Varieties of Arabic (or

dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...

s or

vernaculars Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken form of language, particularly when perceived as having lower social status or less prestige than standard language, which is more codified, institutionally promoted, literary, or formal. More narr ...

) are the linguistic systems that

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

speakers speak natively. Arabic is a

Semitic language The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese, Modern South Arabian languages and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by mo ...

within the

Afroasiatic family The Afroasiatic languages (also known as Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic) are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the ...

that originated in the

Arabian Peninsula The Arabian Peninsula (, , or , , ) or Arabia, is a peninsula in West Asia, situated north-east of Africa on the Arabian plate. At , comparable in size to India, the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world. Geographically, the ...

. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...

that are often related to geographical distance and some that are

mutually unintelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize (or distinguish) the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects as well as local native languages and dialects. Some organizations, such as

SIL International SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics International) is an evangelical Christian nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, to expan ...

, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be separate languages, while others, such as the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic. In terms of

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...

, a major distinction exists between the formal standardized language, found mostly in writing or in prepared speech, and the widely diverging

vernacular Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken language, spoken form of language, particularly when perceptual dialectology, perceived as having lower social status or less Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige than standard language, which is mor ...

s, used for everyday speaking situations. The latter vary from country to country, from speaker to speaker (according to personal preferences, education and culture), and depending on the topic and situation. In other words, Arabic in its natural environment usually occurs in a situation of

diglossia In linguistics, diglossia ( , ) is where two dialects or languages are used (in fairly strict compartmentalization) by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety (labeled "L" or "low" v ...

, which means that its native speakers often learn and use two linguistic forms substantially different from each other, the

Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA) is the variety of Standard language, standardized, Literary language, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages al ...

(often called MSA in English) as the official language and a local colloquial variety (called , ' in many Arab countries, meaning "

slang A slang is a vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in everyday conversation but avoided in formal writing and speech. It also often refers to the language exclusively used by the members of pa ...

" or "colloquial"; or called , ', meaning "common or everyday language" in the

Maghreb The Maghreb (; ), also known as the Arab Maghreb () and Northwest Africa, is the western part of the Arab world. The region comprises western and central North Africa, including Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Maghreb al ...

), in different aspects of their lives. This situation is often compared in Western literature to the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

language, which maintained a cultured variant and several vernacular versions for centuries, until it disappeared as a spoken language, while derived

Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

became new languages, such as Italian, Catalan, Aragonese,

Occitan Occitan may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain. * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France. * Occitan language, spoken in parts o ...

, French, Arpitan, Spanish, Portuguese, Asturleonese, Romanian and more. The regionally prevalent variety is learned as the speaker's

first language A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period hypothesis, critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' ...

whilst the formal language is subsequently learned in school. While vernacular varieties differ substantially, ''fuṣḥa'' (), the formal

register Register or registration may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc. * ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller * Registration (organ), ...

, is standardized and universally understood by those literate in Arabic. Western scholars make a distinction between

Classical Arabic Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic () is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad Caliphate, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, e ...

and

while speakers of Arabic generally do not consider CA and MSA to be different varieties. The largest differences between the classical/standard and the colloquial Arabic are the loss of

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...

; a different and

strict In mathematical writing, the term strict refers to the property of excluding equality and equivalence and often occurs in the context of inequality and monotonic functions. It is often attached to a technical term to indicate that the exclusiv ...

word order; the loss of the previous system of

grammatical mood In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement ...

, along with the evolution of a new system; the loss of the

inflected In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

passive voice A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or ''patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing ...

, except in a few relic varieties; restriction in the use of the

dual number In algebra, the dual numbers are a hypercomplex number system first introduced in the 19th century. They are expressions of the form , where and are real numbers, and is a symbol taken to satisfy \varepsilon^2 = 0 with \varepsilon\neq 0. D ...

and (for most varieties) the loss of the distinctive conjugation and agreement for feminine

plural In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...

s. Many Arabic dialects,

Maghrebi Arabic Maghrebi Arabic, often known as ''ad-Dārija'' to differentiate it from Literary Arabic, is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken in the Maghreb. It includes the Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, Hassaniya and Saharan Arabic di ...

in particular, also have significant

vowel shift A vowel shift is a systematic sound change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language. The best-known example in the English language is the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the 15th century. The Greek language also underwent a v ...

s and unusual

consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

s. Unlike other dialect groups, in the

group, first-person singular

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

s begin with a n- (). Further substantial differences exist between

Bedouin The Bedouin, Beduin, or Bedu ( ; , singular ) are pastorally nomadic Arab tribes who have historically inhabited the desert regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia (Iraq). The Bedouin originated in the Sy ...

and sedentary speech, the countryside and major cities, ethnic groups, religious groups, social classes, men and women, and the young and the old. These differences are to some degree bridgeable. Often, Arabic speakers can adjust their speech in a 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. In terms of typological classification, Arabic dialectologists distinguish between two basic norms: Bedouin and Sedentary. This is based on a set of phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics that distinguish between these two norms. However, it is not really possible to keep this classification, partly because the modern dialects, especially urban variants, typically amalgamate features from both norms. Geographically, modern Arabic varieties are classified into five groups: Maghrebi, Egyptian (including

Egyptian ''Egyptian'' describes something of, from, or related to Egypt. Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to: Nations and ethnic groups * Egyptians, a national group in North Africa ** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of year ...

and Sudanese),

Mesopotamian Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary o ...

, Levantine and

Peninsular Arabic Peninsular Arabic are the varieties of Arabic spoken throughout the Arabian Peninsula. This includes the countries of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Southern Iran, South Iraq, Southern Iraq and Jordan. ...

. Speakers from distant areas, across national borders, within countries and even between cities and villages, can struggle to understand each other's dialects.

Classification

Regional varieties

The greatest variations between kinds of Arabic are those between

regional language * A regional language is a language spoken in a region of a sovereign state, whether it be a small area, a federated state or province or some wider area. Internationally, for the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority La ...

groups. Arabic dialectologists formerly distinguished between just two groups: the Mashriqi (eastern) dialects, east of Libya which includes the dialects of

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

Levant The Levant ( ) is the subregion that borders the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west, and forms the core of West Asia and the political term, Middle East, ''Middle East''. In its narrowest sense, which is in use toda ...

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

Sudan Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...

, and the Maghrebi (western) dialects which includes the dialects of

North Africa North Africa (sometimes Northern Africa) is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region. However, it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of t ...

(

) west of

. The

is high within each of those two groups, while the intelligibility between the two groups is asymmetric: Maghrebi speakers are more likely to understand Mashriqi than vice versa. Arab dialectologists have now adopted a more detailed classification for modern variants of the language, which is divided into five major groups: Peninsular,

, Levantine, Egypto-Sudanic or Nile Valley (including

and Sudanese), and Maghrebi. These large

regional In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as areas, zones, lands or territories, are portions of the Earth's surface that are broadly divided by physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and ...

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

Arab world The Arab world ( '), formally the Arab homeland ( '), also known as the Arab nation ( '), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, comprises a large group of countries, mainly located in West Asia and North Africa. While the majority of people in ...

, varieties are referred to as , and in the eastern parts, as . Nearby varieties of Arabic are mostly

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

, but faraway varieties tend not to be. Varieties west of Egypt are particularly disparate, with Egyptian Arabic speakers claiming difficulty in understanding North African Arabic speakers, while North African Arabic speakers' ability to understand other Arabic speakers is mostly due to the widespread popularity of Egyptian and Levantine popular media (for example Syrian or Lebanese TV shows). This phenomenon is called asymmetric intelligibility. One factor in the differentiation of the varieties is the influence from other languages (mainly other

Afroasiatic languages The Afroasiatic languages (also known as Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic) are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of th ...

) previously spoken or still presently spoken in the regions, such as *

Ancient Egyptian Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

or Coptic in

; *

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

in the

; *

, Akkadian, Kurdish and Persian in

(

Iraq Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to Iraq–Saudi Arabia border, the south, Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq border, the east, the Persian Gulf and ...

); *

Berber Berber or Berbers may refer to: Ethnic group * Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa * Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages Places * Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile People with the surname * Ady Berber (1913–196 ...

; * Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian and

Old South Arabian Ancient South Arabian (ASA; also known as Old South Arabian, Epigraphic South Arabian, Ṣayhadic, or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages ( Sabaean/Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic, Minaic) spoken in the far southern ...

Yemen Yemen, officially the Republic of Yemen, is a country in West Asia. Located in South Arabia, southern Arabia, it borders Saudi Arabia to Saudi Arabia–Yemen border, the north, Oman to Oman–Yemen border, the northeast, the south-eastern part ...

Maghrebi group

Western varieties are influenced by the

Berber languages The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berbers, Berber communities, ...

Punic The Punic people, usually known as the Carthaginians (and sometimes as Western Phoenicians), were a Semitic people who migrated from Phoenicia to the Western Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age. In modern scholarship, the term ''Punic'' ...

and by

. * Koines **

Moroccan Arabic Moroccan Arabic ( ), also known as Darija ( or ), is the dialectal, vernacular form or forms of Arabic spoken in Morocco. It is part of the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum and as such is mutually intelligible to some extent with Algerian ...

(/ – /) – (ISO 639–3: ary) **

Algerian Arabic Algerian Arabic (, romanized: ), natively known as , or , is a variety of Arabic spoken in Algeria. It belongs to the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum and is mostly intelligible with the Tunisian and Moroccan dialects. Darja () means "eve ...

(/ – /) – (ISO 639–3: arq) **

Tunisian Arabic Tunisian Arabic, or simply Tunisian (), is a Varieties of Arabic, variety of Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is known among its 13 million speakers as ''Tūnsi'', "Tunisian" or ''Maghrebi Arabic, Derja'' (; meaning "common or everyday dialect") t ...

(/ – /) – (ISO 639–3: aeb) ** Libyan Arabic (/ – /) – (ISO 639–3: ayl) * Pre-Hilalian ** Jebli Arabic ** Jijel Arabic **

Siculo-Arabic Siculo-Arabic or Sicilian Arabic is a group of Arabic variaties that were spoken in the Emirate of Sicily (which included Malta) from the 9th century, persisting under the subsequent County of Sicily, Norman rule until the 13th century. It was d ...

( – , extinct in Sicily) – (ISO 639–3: sqr) † *** Maltese – (ISO 639–3: mlt) * Bedouin **

Algerian Saharan Arabic Algerian Saharan Arabic (also known as Saharan Arabic, Tamanrasset Arabic, Tamanghasset Arabic) is a variety of Arabic indigenous to and spoken predominantly in the Algerian Sahara. Its ISO 639-3 language code is "aao," and it belongs to Maghreb ...

– (ISO 639–3: aao) **

Hassaniya Arabic Hassaniya Arabic (; also known as , , , , and Maure) is a variety of Maghrebi Arabic spoken by Mauritanian Arabs, Malian Arabs and the Sahrawis. It was spoken by the Beni Ḥassān Bedouin tribes of Yemeni origin who extended their authority o ...

– (ISO 639–3: mey) * Andalusian Arabic ( – , extinct in Iberia, surviving among Andalusi communities in Morocco and Algeria) – (ISO 639–3: xaa) †

Sudanese group

Sudanese varieties are influenced by the

Nubian languages The Nubian languages are a group of related languages spoken by the Nubians. Nubian languages were spoken throughout much of Sudan, but as a result of Arabization they are today mostly limited to the Nile Valley#In Sudan, Nile Valley between Asw ...

, and

Beja language Beja ( or ) is an Afroasiatic language of the Cushitic branch spoken on the western coast of the Red Sea by the Beja people. Its speakers inhabit parts of Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea. In 2022 there were 2,550,000 Beja speakers in Sudan, and 121,00 ...

. *

Sudanese Arabic Sudanese Arabic, also referred to as the Sudanese dialect (, ), Colloquial Sudanese ( ) or locally as Common Sudanese ( ) refers to the various related varieties of Arabic spoken in Sudan as well as parts of Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Sudanese ...

( – ) – (ISO 639–3: apd) **

Juba Arabic Juba Arabic (, ; ), also known since 2011 as South Sudanese Arabic, is a lingua franca spoken mainly in Equatoria Province in South Sudan, and derives its name from the South Sudanese capital, Juba. It is also spoken among communities of people ...

– (ISO 639–3: pga) ** Turku Arabic, pidgin † **

Chadian Arabic Chadian Arabic (), also known as Shuwa Arabic, Western Sudanic Arabic, or West Sudanic Arabic (WSA), is a variety of Arabic and the first language of 1.9 million people in Chad, both town dwellers and Baggara, nomadic cattle herders. Most of its ...

, spoken by nomadic Arab tribes across Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and parts of Sudan.

Egyptian group

Egyptian varieties are influenced by the

Coptic language Coptic () is a dormant language, dormant Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language. It is a group of closely related Egyptian dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Ancient Egyptian language, Egyptian language, and histori ...

. *

Egyptian Arabic Egyptian Arabic, locally known as Colloquial Egyptian, or simply as Masri, is the most widely spoken vernacular Arabic variety in Egypt. It is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and originated in the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt. The esti ...

( – ) – (ISO 639–3: arz) *

Sa'idi Arabic A Ṣa‘īdī (, Coptic language, Coptic: ⲣⲉⲙⲣⲏⲥ ''Remris'') is a person from Upper Egypt (, Coptic language, Coptic: ⲙⲁⲣⲏⲥ ''Maris''). Etymology The word literally means "from Ṣa‘īd" (i.e. Upper Egypt), and can al ...

( – ) – (ISO 639–3: aec)

Mesopotamian group

Mesopotamian varieties are influenced by the Mesopotamian languages ( Sumerian, Akkadian, Mandaic, Eastern Aramaic),

Turkish language Turkish ( , , also known as 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, a member of Oghuz languages, Oghuz branch with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languag ...

, and

Iranian languages The Iranian languages, also called the Iranic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau. The Iranian langu ...

. * North Mesopotamian (''qeltu'' varieties) **

North Mesopotamian Arabic North Mesopotamian Arabic, also known as Moslawi (meaning 'of Mosul Mosul ( ; , , ; ; ; ) is a major city in northern Iraq, serving as the capital of Nineveh Governorate. It is the second largest city in Iraq overall after the capital Baghda ...

or Moslawi ( – ) – (ISO 639–3: ayp) **

Cypriot Maronite Arabic Cypriot Arabic (, ), also known as Cypriot Maronite Arabic or Sanna (, ), is a moribund language, moribund Varieties of Arabic, variety of Arabic language, Arabic spoken by the Maronites in Cyprus, Maronite community of Cyprus. Formerly speakers ...

– (ISO 639–3: acy) ** Judeo-Iraqi Arabic – (ISO 639–3: yhd) *** Baghdad Jewish Arabic ** Anatolian Arabic * Baghdadi Arabic (''gelet'' varieties) – (ISO 639–3: acm) * South Mesopotamian ** South Mesopotamian Arabic ** Khuzestani Arabic

Levantine group

Levantine varieties (ISO 639–3: apc) are influenced by

Western Aramaic languages Western Aramaic is a group of Aramaic dialects once spoken widely throughout the ancient Levant, predominantly in the south, and Sinai, including ancient Damascus, Nabatea, Judea, across the Palestine Region, Transjordan, Samaria as well as L ...

, and to a lesser extent, the Turkish language,

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

, Persian, Phoenician,

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

and

Ancient Egyptian language The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (; ), is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world ...

: * Cilician Arabic () *

Jordanian Arabic Jordanian Arabic is a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Arabic spoken in Jordan. Jordanian Arabic can be divided into sedentary and Bedouin varieties. Sedentary varieties belong to the Levantine Arabic dialect continuum. ...

() *

Lebanese Arabic Lebanese Arabic ( ; autonym: ), or simply Lebanese ( ; autonym: ), is a Varieties of Arabic, variety of Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and primarily Languages of Lebanon, spoken in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from ...

() * Palestinian Arabic () ** Fellahi Arabic () ** Madani Arabic () * Syrian Arabic () ** Damascene Arabic () **

Aleppo Arabic Aleppo Arabic or Aleppine Arabic is the urban Arabic variety spoken in the city of Aleppo. Phonology Aleppo Arabic is characterised by the usage of /d͡ʒ/ instead of the typical urban /ʒ/ used in Damascus Arabic and in Lebanese Arabic ...

(الحلبية)

Peninsular group

Some peninsular varieties are influenced by South Arabian Languages. *

Najdi Arabic Najdi Arabic (, Najdi Arabic: , ) is the group of Arabic varieties originating from the Najd region of Saudi Arabia. Outside of Saudi Arabia, it is also the main Arabic variety spoken in the Syrian Desert of Iraq, Jordan, and Syria (with the exc ...

( – ) – (ISO 639–3: ars) *

Gulf Arabic Gulf Arabic or Khaleeji ( ' local pronunciation: or ', local pronunciation: ) is a variety of the Arabic language spoken in Eastern Arabia around the coasts of the Persian Gulf in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, southern Iraq, ...

( – ) – (ISO 639–3: afb) *

Bahrani Arabic Bahrani Arabic (also known as Bahrani or Baharna Arabic) is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Baharna in Eastern Arabia and Oman. In Bahrain, the dialect is primarily spoken in Shia villages and some parts of Manama. In Saudi Arabia, the diale ...

( – ) – (ISO 639–3: abv) *

Hejazi Arabic Hejazi Arabic or Hijazi Arabic (HA) (, Hejazi Arabic: , ), also known as West Arabian Arabic, is a Varieties of Arabic, variety of Arabic spoken in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. Strictly speaking, there are two main groups of dialects spoken i ...

( – ) – (ISO 639–3: acw) *

Yemeni Arabic Yemeni Arabic () is a cluster of varieties of Arabic spoken in Yemen and southwestern Saudi Arabia. It is generally considered a very conservative dialect cluster, having many classical features not found across most of the Arabic-speaking world ...

( – ) ** Hadhrami Arabic ( – ) – (ISO 639–3: ayh) *** Indonesian Arabic ( – ) ** Sanʽani Arabic – (ISO 639–3: ayn) **

Taʽizzi-Adeni Arabic Taʽizzi-Adeni Arabic () or Southern Yemeni Arabic is a dialect of Arabic spoken primarily in Yemen. The dialect itself is further sub-divided into the regional vernaculars of Ta'izzi, spoken in Ta'izz, and Adeni, spoken in Aden. While both are s ...

– (ISO 639–3: acq) ** Tihamiyya Arabic ** Yāfiʿī Arabic * Omani Arabic ( – ) – (ISO 639–3: acx) * Dhofari Arabic – (ISO 639–3: adf) * Shihhi Arabic ( – ) – (ISO 639–3: ssh) * Bareqi Arabic * Bedawi Arabic ( – /) – (ISO 639–3: avl)

Peripheries

* Central Asian Arabic ** Bactrian Arabic – (ISO 639–3: abh) **

Uzbeki Arabic Central Asian Arabic or Jugari Arabic () refers to a set of four closely-related varieties of Arabic currently facing extinction and spoken predominantly by Arab communities living in portions of Central Asia. These varieties are Bactrian (or ...

– (ISO 639–3: auz) ** Khorasani Arabic * Shirvani Arabic †

Jewish varieties

Jewish varieties are influenced by the

and

languages. Though they have features similar to each other, they are not a homogeneous unit and still belong philologically to the same family groupings as their non-Judeo counterpart varieties. *

Judeo-Arabic Judeo-Arabic (; ; ) sometimes referred as Sharh, are a group of different ethnolects within the branches of the Arabic language used by jewish communities. Although Jewish use of Arabic, which predates Islam, has been in some ways distinct ...

(ISO 639–3: jrb) ** Judeo-Algerian ** Judeo-Egyptian ** Judeo-Iraqi (ISO 639–3: yhd) *** Judeo-Baghdadi ** Judeo-Lebanese ** Judeo-Moroccan (ISO 639–3: aju) ** Judeo-Syrian ** Judeo-Tripolitanian (ISO 639–3: yud) ** Judeo-Tunisian ** Judeo-Yemeni (ISO 639–3: jye) ** Modern Palestinian Judeo-Arabic

Creoles and pidgins

There have been a number of Arabic-based

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified form of contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn f ...

s and creoles throughout history, including a number of new ones emerging today. These may be broadly divided into the Sudanic pidgins and creoles, which share a common ancestry, and incipient immigrant pidgins.

Creoles

* Nubi – (ISO 639–3: kcn)

Pidgins

* Maridi Arabic ( – ) †
Bongor Arabic

Diglossic variety

– (ISO 639–3: arb)

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 motives 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. An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a

prestige dialect Prestige in sociolinguistics is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally c ...

. 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, especially including the capital Amman. 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 In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. These alternations are generally intended to ...

. 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, to make communication easier and more comprehensible. For example, to express the existential "there is" (as in, "there is a place where..."), Arabic speakers have access to many different words: * Iraq and Kuwait: * Egypt, the Levant, and most of the Arabian Peninsula: * Tunisia: * Morocco and Algeria: * Yemen: * Modern Standard Arabic: In this case, 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. Iraqi/Kuwaiti ''aku'', Levantine ''fīh'' and North African ''kayn'' all evolve from Classical Arabic forms (''yakūn'', ''fīhi'', ''kā'in'' respectively), but now sound different. Sometimes a certain dialect may be associated with backwardness and does 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.

Typological differences

A basic distinction that cuts across the entire geography of the

Arabic-speaking world The Arab world ( '), formally the Arab homeland ( '), also known as the Arab nation ( '), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, comprises a large group of countries, mainly located in West Asia and North Africa. While the majority of people in ...

is between sedentary and nomadic varieties (often misleadingly called

). 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 Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pa ...

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 '' qaf'', which is pronounced as a voiced in the urban varieties of the Arabian Peninsula (e.g. the Hejazi dialect in the ancient cities of

Mecca Mecca, officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, is the capital of Mecca Province in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia; it is the Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. It is inland from Jeddah on the Red Sea, in a narrow valley above ...

and

Medina Medina, officially al-Madinah al-Munawwarah (, ), also known as Taybah () and known in pre-Islamic times as Yathrib (), is the capital of Medina Province (Saudi Arabia), Medina Province in the Hejaz region of western Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ...

) as well as in the Bedouin dialects across all Arabic-speaking countries, but is voiceless mainly in post- Arabized urban centers as either (with being an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

in a few words mostly in North African cities) or (merging with ) in the urban centers of

and the

. The latter were mostly Arabized after the Islamic Conquests. The other major phonetic difference is that the rural varieties preserve the

(CA) interdentals ث and ذ, and merge the CA emphatic sounds ض and ظ into rather than sedentary . 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, that a simplified

koiné language In linguistics, a koine or koiné language or dialect (pronounced ; ) is a standard or common dialect that has arisen as a result of the contact, mixing, and often simplification of two or more mutually intelligible varieties of the same langu ...

developed in the army staging camps in Iraq, 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,

) 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.

Examples of major regional differences

The following example illustrates similarities and differences between the literary, standardized varieties, and major urban dialects of Arabic. Maltese, a highly divergent

language descended from Maghrebi Arabic is also provided. ''True pronunciations differ; transliterations used approach an approximate demonstration. Also, the

pronunciation Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. To This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or all language in a specific dialect—"correct" or "standard" pronunciation—or si ...

differs significantly from region to region.''