variety of Arabic originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes, who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and the Western Sahara between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has almost completely replaced the Berber languages spoken in this region...

(Mauritanian Arabic)
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
Nigerian Arabic
Omani Arabic
Omani Arabic
Omani Arabic is a variety of Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in the Hajar Mountains of Oman and in a few neighboring coastal regions. It was formerly spoken by colonists in Kenya and Tanzania, but most or all of them have shifted to Swahili.- References :* -External links:*...
Palestinian Arabic
Palestinian Arabic
Palestinian Arabic is a Levantine Arabic dialect subgroup spoken by Palestinians and the majority of Arab-Israelis. Rural varieties of this dialect exhibit several distinctive features; particularly the pronunciation of qaf as kaf, which distinguish them from other Arabic varieties...
Qatari Arabic
Sahrawi Arabic
Saudi Arabic
Sudanese Arabic
Sudanese Arabic
Sudanese Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken throughout northern Sudan. It has much borrowed vocabulary from the local languages . This has resulted in a variety of Arabic that is unique to Sudan, reflecting the way in which the country has been influenced by both African and Arab cultures...
Syrian Arabic
Syrian Arabic
Syrian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in Syria.-History:Syrian Arabic proper is a form of Levantine Arabic, and may be divided into South Syrian Arabic, spoken in the cities of Damascus, Homs and Hama, and North Syrian Arabic, spoken in the region of Aleppo. Allied dialects are spoken in...
Tunisian Arabic
Tunisian Arabic
Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...
Yemeni Arabic
Yemeni Arabic
Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of Arabic varieties spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia, and northern Somalia...

Diglossic variety

Modern Standard Arabic (ISO 639-3:arb)

Sedentary vs. Nomadic

A basic distinction that cuts across the entire geography of the Arabic-speaking world is between sedentary and nomadic varieties (often misleadingly called Bedouin

Bedouin

The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...

). Across the Levant

Levant

and North Africa (i.e. the areas of post-Islamic settlement), this is mostly reflected as an urban (sedentary) vs. rural/nomadic split, but the situation is more complicated in Iraq

Iraq

Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

and the Arabian Peninsula

Arabian Peninsula

The Arabian Peninsula is a land mass situated north-east of Africa. Also known as Arabia or the Arabian subcontinent, it is the world's largest peninsula and covers 3,237,500 km2...

. The distinction stems from the settlement patterns in the wake of the Arab conquests. As regions were conquered, army camps were set up that eventually grew into cities, and settlement of the rural areas by Nomadic Arabs gradually followed thereafter. In some areas, sedentary dialects are divided further into urban and rural variants.

The most obvious phonetic difference between the two groups is the pronunciation of the letter ق qaaf, which is voiced in the Bedouin varieties (usually /ɡ/, but sometimes a palatalized

Palatalization

In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....

variation /d͡ʒ/ or /ʒ/), but voiceless in the sedentary varieties (/q/ or /ʔ/) (the former realisation being mostly associated with the countryside, the latter being considered typically urban). The other major phonetic difference is that the rural varieties preserve the Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic

(CA) interdentals /θ/ ث and /ð/ ذ, and merge the CA emphatic sounds /dˤ/ ض and /ðˤ/ ظ into /ðˤ/ rather than sedentary /dˤ/.

The most significant differences between rural Arabic and non-rural Arabic are in syntax. The sedentary varieties in particular share a number of common innovations from CA. This has led to the suggestion, first articulated by Charles Ferguson

Charles A. Ferguson

Charles Albert Ferguson was a U.S. linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one the founders of sociolinguistics and is best known for his work on diglossia. The TOEFL test was created under his leadership at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC...

, that a simplified koiné language

Koine language

In linguistics, a koiné language is a standard language or dialect that has arisen as a result of contact between two mutually intelligible varieties of the same language. Since the speakers have understood one another from before the advent of the koiné, the koineization process is not as rapid...

developed in the army staging camps in Iraq, from whence the remaining parts of the modern Arab world were conquered.

In general the rural varieties are more conservative than the sedentary varieties and the rural varieties within the Arabian peninsula are even more conservative than those elsewhere. Within the sedentary varieties, the western varieties (particularly, Moroccan Arabic

Moroccan Arabic

) are less conservative than the eastern varieties.

A number of cities in the Arabic world speak a 'Bedouin' variety, which acquires prestige in that context.

Morphology and syntax

All varieties, sedentary and Bedouin, differ in the following ways from Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic

(CA):

The order subject–verb–object may be more common than verb–subject–object.
Verbal agreement between subject and object is always complete.
- In CA, there was no number agreement between subject and verb when the subject was third-person and the subject followed the verb.
Loss of case distinctions. ([[ʼIʻrāb]])
Loss of original mood distinctions other than the indicative and imperative (i.e. subjunctive, jussive, energetic I, energetic II).
- The dialects differ in how exactly the new indicative was developed from the old forms. The sedentary dialects adopted the old subjunctive forms (feminine /iː/, masculine plural /uː/), while many of the Bedouin dialects adopted the old indicative forms (feminine /iːna/, masculine plural /uːna/).
- The sedentary dialects developed new mood distinctions; see below.
Loss of dual marking everywhere except on nouns.
- A frozen dual persists as the regular plural marking of a small number of words that normally come in pairs (e.g. eyes, hands, parents).
- In addition, a productive dual marking on nouns exists in most dialects. (Tunisian
  Tunisian Arabic
  Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...
  
  and Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
  
  are exceptions.) This dual marking differs syntactically from the frozen dual in that it cannot take possessive suffixes. In addition, it differs morphologically from the frozen dual in various dialects, such as Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
  
  .
- The productive dual differs from CA in that its use is optional, whereas the use of the CA dual was mandatory even in cases of implicitly dual reference.
- The CA dual was marked not only on nouns, but also on verbs, adjectives, pronouns and demonstratives.
Development of an analytic genitive construction to rival the constructed genitive.
- Compare the similar development of shel in Modern Hebrew
  Modern Hebrew
  Modern Hebrew , also known as Israeli Hebrew or Modern Israeli Hebrew, is the language spoken in Israel and in some Jewish communities worldwide, from the early 20th century to the present....
  
  .
- The Bedouin dialects make the least use of the analytic genitive. Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
  
  makes the most use of it, to the extent that the constructed genitive is no longer productive, and used only in certain relatively frozen constructions.
The relative pronoun is no longer inflected. (In CA, it took gender, number and case endings.)
Pronominal clitics ending in a short vowel moved the vowel before the consonant.
- Hence, second singular /-ak/ and /-ik/ rather than /-ka/ and /-ki/; third singular masculine /-uh/ rather than /-hu/.
- Similarly, the feminine plural verbal marker /-na/ became /-an/.
- Because of the absolute prohibition in all Arabic dialects against having two vowels in hiatus, the above changes occurred only when a consonant preceded the ending. When a vowel preceded, the forms either remained as-is or lost the final vowel, becoming /-k/, /-ki/, /-h/ and /-n/, respectively. Combined with other phonetic changes, this resulted in multiple forms for each clitic (up to three), depending on the phonetic environment.
- The verbal markers /-tu/ (first singular) and /-ta/ (second singular masculine) both became /-t/, while second singular feminine /-ti/ remained.
- In the dialect of southern Nejd (including Riyadh
  Riyadh
  Riyadh is the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia. It is also the capital of Riyadh Province, and belongs to the historical regions of Najd and Al-Yamama. It is situated in the center of the Arabian Peninsula on a large plateau, and is home to 5,254,560 people, and the urban center of a...
  
  ), the second singular masculine /-ta/ has been retained, but takes the form of a long vowel rather than a short one as in Classical Arabic.
- The forms given here were the original forms, and have often suffered various changes in the modern dialects.
- All of these changes were triggered by the loss of final short vowels (see below).
Various simplifications have occurred in the range of variation in verbal paradigms.
- Third-weak verbs with radical /w/ and radical /j/ (traditionally transliterated y) have merged in the form I perfect tense. (They had already merged in CA, except in form I.)
- Form I perfect faʕula verbs have disappeared, often merging with faʕila.
- Doubled verbs now have the same endings as third-weak verbs.
- Some endings of third-weak verbs have been replaced by those of the strong verbs (or vice-versa, in some dialects).

All dialects except some Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula share the following innovations from CA:

Loss of the inflected passive (i.e., marked through internal vowel change) in finite verb forms.
- New passives have often been developed by co-opting the original reflexive formations in CA, particularly verb forms V, VI and VII. (In CA these were derivational, not inflectional, as neither their existence nor exact meaning could be depended upon; however, they have often been incorporated into the inflectional system, especially in more innovative sedentary dialects.)
- Hassaniya Arabic
  Hassānīya Arabic
  Hassānīya is the variety of Arabic originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes, who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and the Western Sahara between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has almost completely replaced the Berber languages spoken in this region...
  
  contains a newly developed inflected passive that looks somewhat like the old CA passive.
- Najdi Arabic
  Najdi Arabic
  Najdi Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken in the desert and oases of central Saudi Arabia.There are four major groups of Najdi Arabic.1. Northern Najdi, spoken in Zulfi, Qaseem and Jabal Shammar regions of Najd....
  
  has retained the inflected passive up to the modern era, though this feature is on its way to extinction as a result of the influence of other dialects.
Loss of the indefinite /n/ suffix (tanwiin) on nouns.
- When this marker still appears, it is variously /an/, /in/, or /en/.
- In some Bedouin dialects it still marks indefiniteness on any noun, although this is optional and often used only in oral poetry.
- In other dialects it marks indefiniteness on post-modified nouns (by adjectives or relative clauses).
- All Arabic dialects preserve a form of the CA adverbial accusative /an/ suffix, which was originally a tanwiin marker.
Loss of verb form IV, the causative.
- Verb form II sometimes gives causatives, but it is not productive.
Uniform use of /i/ in imperfect verbal prefixes.
- CA had /u/ before form II, III and IV active, and before all passives, and /a/ elsewhere.
- Some Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula have uniform /a/.
- Najdi Arabic
  Najdi Arabic
  Najdi Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken in the desert and oases of central Saudi Arabia.There are four major groups of Najdi Arabic.1. Northern Najdi, spoken in Zulfi, Qaseem and Jabal Shammar regions of Najd....
  
  has /a/ when the following vowel is /i/, and /i/ when the following vowel is /a/.

All sedentary dialects share the following additional innovations:

Loss of a separately distinguished feminine plural in verbs, pronouns and demonstratives. This is usually lost in adjectives as well.
Development of a new indicative-subjunctive distinction.
- The indicative is marked by a prefix, while the subjunctive lacks this.
- The prefix is /b/ or /bi/ in Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  and Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
  
  , but /ka/ or /ta/ in Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
  
  . It is not infrequent to encounter /ħa/ as an indicative prefix in some Persian Gulf states; and, in South Arabian Arabic (viz. Yemen), /ʕa/ is used in the north around the San'aa region, and /ʃa/ is used in the southwest region of Ta'iz.
- Tunisian Arabic
  Tunisian Arabic
  Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...
  
  lacks an indicative prefix, and therefore does not have this distinction, along with Maltese
  Maltese language
  Maltese is the national language of Malta, and a co-official language of the country alongside English,while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic...
  
  and at least some varieties of Algerian
  Algerian Arabic
  Algerian Arabic is the variety or varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. In Algeria, as elsewhere, spoken Arabic differs from written Arabic; Algerian Arabic has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates, and many new words and loanwords borrowed from French, Turkish and...
  
  and Libyan Arabic
  Libyan Arabic
  Libyan Arabic is a collective term for the closely related varieties of Arabic spoken in Libya. It can be divided into two major dialect areas; the eastern centred in Benghazi and Bayda, and the western centred in Tripoli and Misrata...
  
  .
Loss of /h/ in the third-person masculine enclitic pronoun, when attached to a word ending in a consonant.
- The form is usually /u/ or /o/ in sedentary dialects, but /ah/ or /ih/ in Bedouin dialects.
- After a vowel, the bare form /h/ is used, but in many sedentary dialects the /h/ is lost here as well. In Egyptian Arabic, for example, this pronoun is marked in this case only by lengthening of the final vowel and concomitant stress shift onto it, but the "h" reappears when followed by another suffix.
  - ramā "he threw it"
  - maramahūʃ "he didn't throw it"

The following innovations are characteristic of many or most sedentary dialects:

Agreement (verbal, adjectival) with inanimate plurals is plural, rather than feminine singular, as in CA.
Development of a circumfix negative marker on the verb, involving a prefix /ma-/ and a suffix /-ʃ/.
- In combination with the fusion of the indirect object and the development of new mood markers, this results in verbal complexes that are approaching polysynthetic language
  Polysynthetic language
  In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
  
  s in their complexity.
- An example from Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  is

}

- - [negation]-[indicative]-[2nd.person.subject]-bring-[plural.subject]-her-to.us-[negation]
  - "You (plural) aren't bringing her to us."
- (NOTE: Versteegh glosses /bi/ as continuous.)
In Egyptian
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....

, Tunisian
Tunisian Arabic
Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...

and Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...

, the distinction between active and passive participles has disappeared except in form I and in some Classical borrowings.
- These dialects tend to use form V and VI active participles as the passive participles of forms II and III.

The following innovations are characteristic of Maghrebi Arabic (in North Africa

North Africa

North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...

, west of Egypt):

In the imperfect, Maghrebi Arabic has replaced first person singular /ʔ-/ with /n-/, and the first person plural, originally marked by /n-/ alone, is also marked by the /-u/ suffix of the other plural forms.
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...

has greatly rearranged the system of verbal derivation, so that the traditional system of forms I through X is not applicable without some stretching. It would be more accurate to describe its verbal system as consisting of two major types, triliteral
Triliteral
The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals"...

and quadriliteral, each with a mediopassive variant marked by a prefixal /t-/ or /tt-/.
- The triliteral type encompasses traditional form I verbs (strong: /ktb/ "write"; geminate: /ʃəmm/ "smell"; hollow: /biʕ/ "sell", /ɡul/ "say", /xaf/ "fear"; weak /ʃri/ "buy", /ħbu/ "crawl", /bda/ "begin"; irregular: /kul/-/kla/ "eat", /ddi/ "take away", /ʒi/ "come").
- The quadriliteral type encompasses strong [CA form II, quadriliteral form I]: /sˤrˤfəq/ "slap", /hrrəs/ "break", /hrnən/ "speak nasally"; hollow-2 [CA form III, non-CA]: /ʕajən/ "wait", /ɡufəl/ "inflate", /mixəl/ "eat" (slang); hollow-3 [CA form VIII, IX]: /xtˤarˤ/ "choose", /ħmarˤ/ "redden"; weak [CA form II weak, quadriliteral form I weak]: /wrri/ "show", /sˤqsˤi/ "inquire"; hollow-2-weak [CA form III weak, non-CA weak]: /sali/ "end", /ruli/ "roll", /tiri/ "shoot"; irregular: /sˤifətˤ/-/sˤafətˤ/ "send".
- There are also a certain number of quinquiliteral or longer verbs, of various sorts, e.g. weak: /pidˤali/ "pedal", /blˤani/ "scheme, plan", /fanti/ "dodge, fake"; remnant CA form X: /stəʕməl/ "use", /stahəl/ "deserve"; diminutive: /t-birˤʒəz/ "act bourgeois", /t-biznəs/ "deal in drugs".
- Note that those types corresponding to CA forms VIII and X are rare and completely unproductive, while some of the non-CA types are productive. At one point, form IX significantly increased its productivity over CA, and there are perhaps 50-100 of these verbs currently, mostly stative but not necessarily referring to colors or bodily defects. However, this type is no longer very productive.
- Due to the merging of short /a/ and /i/, most of these types show no stem difference between perfect and imperfect, which is probably why the languages has incorporated new types so easily.

The following innovations are characteristic of Egyptian Arabic

Egyptian Arabic

Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....

Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....

, probably under the influence of Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

, puts the demonstrative pronoun after the noun (/al-X da/ "this X" instead of CA /haːðaː l-X/) and leaves interrogative pronouns in situ
In situ
In situ is a Latin phrase which translated literally as 'In position'. It is used in many different contexts.-Aerospace:In the aerospace industry, equipment on board aircraft must be tested in situ, or in place, to confirm everything functions properly as a system. Individually, each piece may...

rather than fronting them, as in other dialects.

Phonetics

Reflexes of Classical q
Place	\|Reflex	\|baqara	\|qamar	\|quddaam
Place	"heart"	"cow"	"time"	"said"	"moon"	"coffee"	"in front of"
Uzbeki Arabic Uzbeki Arabic Uzbeki Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by a few hundred people in the Bukhara province of Uzbekistan. Few members of the ethnic group now speak Arabic. There is no diglossia with Standard Arabic. It is a variety of Central Asian Arabic.-References:*... (Jugari)	q, occ. g	qalb	baqara	waqt, (waḥt)	qaal	qamar	—	giddaam
Muslim Baghdad Arabic Baghdad Arabic Baghdad Arabic or the Baghdadi Arabic is the Arabic variety spoken in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. During the last century, Baghdad Arabic has become the lingua franca of Iraq, and the language of commerce and education...	g, occ. j	gaḷuḅ	(baqar)	wagut, (waket)	gaal	gumar	gahwa	geddaam, jiddaam
Jewish Baghdadi Arabic	q, occ. j	qalb	—	—	qaal	qamaɣ	—	jeddaam
Mosul North Mesopotamian Arabic North Mesopotamian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken north of the Hamrin Mountains in Iraq, in northwestern Iran in northern Syria, and in southeastern Turkey... , Iraq Iraq Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....	q?	qalb	—	—	—	—	—	—
Anah Anah Anah, or Ana, is an Iraqi town on the Euphrates river, approximately mid-way between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Persian Gulf.-Etymology:... , Iraq Iraq Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....	q, g	qaalb	(bagra)	waqet	qaal	—	gahwa	—
Rural Lower Iraqi Arabic Iraqi Arabic Iraqi Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible Arabic varieties native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into eastern and northern Syria, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in respective Iraqi diaspora communities.-Varieties:Iraqi Arabic has two major varieties...	g, occ. j	galub	bgura, bagra	wakit	gaal	gumar	ghawa, gahwa	jiddaam
Judeo-Iraqi Arabic Judeo-Iraqi Arabic Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by Jews living or formerly living in Iraq. 99% of all speakers now live in Israel. Speakers are older adults.... , Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan or Kurdistan Region is an autonomous region of Iraq. It borders Iran to the east, Turkey to the north, Syria to the west and the rest of Iraq to the south. The regional capital is Arbil, known in Kurdish as Hewlêr...	q	qalb	baqaṛa	waqt, waxt	qaal	qamaṛ	qahwe	qǝddaam
Mardin Mardin Mardin is a city in southeastern Turkey. The capital of Mardin Province, it is known for its Arabic-like architecture, and for its strategic location on a rocky mountain overlooking the plains of northern Syria.-History:... , Anatolia Anatolia Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...	q	qalb	baqaṛa	waqt, waxt	qaal	qamaṛ	qaḥwe	qǝddaam
Sheep nomads, Mesopotamia Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the... , NE Arabian Peninsula Arabian Peninsula The Arabian Peninsula is a land mass situated north-east of Africa. Also known as Arabia or the Arabian subcontinent, it is the world's largest peninsula and covers 3,237,500 km2...	g, occ. j	galb, galub	bgara	wagt, wakit	gaal	gumar	ghawa	jeddaam
Camel nomads, Mesopotamia Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the... , NE Arabian Peninsula Arabian Peninsula The Arabian Peninsula is a land mass situated north-east of Africa. Also known as Arabia or the Arabian subcontinent, it is the world's largest peninsula and covers 3,237,500 km2...	g, occ. dᶻ	galb, galub	bgara	wagt, wakit	gaal	gumar	ghawa	dᶻöddaam
Aleppo Aleppo Aleppo is the largest city in Syria and the capital of Aleppo Governorate, the most populous Syrian governorate. With an official population of 2,301,570 , expanding to over 2.5 million in the metropolitan area, it is also one of the largest cities in the Levant... , Syria North Syrian Arabic North Syrian Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in Northern Syria. This dialect is spoken mainly in the region of Aleppo. It is a variant of Levantine Arabic.-External links:*...	ʾ	ʾalb	baʾara	waʾt	ʾaal	ʾamar	ʾahwe	ʾǝddaam
Damascus Damascus Damascus , commonly known in Syria as Al Sham , and as the City of Jasmine , is the capital and the second largest city of Syria after Aleppo, both are part of the country's 14 governorates. In addition to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is a major... , Syria Syrian Arabic Syrian Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken in Syria.-History:Syrian Arabic proper is a form of Levantine Arabic, and may be divided into South Syrian Arabic, spoken in the cities of Damascus, Homs and Hama, and North Syrian Arabic, spoken in the region of Aleppo. Allied dialects are spoken in...	ʾ	ʾalb	baʾara	waʾt	ʾaal	ʾamar	ʾahwe	ʾǝddaam
Beirut Beirut Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan... , Lebanon Lebanese Arabic Lebanese or Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages, and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic...	ʾ	ʾalb	baʾra	waʾt	ʾaal	ʾamar	ʾahwe	ʾǝddeem
NW Jordan Jordanian Arabic Jordanian Arabic is a set of dialects of Levantine Arabic that are originated in the Jordanian Kingdom and are spoken by Jordanians. Jordanian Arabic has a Semitic language structure, with lexical influence of English, Turkish and French. It is spoken by more than 6 million people, and understood...	g	gaḷib	bagara	wagǝt	gaal	gamar	gahwah	giddaam
Druze Druze The Druze are an esoteric, monotheistic religious community, found primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, which emerged during the 11th century from Ismailism. The Druze have an eclectic set of beliefs that incorporate several elements from Abrahamic religions, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism...	q	qalb	baqara	—	qaal	qamar	qahwe	—
Nazareth Nazareth Nazareth is the largest city in the North District of Israel. Known as "the Arab capital of Israel," the population is made up predominantly of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel... , Israel Palestinian Arabic Palestinian Arabic is a Levantine Arabic dialect subgroup spoken by Palestinians and the majority of Arab-Israelis. Rural varieties of this dialect exhibit several distinctive features; particularly the pronunciation of qaf as kaf, which distinguish them from other Arabic varieties...	k	kalb	bakara	wakt	kaal	kamar	kahwe	kuddaam
Jerusalem (urban Palestinian Arabic Palestinian Arabic Palestinian Arabic is a Levantine Arabic dialect subgroup spoken by Palestinians and the majority of Arab-Israelis. Rural varieties of this dialect exhibit several distinctive features; particularly the pronunciation of qaf as kaf, which distinguish them from other Arabic varieties... )	ʾ	ʾalb	baʾara	waʾt	ʾaal	ʾamar	ʾahwe	ʾuddaam
Bir Zeit Bir Zeit Birzeit is a Palestinian town near Ramallah in the central West Bank. Its population in the 2007 census was 4529... , West Bank Palestinian Arabic Palestinian Arabic is a Levantine Arabic dialect subgroup spoken by Palestinians and the majority of Arab-Israelis. Rural varieties of this dialect exhibit several distinctive features; particularly the pronunciation of qaf as kaf, which distinguish them from other Arabic varieties...	k	kalb	bakara	wakt	kaal	kamar	kahwe	kuddaam
Sana Sana -Geography:* Sana'a, the capital of Yemen* Sana, Haute-Garonne, France, a commune in the Haute-Garonne département* Sana, Bhutan, a town in Bhutan* Sana, Greece, a village in the northern part of the prefecture of Chalkidiki... , Yemen Yemeni Arabic Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of Arabic varieties spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia, and northern Somalia...	g	galb	bagara	wagt	gaal	gamar	gahweh	guddaam
Cairo Cairo Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life... , Egypt Egyptian Arabic Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....	ʾ	ʾalb	baʾara	waʾt	ʾaal	ʾamar	ʾahwa	ʾuddaam
Sudan Sudanese Arabic Sudanese Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken throughout northern Sudan. It has much borrowed vocabulary from the local languages . This has resulted in a variety of Arabic that is unique to Sudan, reflecting the way in which the country has been influenced by both African and Arab cultures...	g	galib	bagara	wagt	gaal	gamra	gahwa, gahawa	giddaam
Ouadai, Chad Chadian Arabic Chadian Arabic is one of the regional colloquial Arabic languages. "Shuwa Arabic" properly refers only to its Nigerian dialects, and even then, it is a term not used by the speakers themselves...	g, occ. q	—	beger	waqt	gaal	gamra	gahwa	—
Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi is the second largest city in Libya, the main city of the Cyrenaica region , and the former provisional capital of the National Transitional Council. The wider metropolitan area is also a district of Libya... , E. Libya Libyan Arabic Libyan Arabic is a collective term for the closely related varieties of Arabic spoken in Libya. It can be divided into two major dialect areas; the eastern centred in Benghazi and Bayda, and the western centred in Tripoli and Misrata...	g	gaḷǝb	ǝbgǝ́ṛa	wagǝt	gaaḷ	gǝmaṛ	gahawa	giddaam
Tunis Tunis Tunis is the capital of both the Tunisian Republic and the Tunis Governorate. It is Tunisia's largest city, with a population of 728,453 as of 2004; the greater metropolitan area holds some 2,412,500 inhabitants.... , Tunisia Tunisian Arabic Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...	q, occ. g	qalb	(bagra)	waqt	—	—	—	quddaam
El Hamma de Gabes, Tunisia Tunisian Arabic Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...	g	gal^ab	—	—	gal	—	—	—
Marazig, Tunisia Tunisian Arabic Tunisian Arabic is a Maghrebi dialect of the Arabic language, spoken by some 11 million people. It is usually known by its own speakers as Derja, which means dialect, to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, or as Tunsi, which means Tunisian...	g, occ. q	galab	—	—	gal	—	gahwa, qahwa	geddaam
Jewish Algiers Algiers ' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000... (Judeo-Arabic)	ʾ	ʾǝlb	—	wǝʾt	—	ʾǝmr	—	ʾǝddam
Bou Saada Bou Saada Bou Saada is a town and municipality in M'Sila Province, Algeria, situated 245 km south of Algiers. The municipality population was estimated at 134,000 in 2008.... , Algeria Algerian Arabic Algerian Arabic is the variety or varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. In Algeria, as elsewhere, spoken Arabic differs from written Arabic; Algerian Arabic has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates, and many new words and loanwords borrowed from French, Turkish and...	g	—	bigar	—	—	gimar	—	—
Jijel Arabic Jijel Arabic Jijel Arabic is a dialect of Arabic spoken specifically in the Jijel Province in northeastern Algeria, but traces of it reach parts of the neighboring provinces of Skikda and Mila... (Algeria Algeria Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab... )	q	qǝlb	—	wǝqt	—	qmǝr	—	qǝddam
Casablanca Casablanca Casablanca is a city in western Morocco, located on the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Grand Casablanca region.Casablanca is Morocco's largest city as well as its chief port. It is also the biggest city in the Maghreb. The 2004 census recorded a population of 2,949,805 in the prefecture... , Morocco Moroccan Arabic Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...	q, occ. g	qǝlb	bqʌr, bgʌr	wʌqt	—	qǝmr	—	qoddam
North Taza Taza Taza is a city in northern Morocco, which occupies the corridor between the Rif mountians and Middle Atlas mountains, about 120 km east of Fez. It is located at 150 km from Nador, and 210 km from Oujda... , Morocco Moroccan Arabic Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...	q or g?	—	—	waqt, (wax)	—	gǝmra	—	—
Maltese Maltese language Maltese is the national language of Malta, and a co-official language of the country alongside English,while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic...	ʾ Maltese language uses q Q Q is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic sound value of Qôp was , a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones... for ʔ	qalp	—	waqt	qaal	qamar	—	qoddiem
Andalusian Arabic (low register)	k	kalb	bakar	wakt	—	kamar	—	kuddím

CA ʔ is mostly lost.
- Depending on the exact phonetic environment, this either caused reduction of two vowels into a single long vowel or diphthong (when between two vowels), insertion of a homorganic glide j or w (when between two vowels, the first of which was short or long /i/ or /u/ and the second not the same), lengthening of a preceding short vowel (between a short vowel and a following non-vowel), or simple deletion (elsewhere). This resulted initially in a large number of complicated morphophonemic variations in verb paradigms.
- In CA and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), ʔ is still pronounced.
- However, because this change had already happened in Meccan Arabic at the time the Qur'an
  Qur'an
  The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
  
  was written, it is reflected in the orthography of written Arabic, where a diacritic known as hamzah is inserted either above an ʾalif, wāw or yāʾ, or "on the line" (between characters); or in certain cases, a diacritic ʾalif maddah ("lengthened ʾalif") is inserted over an ʾalif. (As a result, proper spelling of words involving ʔ is probably one of the most difficult issues in Arabic orthography. Furthermore, actual usage is inconsistent in many circumstances.)
- Modern dialects have smoothed out the morphophonemic variations, typically by deleting the associated verbs or moving them into another paradigm (for example, /qaraʔ/ "read" becomes /qara/ or /ʔara/, a third-weak verb).
- ʔ has reappeared medially in various words due to borrowing from CA. (In addition, q has become ʔ in many dialects, although the two are marginally distinguishable in Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  , since words beginning with original ʔ can elide this sound, whereas words beginning with original q cannot.)
CA q changes widely from variety to variety. In Bedouin
Bedouin
The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...

dialects from Mauritania
Mauritania
Mauritania is a country in the Maghreb and West Africa. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean in the west, by Western Sahara in the north, by Algeria in the northeast, by Mali in the east and southeast, and by Senegal in the southwest...

to Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...

, it is pronounced ɡ, as in most of Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

. In the Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

and Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

(except in Upper Egypt (the Sa'id), as well as some North African towns such as Tlemcen
Tlemcen
Tlemcen is a town in Northwestern Algeria, and the capital of the province of the same name. It is located inland in the center of a region known for its olive plantations and vineyards...

, it is pronounced as a glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...

ʔ, apart from rural areas in the South West Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

where it becomes emphatic q. In the Persian Gulf, it becomes d͡ʒ in many words (adjacent to an original /i/), and is ɡ otherwise. Elsewhere, it is usually realized as uvular q.
CA [ɡʲ] varies widely. In some Arabian Bedouin
Bedouin
The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...

dialects, and parts of the Sudan
Sudan
Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...

, it is still realized as the medieval Persian linguist Sibawayh
Sibawayh
Abū Bishr ʻAmr ibn ʻUthmān ibn Qanbar Al-Bishrī , commonly known as Sībawayh , was an influential linguist and grammarian of the Arabic language. He was of Persian origin born ca...

described it, as a palatalized [ɡʲ]. In Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

, parts of Yemen
Yemen
The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....

and parts of Oman
Oman
Oman , officially called the Sultanate of Oman , is an Arab state in southwest Asia on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by the United Arab Emirates to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the southwest. The coast is formed by the Arabian Sea on the...

, it is a plain ɡ. In most of the Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

and most of North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...

, apart from north Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

, it is ʒ. In the Persian Gulf and southern Iraq, it often becomes j. Elsewhere, it is usually d͡ʒ.
CA k often becomes t͡ʃ in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, some Rural Palestinian dialects and in some Bedouin
Bedouin
The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...

dialects (adjacent to an original /i/, particularly in the second singular feminine enclitic pronoun, where t͡ʃ replaces an classical /ik/ or /ki/). In a very few Moroccan varieties, it affricates to /k͡ʃ/. Elsewhere, it remains k.
CA r is pronounced ʀ in a few areas: Mosul
Mosul
Mosul , is a city in northern Iraq and the capital of the Ninawa Governorate, some northwest of Baghdad. The original city stands on the west bank of the Tigris River, opposite the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh on the east bank, but the metropolitan area has now grown to encompass substantial...

, for instance, and the Jewish variety in Algiers
Algiers
' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000...

. In all northern Africa, a phonemic distinction has emerged between plain r and emphatic [rˤ], thanks to the merging of short vowels.
CA θ, ð become /t, d/ in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

and some regions in North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...

(including Malta), and become /s, z/ in the Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...

(except for some words, in which they become /t, d/), but remain /θ/ and /ð/ in Iraqi, Yemenite, Tunisian, rural Palestinian, Eastern Libyan, and some rural Algerian
Algerian Arabic
Algerian Arabic is the variety or varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. In Algeria, as elsewhere, spoken Arabic differs from written Arabic; Algerian Arabic has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates, and many new words and loanwords borrowed from French, Turkish and...

dialects. In Arabic-speaking towns of Eastern Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

, (Urfa, Siirt and Mardin) they respectively become /f, v/.
CA t (but not emphatic CA /tˤ/) is affricated to t͡s in Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...

; this is still distinguishable from the sequence [ts].
CA ʕ) is pronounced in Iraqi Arabic
Iraqi Arabic
Iraqi Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible Arabic varieties native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into eastern and northern Syria, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in respective Iraqi diaspora communities.-Varieties:Iraqi Arabic has two major varieties...

and Kuwaiti Arabic
Kuwaiti Arabic
Kuwaiti Arabic is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Kuwait. Though it shares the majority of its' features with most Gulf dialects, it also exhibits largely phonetic features that are unique to the dialects of Iraq as well.-See also:* Varieties of Arabic...

with glottal closure: [ʔˤ]. In some varieties ʕ is devoiced to ħ before h, for some speakers of Cairene Arabic /bitaʕha/ → /bitaħħa/ (or /bitaʕ̞ħa/) "hers". The residue of this rule applies also in the Maltese language, where neither etymological h nor ʕ are pronounced as such, but give ħ in this context: tagħha [taħħa] "hers".
The nature of "emphasis" differs somewhat from variety to variety. It is usually described as a concomitant pharyngealization, but in most sedentary varieties it is actually velarization
Velarization
Velarization is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant.In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of three diacritics:...

, or a combination of the two. (The phonetic effects of the two are only minimally different from each other.) Usually there is some associated lip rounding; in addition, the stop consonants t and d are dental and lightly aspirated when non-emphatic, but alveolar and completely unaspirated when emphatic.
CA short vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/ suffer various changes.
- Original final short vowels are mostly deleted.
- Many Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
  
  dialects merge /i/ and /u/ into a phonemic ə except when directly followed by a single consonant; this sound may appear allophonically as /i/ or /u/ in certain phonetic environments.
- Maghreb
  Maghreb
  The Maghreb is the region of Northwest Africa, west of Egypt. It includes five countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania and the disputed territory of Western Sahara...
  
  dialects merge /a/ and /i/ into ə, which is deleted when unstressed. Tunisian maintains this distinction, but deletes these vowels in non-final open syllables.
- Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
  
  , under the strong influence of Berber
  Berber languages
  The Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...
  
  , goes even further. Short /u/ is converted to labialization of an adjacent velar, or is merged with ə. This schwa then deletes everywhere except in certain words ending /-CCəC/.
  - The result is that there is no more distinction between short and long vowels; borrowings from CA have "long" vowels (now pronounced half-long) uniformly substituted for original short and long vowels.
  - This also results in consonant clusters of great length, which are (more or less) syllabified according to a sonority hierarchy. (For some subdialects, in practice, it is very difficult to tell where, if anywhere, there are syllabic peaks in long consonant clusters in a phrase such as /xsˤsˤk tktbi/ "you (fem.) must write". Other dialects, in the North, make a clear distinction; they say /xəssək təktəb/ "you want to write", but */xəssk ətkətb/ just won't do).
- In Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  and Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
  
  , short /i/ and /u/ are elided in various circumstances in unstressed syllables (typically, in open syllables; for example, in Egyptian Arabic, this occurs only in the middle vowel of a VCVCV sequence, ignoring word boundaries). In Levantine, however, clusters of three consonants are almost never permitted. If such a cluster would occur, it is broken up through the insertion of ə between the second and third consonants in Egyptian Arabic, and between the first and second in Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
  
  .

CA long vowels are shortened in some circumstances.
- Original final long vowels are shortened in all dialects.
- In Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  and Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
  
  , unstressed long vowels are shortened.
- Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  also cannot tolerate long vowels followed by two consonants, and shorten them. (Such an occurrence was rare in CA, but often occurs in modern dialects as a result of elision of a short vowel.)

In most dialects, particularly sedentary ones, CA /a/ and /aː/ have two strongly divergent allophones, depending on the phonetic context.
- Adjacent to an emphatic consonant and to q (but not usually to other sounds derived from this, such as ɡ or ʔ), a back variant ɑ occurs; elsewhere, a strongly fronted variant æ~ɛ is used.
- There is a tendency for emphatic consonants to cause non-adjacent low vowels to be backed, as well; this is known as emphasis spreading. The domain of emphasis spreading is potentially unbounded; in Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  , the entire word is usually affected, although in Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic
  Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
  
  and some other varieties, it is blocked by an /i/ or j (and sometimes ʃ).
- The two allophones are in the process of splitting phonemically in some dialects, as ɑ occurs in some words (particularly foreign borrowings) even in the absence of any emphatic consonants anywhere in the word. (Some linguists have postulated additional emphatic phonemes in an attempt to handle these circumstances; in the extreme case, this requires assuming that every phoneme occurs doubled, in emphatic and non-emphatic varieties. Some have attempted to make the vowel allophones autonomous and eliminate the emphatic consonants as phonemes. Others have asserted that emphasis is actually a property of syllables or whole words rather than of individual vowels or consonants. None of these proposals seems particularly tenable, however, given the variable and unpredictable nature of emphasis spreading.)
- CA r is also in the process of splitting into emphatic and non-emphatic varieties, with the former causing emphasis spreading, just like other emphatic consonants. Originally, non-emphatic r occurred before /i/ or between /i/ and a following consonant, while emphatic [rˤ] occurred mostly near ɑ.
  - To a large extent, Western Arabic dialects reflect this, while the situation is rather more complicated in Egyptian Arabic
    Egyptian Arabic
    Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
    
    . (The allophonic distribution still exists to a large extent, although not in any predictable fashion; nor is one or the other variety used consistently in different words derived from the same root. Furthermore, although derivational suffixes (in particular, relational /-i/ and /-ijja/) affect a preceding /r/ in the expected fashion, inflectional suffixes do not.)
  - In Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
    
    , short /a/ and /i/ have merged, obscuring the original distribution. In this dialect, the two varieties have completely split into separate phonemes, with one or the other used consistently across all words derived from a particular root except in a few situations.
- In Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
  
  , the allophonic effect of emphatic consonants is more pronounced than elsewhere.
  - Full /a/ is affected as above, but /i/ and /u/ are also affected, and are lowered to e and o, respectively.
  - In some varieties, such as in Marrakesh, the effects are even more extreme (and complex), where both high-mid and low-mid allophones exist (e and ɛ, o and ɔ), in addition to front-rounded allophones of original /u/ (y, ø, œ), all depending on adjacent phonemes.
  - On the other hand, emphasis spreading in Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
    
    is less pronounced than elsewhere; usually it only spreads to the nearest full vowel on either side, although with some additional complications.
- Emphasis spreading also pharyngealizes consonants between the source consonant and affected vowels, although the effects are much less noticeable than for vowels, since the rise of emphasis spreading is associated with a concomitant decrease in the amount of pharyngealization of emphatic consonants.
  - Interestingly, emphasis spreading does not affect the affrication of non-emphatic t in Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
    
    , with the result that these two phonemes are always distinguishable regardless of the nearby presence of other emphatic phonemes.
- Certain other consonants, depending on the dialect, also cause backing of adjacent sounds, although the effect is typically weaker than full emphasis spreading and usually has no effect on more distant vowels.
  - The x and the uvular consonant q often cause partial backing of adjacent /a/ (and lowering of /u/ and /i/ in Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
    
    ). For Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic
    Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
    
    , the effect is sometimes described as half as powerful as an emphatic consonant, as a vowel with uvular consonants on both sides is affected similarly to having an emphatic consonant on one side.
  - Interestingly, the pharyngeal consonants ħ and ʕ cause no emphasis spreading and may have little or no effect on adjacent vowels. In Egyptian Arabic
    Egyptian Arabic
    Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
    
    , for example, an /a/ adjacent to either sound is a fully front æ. In other dialects, ʕ is more likely to have an effect than ħ.
  - In some Gulf Arabic
    Gulf Arabic
    Gulf Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken around the shore of the Persian Gulf such as in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman...
    
    dialects, w and/or l causes backing.
  - In some dialects, words such as /aɫɫaː/ has backed ɑ's and in some dialects also velarized /l/.
CA diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/ have become eː and oː (but merge with original /iː/ and /uː/ in Maghreb
Maghreb
The Maghreb is the region of Northwest Africa, west of Egypt. It includes five countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania and the disputed territory of Western Sahara...

dialects, which is probably a secondary development). The diphthongs are maintained in the Maltese language
Maltese language
Maltese is the national language of Malta, and a co-official language of the country alongside English,while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic...

and some urban Tunisian dialects, particularly that of Sfax
Sfax
Sfax is a city in Tunisia, located southeast of Tunis. The city, founded in AD 849 on the ruins of Taparura and Thaenae, is the capital of the Sfax Governorate , and a Mediterranean port. Sfax has population of 340,000...

, while eː and oː also occur in some other Tunisian dialects, such as Monastir
Monastir, Tunisia
-Areas within Monastir:Monastir's north-eastern territories lead into a place called Route de la Falaise, through which you will reach its most notable suburb, Skanes, which is 6 miles from Monastir's town centre...

.
The placement of the stress accent is extremely variable between varieties; nowhere is it phonemic.
- Most commonly, it falls on the last syllable containing a long vowel, or a short vowel followed by two consonants; but never farther from the end than the third-to-last syllable. This maintains the presumed stress pattern in CA (although there is some disagreement over whether stress could move farther back than the third-to-last syllable), and is also used in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).
  - In CA and MSA, stress cannot occur on a final long vowel; however, this does not result in different stress patterns on any words, because CA final long vowels are shortened in all modern dialects, and any current final long vowels are secondary developments from words containing a long vowel followed by a consonant.
- In Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic
  Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
  
  , the rule is similar, but stress falls on the second-to-last syllable in words of the form ...VCCVCV, as in /makˈtaba/.
- In Maghrebi Arabic, stress is final in words of the (original) form CaCaC, after which the first /a/ is elided. Hence "mountain" becomes [ˈʒbəl].
- In Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic
  Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
  
  , phonetic stress is often not recognizable.

Language mixing and change

Regional varieties

Examples of major regional differences

Other regional differences

Formal vs. vernacular speech

Sociolinguistic variables

Religion

Pre-Islamic varieties

Western varieties

Central varieties

Northern varieties

Southern varieties

Peripheries

Sectarian varieties

Creoles

Country-based varieties

Diglossic variety

Sedentary vs. Nomadic

Morphology and syntax

Phonetics

Further reading