What Arabic dialects are spoken in Saudi Arabia?
Hejaz
Historically, the Hejaz has always seen itself as separate from the rest of Saudi Arabia. The Hejaz is the most populated region in Saudi Arabia; 35% of all Saudis live there. Hejazi Arabic is the most widely spoken dialect in the region. Saudi Hejazis are of ethnically diverse origins.
Varieties of Arabic
Modern languages have also 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, English and French in Lebanon, and English and Hebrew in Israel. However, a much more significant factor for all five dialect groups is, as Latin among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of the form of Classical Arabic used in the Quran.
South Arabia
The frontiers of South Arabia as linguistically conceived would include the historic peoples speaking the related South Arabian languages as well as neighboring dialects of Arabic, and their descendants. Anciently, there was a South Arabian language, which was borrowed by Ethiopia.
Fourth Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference
Discussions centred on Syria and preventing the spread of sectarian unrest that began to be experienced in the region. The king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, proposed the establishment of a center for dialogue in order to address the sectarian unrest in the region. It was reported that the center would be established in Riyadh. During the summit, Abdullah called for a dialogue among eight sects: the Sunni Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and the Shia Ja'fari, Zaidi, al-Abazi and al-Zahiri, which exist in the Persian Gulf region, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen and Iraq.
Stratum (linguistics)
Other examples of substrate languages are the influence of the now extinct North Germanic Norn language on the Scots dialects of the Shetland and Orkney islands. In the Arab Middle East and North Africa, colloquial Arabic dialects, most especially Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghreb dialects, often exhibit significant substrata from other regional Semitic (especially Aramaic), Iranian, and Berber languages. Yemeni Arabic has Modern South Arabian, Old South Arabian and Himyaritic substrata.
Old South Arabian
Old South Arabian comprised a number of languages; the following are those that have been preserved in writing (the dates follow the so-called 'Long Chronology'. Besides these, at least Jabal Razih survives today.Old South Arabian was written in the Old South Arabian script, a consonantal abjad deriving from the Phoenician alphabet. Compared with other parts of the ancient world, Palestine for instance, the number of surviving inscriptions is very high. Something in the region of 10,000 inscriptions exist. The Sabaean lexicon contains about 2,500 words.The inscriptions on stone display a very formal and precise wording and expression, whereas the style of the wooden inscriptions written in the cursive script is much more informal.
Hejazi Arabic
A conservative phonological feature that Hejazi holds is the lack of palatalization for the letters , and , unlike in other peninsular dialects where they can be palatalized and merged with other phonemes in certain positions (to [t͡ʃ], [t͡s], [ʃ], or [s] in case of ك, [d͡ʒ] or [d͡z] in case of ق and in case of ج), it is also worth mentioning that this trait of non-palatalization is becoming common across Saudi Arabia especially in urban centers, another feature is that the ل is only velarized to /ɫ/ in the word الله /aɫːaːh/ 'god' (except when it follows an /i/: بسمِ الله or لله ) and words derived from it, unlike other peninsular dialects where it might be velarized allophonically, as in pronounced in Hejazi but in other peninsular Arabic dialects.
Emirati Dialect
The United Arab Emirates, extending over a total area of about 83,000 km² and hosting more than 200 different nationalities, represent one of the nations with the largest aggregation of ethnic groups in the world. Archaeological excavations have shown that in this area several Semitic races were established. It follows that the spoken language, the emirate dialect, includes some different dialectal shades. It represents the communication tool used by the overwhelming majority of the population, although people of good cultural level are able to express themselves in official Arabic. Notwithstanding the recent filling up of urban areas to the detriment of rural ones has led to a growing decrease in local dialectal variations, we can still identify three main areas of different shades of the Emirate dialect: Abu Dhabi (including Al-'Ayn, the western region and islands), the Northern Emirates (including Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain and part of Ras al-Khaimah) and the East Coast (including Fujairah, Khawr Fakkan, and the remainder of Ras al-Khaimah). To give a practical example, the "mob" negation should be mentioned with its variations: "mesh" in Abu Dhabi, "mob" in the Northern Emirates and "ma" in the East Coast.
Varieties of Arabic
The largest differences between the classical/standard and the colloquial Arabic are the loss of grammatical case; a different and strict word order; the loss of the previous system of grammatical mood, along with the evolution of a new system; the loss of the inflected passive voice, except in a few relic varieties; restriction in the use of the dual number and (for most varieties) the loss of the feminine plural. Many Arabic dialects, Maghrebi Arabic in particular, also have significant vowel shifts and unusual consonant clusters. Unlike other dialect groups, in the Maghrebi Arabic group, first person singular verbs begin with a n- (ن).
Omani Arabic
Omani Arabic (also known as Omani Hadari Arabic) is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Al Hajar Mountains of Oman and in a few neighboring coastal regions. It is the easternmost Arabic dialect. It was formerly spoken by colonists in Kenya and Tanzania, but most or all of them have shifted to Swahili. There are several distinct dialects of Omani Arabic, such as Dhofari Arabic and Shihhi Arabic.
Semitic languages
Arabic languages and dialects are currently the native languages of majorities from Mauritania to Oman, and from Iraq to the Sudan. Classical Arabic is the language of the Quran. It is also studied widely in the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim world. The Maltese language is genetically a descendant of the extinct Siculo-Arabic, a variety of Maghrebi Arabic formerly spoken in Sicily. The modern Maltese alphabet is based on the Latin script with the addition of some letters with diacritic marks and digraphs. Maltese is the only Semitic official language within the European Union.
Damascus Arabic
Damascus Arabic ("llahže ššāmiyye") or Damascus Dialect is a North Levantine Arabic spoken dialect, indigenous to and spoken primarily in Damascus. As the dialect of the capital city of Syria, and due to its use in the Syrian broadcast media, it is prestigious and widely recognized by speakers of other Syrian dialects, as well as in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. Accordingly, in modern times it is sometimes known as Syrian Arabic or the Syrian Dialect; however, the former term may also be used to refer to the group of similar urban sedentary dialects of the Levant, or to mean Levantine Arabic in general.
Tunisian Arabic
Tunisian Arabic is one of the Arabic languages within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. It is a variety of Maghrebi Arabic like Moroccan and Algerian Arabic, which are mostly unintelligible to Modern Standard or Mashriqi Arabic speakers. It has a considerable number of pre-hilalian dialects but is usually considered in its koiné form to be a mostly Hilalian variety of Maghrebi Arabic because it was affected by the immigration of Banu Hilal in the 11th century, as were the other Maghrebi varieties.
Hejazi Arabic
Notes:The varieties of Arabic spoken in the smaller towns and by the bedouin tribes in the Hejaz region are relatively under-studied. However, the speech of some tribes shows much closer affinity to other bedouin dialects, particularly those of neighboring Najd, than to those of the urban Hejazi cities. The dialects of northern Hejazi tribes merge into those of Jordan and Sinai, while the dialects in the south merge with those of 'Asir and Najd. Also, not all speakers of these bedouin dialects are figuratively nomadic bedouins; some are simply sedentary sections that live in rural areas, and thus speak dialects similar to those of their bedouin neighbors.
Moroccan Arabic
Pre-Hilalian dialects are a result of early Arabization phases of the Maghreb, from the 7th to the 12th centuries, concerning the main urban settlements, the harbors, the religious centres ("zaouias") as well as the main trade routes. The dialects are generally classified in three types: (old) urban, "village" and "mountain" sedentary and Jewish dialects. In Morocco, several pre-Hilalian dialects are spoken:
Eastern Arabia
The Arabs of Eastern Arabia speak a dialect known as Gulf Arabic. Most Saudis do not speak Gulf Arabic because most Saudis do not live in Eastern Arabia. There are approximately 2 million Gulf Arabic speakers in Saudi Arabia, mostly in the coastal eastern region. Before the GCC was formed in 1981, the term "Khaleeji" was solely used to refer to the inhabitants of Eastern Arabia.
Syria
Arabic is the official language of the country. Several modern Arabic dialects are used in everyday life, most notably Levantine in the west and Mesopotamian in the northeast. According to "The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics", in addition to Arabic, the following languages are spoken in the country, in order of the number of speakers: Kurdish, Turkish, Neo-Aramaic (four dialects), Circassian, Chechen, Armenian, and finally Greek. However, none of these minority languages have official status.
Levantine Arabic Sign Language
Levantine Arabic Sign Language, also known as Syro-Palestinian Sign Language, is the deaf sign language of Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Although there are significant differences in vocabulary between the four states, this is not much greater than regional differences within the states, their grammar is quite uniform, and mutual intelligibility is high, indicating that they are dialects of a single language (Hendriks 2008).
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.
Varieties of Arabic
The main dialectal variations in Arabic consonants revolve around the six consonants; , , , , and .
Tunisian Arabic
By then, Tunisian Arabic reached nationwide usage and became composed of six slightly different but fully mutually intelligible dialects: Tunis dialect, considered the reference Tunisian dialect; Sahil dialect; Sfax dialect; southwestern dialect; southeastern dialect and northwestern dialect. Older dialects became less commonly used and began disappearing. Consequently, Tunisian became the main prestigious language of communication and interaction within the Tunisian community and Tunisia became the most linguistically homogeneous state of the Maghreb. However, Berber dialects, Libyan and Algerian Arabic as well as several Tunisian dialects like the traditional urban woman dialect, Judeo-Tunisian Arabic or even several Tunisian structures like "lā" noun"+š", also practically disappeared from Tunisia.
Yemeni Americans
Yemeni Americans speak both English and Arabic. They speak many different dialects of Arabic, including: Sanaani or Northern Yemeni dialect, Ta'izzi-Adeni or Southern Yemeni dialect, Hadrami dialect, Mehri dialect, and Judeo-Yemeni dialect. Most of them are Muslim.
Arabic
"Colloquial Arabic" is a collective term for the spoken dialects of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal division is between the varieties within and outside of the Arabian peninsula, followed by that between sedentary varieties and the much more conservative Bedouin varieties. All of the varieties outside of the Arabian peninsula (which include the large majority of speakers) have a large number of features in common with each other that are not found in Classical Arabic. This has led researchers to postulate the existence of a prestige koine dialect in the one or two centuries immediately following the Arab conquest, whose features eventually spread to all of the newly conquered areas. (These features are present to varying degrees inside the Arabian peninsula. Generally, the Arabian peninsula varieties have much more diversity than the non-peninsula varieties, but have been understudied.)
Sudanese Arabs
It was noted in the late 19th century that the Arabic spoken in Sudan still largely maintained grammatical and dialectical features similar to that introduced from the Arabian Peninsula in the 12th century, and as a result Sudanese Arabic is a form of pure or "archaic Arabic." This, among other features, serves to distinguish the Arabic spoken in Sudan from that of its neighbor, Egypt.
Demographics of Saudi Arabia
The official language of Saudi Arabia is Arabic. Saudi Sign Language is the principal language of the deaf community. The large expatriate communities also speak their own languages, the most numerous of which are Indonesian (850,000), Filipino/Tagalog (700,000), Malayalam (447,000), Rohingya (400,000), Urdu (380,000), and Egyptian Arabic (300,000).
Western Morocco Arabic
Western Morocco Arabic, Western Moroccan Arabic or ʿAroubi Arabic is a dialectal continuum of Hilalian Arabic, mainly spoken in the plains of western (Doukkala, Abda, Tadla, Chaouia, Rhamna, Sraghna, Chiadma and Zaër) and central-western (Saïss, Gharb and pre-Rif) plains of Morocco.
Levantine Arabic
Ancient Arabia was home to a continuum of Central Semitic languages in antiquity which stretched from the southern Levant to Yemen. The isoglosses associated with Arabic are clustered at the northern end of this continuum, in the northern Hijaz and the southern Levant. This may be in part due to a lack of documentation, but it is clear that Central Arabia was home to languages quite distinct from Arabic. Thus, Arabic can be said to have emerged in the second millennium BC and spread into the peninsula, replacing its sister languages on the Central Semitic continuum.
Saudi Arabia
The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of mainly four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia ('Asir). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud. He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia has since been an absolute monarchy, effectively a hereditary dictatorship governed along Islamist lines. The ultraconservative Wahhabi religious movement within Sunni Islam has been called "the predominant feature of Saudi culture", with its global spread largely financed by the oil and gas trade. Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "the Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca) and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in Islam. As of 2013, the state had a total population of 28.7 million, of which 20 million were Saudi nationals and 8 million were foreigners. As of 2017, the population is 33 million. The state's official language is Arabic.
Arabs
The table below shows the distribution of populations in the Arab world, as well as the official language(s) within the various Arab states.
Arab diaspora refers to descendants of the Arab immigrants who, voluntarily or as refugees, emigrated from their native lands in non-Arab countries, primarily in East Africa, South America, Europe, North America, Australia and parts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and West Africa. According to the International Organization for Migration, there are 13 million first-generation Arab migrants in the world, of which 5.8 million reside in Arab countries. Arab expatriates contribute to the circulation of financial and human capital in the region and thus significantly promote regional development. In 2009, Arab countries received a total of 35.1 billion USD in remittance in-flows and remittances sent to Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon from other Arab countries are 40 to 190 per cent higher than trade revenues between these and other Arab countries. The 250,000 strong Lebanese community in West Africa is the largest non-African group in the region. Arab traders have long operated in Southeast Asia and along the East Africa's Swahili coast. Zanzibar was once ruled by Omani Arabs. Most of the prominent Indonesians, Malaysians, and Singaporeans of Arab descent are Hadhrami people with origins in southern Yemen in the Hadramawt coastal region.
Arabic phonology
Even in the most formal of conventions, pronunciation depends upon a speaker's background. Nevertheless, the number and phonetic character of most of the 28 consonants has a broad degree of regularity among Arabic-speaking regions. Note that Arabic is particularly rich in uvular, pharyngeal, and pharyngealized ("emphatic") sounds. The emphatic coronals (, , , and ) cause assimilation of emphasis to adjacent non-emphatic coronal consonants. The phonemes ⟨پ⟩ and ⟨ڤ⟩ (not used by all speakers) are not considered to be part of the phonemic inventory, as they exist only in foreign words and they can be pronounced as ⟨ب⟩ and ⟨ف⟩ respectively depending on the speaker.. The standard pronunciation of ⟨ج⟩ varies regionally, most prominently in the Arabian Peninsula, parts of the Levant, Iraq, northern Algeria and Sudan, it is also considered as the predominant pronunciation of Literary Arabic outside the Arab world, in most of Northwest Africa and the Levant, and only in Egypt.
Yemeni Arabic
Non-Arabic South Semitic languages indigenous to the region include several Modern South Arabian languages, such as the Mehri and Soqotri languages, which are not Arabic languages, but members of an independent branch of the Semitic family. Another separate Semitic family once spoken in the region is Old South Arabian; these became extinct in the pre-Islamic period with the possible exception of the Razihi. Some of these share areal features with Yemeni Arabic due to influence from or on Yemeni Arabic.
Arabic
Although Classical Arabic was a unitary language and is now used in Quran, its pronunciation varies somewhat from country to country and from region to region within a country. It is influenced by colloquial dialects.
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic has many regional dialects and accents as well. Its mainstream dialect is the one used in Casablanca, Rabat and Fas and therefore it dominates the media eclipsing the other regional dialects like the ones spoken in Tangiers and Oujda.
Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic (, , autonym: "il-lahje š-šāmiyye") is a broad variety of Arabic and the main vernacular spoken Arabic of the eastern coastal strip of the Levantine Sea that includes parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Turkey. With numerous dialects and over 30 million native speakers worldwide, it is considered one of the five major varieties of Arabic. In the frame of the general diglossia status of the Arab world, Levantine Arabic is used for daily spoken use, while most of the written and official documents and media use Modern Standard Arabic.
Sudanese Arabs
While most Sudanese Arabs speak some form of Sudanese Arabic, some other Arab tribes speak different Arabic dialects like the Awadia and Fadnia tribes and the Bani Hassan, Al-Ashraf and Rashaida who speak Hejazi Arabic. In addition, Western province tribes like the Baggara and Darfurians) speak Chadian Arabic, although they have great variation in cultural and genealogy aspects. Sudanese Arabs descend primarily from migrants from the Arabian Peninsula and some of the pre-existing indigenous populations of Sudan, most predominantly the Nubian people who also share a common history with Egypt. In addition, a few Arabian tribes existed in Sudan prior to the advent of Islam. Nevertheless, most Arab tribes migrated into the Sudan in the 12th century and introduced Islam.
Najdi Arabic
Najdi Arabic () is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Najd region of Saudi Arabia.
Tunisian Arabic
Tunis, Sahil and Sfax dialects (considered sedentary dialects) use the voiceless uvular stop in words such as قال "he said" while southeastern, northwestern and southwestern varieties (considered nomadic dialects) substitute it by the voiced velar stop as in . Moreover, only Tunis, Sfax and Sahil dialects use Tunisian phonology.
Eastern Arabic numerals
In Arabic-speaking Asia as well as Egypt and Sudan both kinds of numerals are used alongside each other with Western Arabic numerals gaining more and more currency, now even in very traditional countries such as Saudi Arabia. The United Arab Emirates uses both Eastern and Western Arabic numerals.
Varieties of Arabic
The spoken dialects of Arabic have occasionally been written, usually in the Arabic alphabet. Vernacular Arabic was first recognized as a written language distinct from Classical Arabic in 17th century Ottoman Egypt, when 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. More recently, many plays and poems, as well as a few other works (even translations of Plato) exist in Lebanese Arabic and Egyptian Arabic; books of poetry, at least, exist for most varieties. In Algeria, colloquial Maghrebi Arabic was taught as a separate subject under French colonization, and some textbooks exist. Mizrahi Jews 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, adding diacritics and other conventions for letters that exist in Judeo-Arabic but not Hebrew. The Latin alphabet was advocated for Lebanese Arabic by Said Aql, whose supporters published several books in his transcription. In 1944, Abdelaziz Pasha Fahmi, a member of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Egypt proposed the replacement of the Arabic alphabet with the Latin alphabet. His proposal was discussed in two sessions in the communion but was rejected, and faced strong opposition in cultural circles. Latin alphabet is used by Arabic speakers over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones when the Arabic alphabet is unavailable or difficult to use for technical reasons; this is also used in Modern Standard Arabic when Arabic speakers of different dialects communicate each other.
Syrian Americans
While some may speak the formal Literary Arabic, many Syrians speak Syrian Arabic, a dialect which belongs to the Levantine Arabic family of dialects. There are also sub-dialects in Syrian Arabic; for example, people from Aleppo have a distinct and distinguishable accent, one that differs considerably from that of people from Homs or Al-Hasakah. Syrians can usually comprehend and understand the dialects of most Arabs, especially those who speak any form of Levantine Arabic.
Influence of Arabic on other languages
Arabic has had a great influence on other languages, especially in vocabulary. The influence of Arabic has been most profound in those countries dominated by Islam or Islamic power. Arabic is a major source of vocabulary for languages as diverse as Amharic, Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Chaldean, Chechen, Croatian, Dagestani, English, German, Gujarati, Hausa,
Hebrew, 
Hindi,
Kazakh, Kurdish, Kutchi, Kyrgyz, Malay (Malaysian and Indonesian), Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Rohingya, Romance languages (French, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Sicilian, Spanish, etc.) Saraiki, Sindhi, Somali, Sylheti, Swahili, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Visayan and Wolof as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. For example, the Arabic word for "book" (كتاب "kitāb") is used in most of the languages listed. Other languages such as Maltese and Nubi derive from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary. Spanish has the largest Arabic influenced vocabulary outside the Islamic world due to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula from 711 until 1492 known as Al-Andalus, although Spain's re-christianization and resulting loss of contact with Quranic Arabic has led to a significant shift in both meaning and pronunciation of Spanish words of Arabic etymology.
Saudi Canadians
Most Saudi Canadians speak Arabic, English or French. According to the 2011 Census there were 7,955 Canadians who claimed Saudi ancestry.
Arab League
The official language of the Arab League is Literary Arabic, based on Classical Arabic. However, several Arab League member states have other co-official or national languages, such as Somali, Berber, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Nubian. Additionally, various different Arabic dialects are spoken, such as Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic and Moroccan Arabic.
Tunisian Arabic
Many Tunisian and Maghrebi words, like "qarnīṭ ("octopus")", have a Latin etymology. The dialects were later called Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects and were used along Classical Arabic for communication in Tunisia. Also, Siculo-Arabic was spoken in several islands near Tunisia like Sicily, Pantelleria, and Malta and entered into contact with the Tunisian pre-hilalian dialects. Consequently, it ameliorated the divergence in grammar and structures of all the concerned dialects from Classical Arabic.
Riyadh
The Riyadh TV Tower, operated by the Ministry of Information, was built between 1978 and 1981.
National Saudi television channels Saudi TV1, Saudi TV2, Saudi TV Sports, Al-Ekhbariya, ART channels network operate from here. Television broadcasts are mainly in Arabic, although some radio broadcasts are in English or French. Arabic is the main language used in television and radio but radio broadcasts are also made in different languages such as Urdu, French, or English. Riyadh has four Arabic newspapers; "Asharq Al-Awsat" (which is owned by the city governor), "Al Riyadh", "Al Jazirah" and "Al-Watan", two English language newspapers; "Saudi Gazette" and "Arab News", and one Malayalam language newspaper, "Gulf Madhyamam".
Languages of Morocco
As a member of the Maghrebi Arabic grouping of dialects, Moroccan Arabic is similar to the dialects spoken in Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya (and also Maltese). The country shows a marked difference in urban and rural dialects. This is due to the history of settlement. Originally, Arabs established centers of power in only a few cities and ports in the region, with the effect that the other areas remained Berber-speaking. Then, in the 13th century, Bedouin tribes swept through many of the unsettled areas, spreading with them their distinct Arabic dialect in the non-urbanized areas and leaving speakers of Berber in isolated areas in the more mountainous regions.
Old South Arabian
Old South Arabian (or Ṣayhadic or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. There were a number of other Old South Arabian languages (e.g. Awsānian), of which very little evidence has survived, however. A sole surviving Sayhadic language is attested in Jabal Rāziḥ in far north-west of Yemen, though the varieties of speech in neighboring areas have both Arabic and Sayhadic features, and it is difficult to classify them as either Arabic dialects with a Sayhadic substratum, or Sayhadic languages that have been restructured under pressure of Arabic.
Inflection
Arabic regional dialects (e.g. Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic), used for everyday communication, tend to have less inflection than the more formal Literary Arabic. For example, in Jordanian Arabic, the second- and third-person feminine plurals ( and ) and their respective unique conjugations are lost and replaced by the masculine ( and ), whereas in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, is replaced by .
Languages of Syria
Non-indigenous dialects of Arabic, most notably those of Iraq and Palestine, are frequently used within their respective refugee diasporas, especially in Damascus.
Semitic languages
With the advent of the early Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, the hitherto largely uninfluential Arabic language slowly replaced many (but not all) of the indigenous Semitic languages and cultures of the Near East. Both the Near East and North Africa saw an influx of Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, followed later by non-Semitic Muslim Iranian and Turkic peoples. The previously dominant Aramaic dialects gradually began to be sidelined, however descendant dialects of Eastern Aramaic (including the Akkadian influenced Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo and Mandaic) survive to this day among the Assyrians and Mandaeans of northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey, with up to a million fluent speakers. Western Aramaic is now only spoken by a few thousand Syriac Christians in western Syria. The Arabs spread their Central Semitic language to North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and northern Sudan and Mauritania) where it gradually replaced Egyptian Coptic and many Berber languages (although Berber is still largely extant in many areas), and for a time to the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar) and Malta.
With the patronage of the caliphs and the prestige of its liturgical status, Arabic rapidly became one of the world's main literary languages. Its spread among the masses took much longer, however, as many (although not all) of the native populations outside the Arabian Peninsula only gradually abandoned their languages in favour of Arabic. As Bedouin tribes settled in conquered areas, it became the main language of not only central Arabia, but also Yemen, the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt. Most of the Maghreb followed, particularly in the wake of the Banu Hilal's incursion in the 11th century, and Arabic became the native language of many inhabitants of al-Andalus. After the collapse of the Nubian kingdom of Dongola in the 14th century, Arabic began to spread south of Egypt into modern Sudan; soon after, the Beni Ḥassān brought Arabization to Mauritania. A number of South Arabian languages distinct from Arabic still survive, such as Soqotri, Mehri and Shehri which are mainly spoken in Socotra, Yemen and Oman, and are likely descendants of the languages spoken in the ancient kingdoms of Sheba, Magan, Ubar, Meluhha and Dilmun.
Languages of Algeria
In the Sahara, more conservative Bedouin dialects, grouped under the name Saharan Arabic, are spoken; in addition, the many Sahrawi refugees at Tindouf speak Hassaniya Arabic. Most Jews of Algeria once spoke dialects of Arabic specific to their community, collectively termed Judeo-Arabic.
Kuwaiti Arabic
Kuwaiti (in Kuwaiti كويتي, //) is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Kuwait. Kuwaiti Arabic shares many phonetic features unique to Gulf dialects. Due to Kuwait's soap opera industry, Kuwaiti Arabic spread throughout the Arabic-speaking world and became familiar even to people in countries such as Tunisia and Jordan.
Varieties of Arabic
An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect. 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.
Classical Arabic
In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal ‘poetic koiné’ distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the Lakhmid court of al-Ḥīra. During the first Islamic century the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke a form of Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. The standardization of Classical Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the "ʿarabiyya" "Arabic", Sībawayhi's "al"-"Kitāb", is based first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to the Qurʾān and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the "ʿarabiyya". "Colloquial" Arabic refers to the many regional dialects derived from Arabic spoken daily across the region and learned as a first language, and as second language if people speak other languages native to their particular country. By the 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, as it was the lingua franca across the Middle East, North Africa, Horn of Africa during those times; the analogy is like most literate Romance speakers were also literate in Classical Latin. Various Arabic dialects freely borrowed words from Classical Arabic, this situation is similar to Romance languages, wherein scores of words were borrowed directly from Classical Latin. People speak Classical Arabic as a second language if they speak colloquial Arabic dialects as their first language, but as a third language if others speak other languages native to a country as their first language and colloquial Arabic dialects as their second language. But Classical Arabic was spoken with different pronunciations influenced by informal dialects. The differentiation of the pronunciation of informal dialects is the influence from native languages previously spoken and some presently spoken in the regions, such as Coptic in Egypt, Berber, Punic or Phoenician in North Africa, Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian in Yemen, and Aramaic in the Levant.
Yemeni Arabic
Yemeni Arabic can be divided roughly into several main dialect groups, each with its own distinctive vocabulary and phonology. The most important four groups are San'ani in the North and Center and Hadhrami in the East, where is pronounced and is or (except in coastal Hadhrami where is ), in addition to Ta'izzi-Adeni (also called Djibouti Arabic) in the South and Tihami in the West, where is and is . Yemeni Arabic is used for daily communications and has no official status; Modern Standard Arabic is used in official purposes, education, commerce and media.
Sudanese Arabs
Sudanese Arabs are the majority population of Sudan. They are predominantly Muslim and most of them speak the Sudanese Arabic dialect. The population of Sudan also includes various tribes who are genealogically Arabian, such as the Shaigiya,Ja'alin, Shukria, Juhaynah,Rashaida, Sulaym etc. (according to Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, the Bedouins of the eastern desert of Sudan, such as the Ja'alin and Shaigiya are almost indistinguishable from the Bedouins of eastern Arabia).
Middle East
Bengali, Hindi and Urdu is widely spoken by migrant communities in many Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia (where 20–25% of the population is South Asian), the United Arab Emirates (where 50–55% of the population is South Asian), and Qatar, which have large numbers of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian immigrants.
Modern Standard Arabic
The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossiathe use of two distinct varieties of the same language, usually in different social contexts. This diglossic situation facilitates code-switching in which a speaker switches back and forth between the two dialects of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. People speak MSA as a third language if they speak other languages native to a country as their first language and colloquial Arabic dialects as their second language. Modern Standard Arabic is also spoken by people of Arab descent outside the Arab world when people of Arab descent speaking different dialects communicate to each other. As there is a prestige or standard dialect of vernacular Arabic, speakers of standard colloquial dialects code-switch between these particular dialects and MSA.
Arabic
The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native, mutually unintelligible "dialects"; these dialects linguistically constitute separate languages which may have dialects of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. Arabic speakers often improve their familiarity with other dialects via music or film.
Sylheti language
1. Jalalabadi Sylheti: This dialect is mostly spoken in the Sylhet, Moulvibazar and Habiganj districts. It is heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian due to arrival of Islam in the region. Named after Shah Jalal, it is mostly spoken by the Muslim population although Hindus in these areas may also speak in this dialect. Covering most of the Sylhet region, there are slight differences in vocabulary which can still be seen although it is one dialect. This dialect is also viewed as the standard version of Sylheti.
Arabic phonology
Some examples of variation:In Modern Standard Arabic is used as a marginal phoneme to pronounce some dialectal and loan words.
On the other hand it is considered a native phoneme or allophone in most modern Arabic dialects, mostly as a variant of (as in Arabian Peninsula and Northwest African dialects) or as a variant of (as in Egyptian and a number of Yemeni and Omani dialects). It is also considered a separate foreign phoneme that appears only in loanwords, as in most urban Levantine dialects where is and is .
Hadhrami Arabic
Hadhrami Arabic, or Ḥaḍrami Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Hadhrami people ("Ḥaḍārima") living in the Hadhramaut. It is also spoken by many emigrants, who migrated from the Hadhramaut to the Horn of Africa (Somalia and Eritrea), East Africa (Comoros, Zanzibar, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique), Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore) and, recently, to the other Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
Arabic Braille
Arabic braille includes numerous abbreviations, some marked by dot 4 or dot 5 (the comma), which are not described here. A conference in Saudi Arabia in 2002 set up a unified braille standard for Arabic, but as of 2013 not all countries had signed up; those not adopting the standard include some Arab countries but also non-Arab Muslim countries such as Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Bedaria tribe
Bedaria () is a branch of Ja'alin tribes or Ja'alia are an Arabic speaking, Semitic tribe. The Bedaria constitute a large portion of Sudanese Arabs, and traditionally only speak Arabic. Sudanese Arabs are the Arabic-speaking majority population of Sudan. They are predominantly Muslim and most of them speak the Sudanese Arabic dialect.
Arabic phonology
The phoneme represented by the Arabic letter "" () has many standard pronunciations: in most of the Arabian Peninsula and as the predominant pronunciation of Literary Arabic outside the Arab world, in most of Egypt and some regions in southern Yemen and southwestern Oman. This is also a characteristic of colloquial Egyptian and southern Yemeni dialects. In Morocco and western Algeria, it is pronounced as in some words, especially colloquially. In most north Africa and most of the Levant, the standard is pronounced , and in certain regions of the Persian Gulf colloquially with . In some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either or as it used to be in Classical Arabic.
Arabic
Within the non-peninsula varieties, the largest difference is between the non-Egyptian North African dialects (especially Moroccan Arabic) and the others. Moroccan Arabic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabic speakers east of Libya (although the converse is not true, in part due to the popularity of Egyptian films and other media).
Arabic
According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are some of the characteristic features of the koiné that underlies all of the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine:Of the 29 Proto-Semitic consonants, only one has been lost: , which merged with . But the consonant is still found in many colloquial Arabic dialects. Various other consonants have changed their sound too, but have remained distinct. An original lenited to , and – consistently attested in pre-Islamic Greek transcription of Arabic languages – became palatalized to or by the time of the Quran and , , or after early Muslim conquests and in MSA (see Arabic phonology#Local variations for more detail). An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative became . Its emphatic counterpart was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic (Hence the Classical Arabic's appellation ' or "language of the '"); for most modern dialects, it has become an emphatic stop with loss of the laterality or with complete loss of any pharyngealization or velarization, . (The classical "" pronunciation of pharyngealization still occurs in the Mehri language and the similar sound without velarization, , exists in other Modern South Arabian languages.)
Arabic phonology
Modern Standard Arabic has six vowel phonemes forming three pairs of corresponding short and long vowels (). Many spoken varieties also include and . Modern Standard Arabic has two diphthongs (formed by a combination of short with the semivowels and ) in Classical Arabic with no allophones. Allophony in different dialects of Arabic can occur, and is partially conditioned by neighboring consonants within the same word. As a general rule, for example, and are:
Sudanese Arabic
In northern and central parts of Sudan, Sudanese colloquial Arabic has been influenced by the Nubian language, which in ancient times was the dominant language in Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan. Many of the agricultural and farming terms in Sudanese Arabic were adopted from Nubian.Because of the varying influence of local languages in different parts of Sudan, there is considerable regional variation in Arabic spoken throughout the country. Sudanese Arabic typically refers to Arabic spoken mostly in central parts of Sudan. The other most commonly mentioned derivative of Sudanese Arabic is Juba Arabic, a pidgin of Arabic spoken in South Sudan, which is much more heavily influenced by other local languages.
Arabic
"Arabic" usually designates one of three main variants: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and "colloquial" or "dialectal" Arabic. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran, used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate. Theoretically, Classical Arabic is considered normative, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as the Lisān al-ʻArab). In practice, however, modern authors almost never write in pure Classical Arabic, instead using a literary language with its own grammatical norms and vocabulary, commonly known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).
Telephone numbers in Saudi Arabia
Telephone numbers in Saudi Arabia have seven digits, five digits (00966) for area codes (from 011 to 017 except 05X whose code is confined to mobile numbers).
Semitic languages
For more comparative vocabulary lists, see Wiktionary appendices:There are six fairly uncontroversial nodes within the Semitic languages: East Semitic, Northwest Semitic, North Arabian, Old South Arabian (also known as Sayhadic), Modern South Arabian, and Ethiopian Semitic. These are generally grouped further, but there is ongoing debate as to which belong together. The classification based on shared innovations given below, established by Robert Hetzron in 1976 and with later emendations by John Huehnergard and Rodgers as summarized in Hetzron 1997, is the most widely accepted today. In particular, several Semiticists still argue for the traditional (partially nonlinguistic) view of Arabic as part of South Semitic, and a few (e.g. Alexander Militarev or the German-Egyptian professor Arafa Hussein Mustafa) see the South Arabian languages as a third branch of Semitic alongside East and West Semitic, rather than as a subgroup of South Semitic. Roger Blench notes that the Gurage languages are highly divergent and wonders whether they might not be a primary branch, reflecting an origin of Afroasiatic in or near Ethiopia. At a lower level, there is still no general agreement on where to draw the line between "languages" and "dialects" an issue particularly relevant in Arabic, Aramaic, and Gurage and the strong mutual influences between Arabic dialects render a genetic subclassification of them particularly difficult.
Tunisian Arabic
Tunisian Arabic is a variety of Arabic and as such shares many features with other modern varieties, especially the Maghrebi varieties of Arabic. Some of its distinctive features (compared to other Arabic dialects) are listed here.The Arabic dialects of Tunisia belong to either pre-Hilalian or Hilalian dialectal families.
Levantine Arabic
The primary division between Arabic dialects in ancient times was between Northern Old Arabic, spoken in the southern Levant, and Old Hijazi, spoken in the northern, and later central Hijaz. The main representatives of Northern Old Arabic were Safaitic, Hismaic, and Nabataean Arabic. Tens of thousands of graffiti in the Safaitic and Hismaic scripts cover the deserts of southern Syria and present-day Jordan. The Safaitic inscriptions sometimes exhibit the article ʾ(l), a shared areal isogloss with the Arabic substrate of the Nabataean inscriptions. Many Safaitic inscriptions exhibit all of the features typical of Arabic. The Hismaic script was used to compose two long texts in an archaic stage of Arabic before the language acquired the definite article.
Northwest Arabian Arabic
The Northwest Arabian Arabic dialects share a number of features distinguishing them from the North Arabian Bedouin dialects:Levantine Bedawi is spoken in the eastern area of Jordan, in the southwestern corner of Syria and in the Bedouin regions of Egypt (on the northern and southern coast of the Sinai).
Hadhrami Arabic
There are a few lexical items that are shared with Modern South Arabian languages, which perhaps distinguish this dialect from other neighbouring Peninsular dialects. The effect of Hadhrami emigration to Southeast Asia (see Arab Indonesians and Arab Singaporeans), the Indian subcontinent and East Africa is clear in the vocabulary especially in certain registers like types of food and dress: "sarong." Many loanwords are listed in al-Saqqaf (2006).
Eastern Arabia
The Arab states of the Persian Gulf are solely Eastern Arabia, the borders of the Arabic-speaking Gulf do not extend beyond Eastern Arabia. The modern-day states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and UAE are the archetypal Gulf Arab states. Saudi Arabia is often considered a Gulf Arab state although most Saudis do not live in Eastern Arabia.
Tunisian Arabic
Before 1980, The pre-Hilalian group included old ("Baldī") Urban dialects of Tunis, Kairouan, Sfax, Sousse, Nabeul and its region Cap Bon, Bizerte, old Village dialects (Sahil dialects), and the Judeo-Tunisian. The Hilalian set includes the Sulaym dialects in the south and the Eastern Hilal dialects in central Tunisia. The latter were also spoken in the Constantinois (eastern Algeria).
Saudi Sign Language
Saudi Sign Language is the deaf sign language of Saudi Arabia. This sign language is different from the Unified Arabic Sign Language that is used by 18 Arab countries.
Demographics of Saudi Arabia
The ethnic composition of Saudi citizens is 90% Arab and 10% Afro-Asian.
Emirati Dialect
There are different forms of Arabic:Due to the coexistence of the Modern Standard Arabic (high language) and the dialect (low language), we can speak about diglossia of the Arabic language.
Moroccan Arabic
The Hilalian dialects spoken in Morocco belong to the Mâqil subgroup, a family that includes three main dialectal areas: western Morocco (Doukkala, Abda, Tadla, Chaouia, Gharb, Zaers and Sraghna), eastern Morocco (L'Oriental and the Oujda area) and western Algeria (central and western ), and the southernmost Hassaniya area (southern Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania). Among the dialects, Hassaniya is often considered as distinct from Moroccan Darija.
Basic Law of Saudi Arabia
Article 1 states that "God's Book and the Sunna of His Prophet" are the country's constitution and Arabic is the official language with the capital at Riyadh.
Sudanese Arabic
Sudanese Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken throughout Sudan and in parts of Eritrea. Some of the tribes in Sudan still have similar accents to the ones in Saudi Arabia.
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian is a North African dialect of the Arabic language which is a Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It originated in the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt around the capital Cairo. Egyptian Arabic evolved from the Quranic Arabic which was brought to Egypt during the seventh-century AD Muslim conquest that aimed to spread the Islamic faith among the Egyptians. Egyptian Arabic is influenced by the Egyptian Coptic language which was the native language of the Egyptians prior to the Islamic conquest, and later it had influences by other languages such as French, Italian, Greek, Turkish and English. The 94 million Egyptians speak a continuum of dialects, among which Cairene is the most prominent. It is also understood across most of the Arabic-speaking countries due to the predominance of Egyptian influence on the region as well as Egyptian media including Egyptian cinema which has had a big influence in the MENA region for more than a century along with the Egyptian music industry, making it the most widely spoken and one of the most widely studied varieties of Arabic.
Maghrebi Arabic
In contrast, the colloquial dialects of more eastern Arab countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Sudan, are usually known as "" (), though Egyptians may also refer to their dialects as "al-logha-d-darga".
Demographics of the Arab League
Nubians, found in Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt, are a different ethnicity from their northern and southern neighbors in Egypt and Sudan, numbering 1.7 million in Sudan and Egypt. The Nubian people in Sudan inhabit the region between Wadi Halfa in the north and Aldaba in the south. The main Nubian groups from north to south are the Halfaweyen, Sikut (Sickkout), Mahas, and Danagla. They speak different dialects of the Nubian language.
Vehicle registration plates of Saudi Arabia
The plates consist of three letters and up to four numbers in Arabic. Both letters and numbers are also translated into the Latin alphabet and into the Western Arabic numerals, respectively.
On the right side (or in the centre since 2014), the plate contain the Saudi Arabia coat of arms and the international code KSA letters written vertically (horizontally since 2014) . The lower sticker is the official seal.
The standard plates always have four numbers and if necessary they are padded by zeroes. Personalised plates or earlier registrations may contain one, two or three numbers with or without zero padding.
The letter translation into the Latin alphabet is done from left to right, although Arabic letters are read from right to left. Furthermore, the translation is not always correct. There are only 17 Arabic letters used on the registration plates.
Hasaitic dialect
Hasaitic is an Ancient 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.
It is written in the Ancient North Arabian script and dates from the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC.
Algerian Arabic
Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects are generally classified in three types: urban, "village" sedentary and Jewish dialects. Several Pre-Hilalian dialects are spoken in Algeria:
Emirati Dialect
The Emirati dialect is a dialectal variety of the Arabic language that is spoken in the United Arab Emirates, and is a branch of the regional Gulf dialects family. It refers to a range of different levels of dialects: local, national, cultured and formal.
Sudan
Sudan has 597 groups that speak over 400 different languages and dialects. Sudanese Arabs are by far the largest ethnic group in Sudan. They are almost entirely Muslims; while the majority speak Sudanese Arabic, some other Arab tribes speak different Arabic dialects like Awadia and Fadnia tribes and Bani Arak tribes who speak Najdi Arabic; and Rufa'a, Beni Ḥassān, Al-Ashraf, Kinanah and Rashaida who speak Hejazi Arabic. In addition, the Western province comprises various ethnic groups, while a few Arab Bedouin of the northern Rizeigat and others who speak Sudanese Arabic share the same culture and backgrounds of the Sudanese Arabs.
Varieties of Arabic
When it comes to phonetics the Arabic dialects differ in the pronunciation of the short vowels (, and ) and a number of selected consonants, mainly , and the interdental consonants , and , in addition to the dental .
Arabic
Charles Ferguson's koine theory (Ferguson 1959) claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on the eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories.
According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA.
Palestinian Arabic
The dialects spoken by the Arabs of the Levant – the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean – or Levantine Arabic, form a group of dialects of Arabic. Arabic manuals for the "Syrian dialect" were produced in the early 20th century, and in 1909 a specific "Palestinean Arabic" manual was published.
Varieties of Arabic
Arabic-based pidgins (which have a limited vocabulary consisting mostly of Arabic words, but lack most Arabic morphological features) are in widespread use along the southern edge of the Sahara, and have been for a long time. In the eleventh century, the medieval geographer al-Bakri records a text in an Arabic-based pidgin, probably one that was spoken in the region corresponding to modern Mauritania. In some regions, particularly around the southern Sudan, the pidgins have creolized (see the list below).
Varieties of Arabic
The greatest variations between kinds of Arabic are those between regional language groups. These can be divided many ways, but the following typology is usually used:
These large regional groups do not correspond to borders of modern states. In the western parts of the Arab world, varieties are referred to as الدارجة "ad-dārija", and in the eastern parts, as العامية "al-ʿāmmiyya". Nearby varieties of Arabic are mostly mutually intelligible, 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 Standard and to a lesser extent, the Lebanese popular media (this phenomenon is called asymmetric intelligibility). One factor in the differentiation of the varieties is the influence from other languages previously spoken or still presently spoken in the regions, such as Coptic in Egypt, French, Ottoman Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Berber, Punic or Phoenician in North Africa, Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian in Yemen and Aramaic in the Levant. Speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties are often able to communicate by switching to Modern Standard Arabic.
Demographics of the Arab League
On the other hand, Arabic is divided into over 27 dialects. Almost every Arab state has at least one local dialect of its own. they can be divided into 5 major branches, the Peninsula Arabic, which is the Arabic used in the Arabian peninsula, with around 9 main dialects, Arabic of the Nile Valley, which includes the Masri, Saedi, Sudanese and Chadic Arabic, the Arabic of the Fertile Crescent, which includes the Bedawi, Levant Arabic, Iraqi Arabic and North Mesopotamian Arabic, the Magharbi Arabic, which includes the Dialects used in Mauritania, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, also another category of Arabic is the other isolated dialects of Arabic, like the Judeo-Arabic, Mediterranean Arabic, Nubi Arabic, and the juba Arabic, which have greatly been affected by these communities' own pronunciation, culture and native tongue.
Yemeni Arabic
The Hadhrami dialect in many towns and villages in the "Wādī" (valley) and the coastal region is characterised by its pronunciation of the voiced palatal plosive (or affricate) (ج) as the semi-vowel (ي) ("y") (). In this it resembles some Eastern Arabian and Gulf dialects including the dialects of Basra in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the dialects of the other Arab Emirates. In educated speech, (ج) is realised as a voiced palatal plosive () or affricate () in some lexical items.
Semitic languages
In Arab-dominated Yemen and Oman, on the southern rim of the Arabian Peninsula, a few tribes continue to speak Modern South Arabian languages such as Mahri and Soqotri. These languages differ greatly from both the surrounding Arabic dialects and from the (unrelated but previously thought to be related) languages of the Old South Arabian inscriptions.
Arabic
Even during Muhammad's lifetime, there were dialects of spoken Arabic. Muhammad spoke in the dialect of Mecca, in the western Arabian peninsula, and it was in this dialect that the Quran was written down. However, the dialects of the eastern Arabian peninsula were considered the most prestigious at the time, so the language of the Quran was ultimately converted to follow the eastern phonology. It is this phonology that underlies the modern pronunciation of Classical Arabic. The phonological differences between these two dialects account for some of the complexities of Arabic writing, most notably the writing of the glottal stop or "hamzah" (which was preserved in the eastern dialects but lost in western speech) and the use of ' (representing a sound preserved in the western dialects but merged with ' in eastern speech).