Hejazi Arabic
Hejazi Arabic or Hijazi Arabic ( '), also known as West Arabian Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. Strictly speaking, there are two main groups of dialects spoken in the Hejaz region, one by the urban population, originally spoken in the major cities of Jeddah, Mecca and Medina, and another by the Bedouin or rural populations. However, the term most often applies to the urban variety which is discussed in this article.
Varieties of Arabic
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 (like the Hejazi dialect in the ancient urban cities of Mecca and Medina) as well as in the Bedouin dialects across all Arabic-Speaking Countries, but is voiceless mainly in the post-Arabized Urban centers as either (with being an allophone in few words mostly in North African cities) or (merging with ) in the urban centers of Egypt and the Levant, all of which were mostly Arabized after the Islamic Conquests.