Varieties of Arabic

Classification

Regional varieties

• Ancient Egyptian or Coptic in Egypt;
• Aramaic languages|Aramaic] in the Levant;
• Aramaic, Akkadian, and Persian in Mesopotamia ;
• Berber, Spanish, and French in the Maghreb;
• Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian in Yemen.

  Maghrebi group

• Koines
• * Moroccan Arabic –
• * Algerian Arabic –
• * Tunisian Arabic –
• * Libyan Arabic –
• Pre-Hilalian
• * Jebli Arabic
• * Jijel Arabic
• * Siculo-Arabic – †
• ** Maltese –
• Bedouin
• * Algerian Saharan Arabic –
• * Hassaniya Arabic –
• Andalusian Arabic – †

  Sudanese group

• Sudanese Arabic –
• * Juba Arabic –
• * Turku Arabic, pidgin †
• * Chadian Arabic, spoken by nomadic Arab tribes across Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and parts of Sudan.

  Egyptian group

• Egyptian Arabic –
• Sa'idi Arabic –

  Mesopotamian group

• North Mesopotamian
• * North Mesopotamian Arabic or Moslawi –
• * Cypriot Maronite Arabic –
• * Judeo-Iraqi Arabic –
• ** Baghdad Jewish Arabic
• * Anatolian Arabic
• South Mesopotamian (gelet varieties)
• * South Mesopotamian Arabic
• *Baghdadi Arabic –
• * Khuzestani Arabic
• * Shawi Arabic

  Levantine group

• Cilician Arabic
• Jordanian Arabic
• Lebanese Arabic
• Palestinian Arabic
• * Fellahi Arabic
• * Madani Arabic
• Syrian Arabic
• *Damascene Arabic
• *Aleppo Arabic

  Peninsular group

• Najdi Arabic –
• Gulf Arabic –
• Bahrani Arabic –
• Hejazi Arabic –
• Yemeni Arabic
• * Hadhrami Arabic –
• ** Indonesian Arabic
• * Sanʽani Arabic –
• * Taʽizzi-Adeni Arabic –
• * Tihamiyya Arabic
• * Yāfiʿī Arabic
• Omani Arabic –
• Dhofari Arabic –
• Shihhi Arabic –
• Bareqi Arabic
• Bedawi Arabic –

  Peripheries

• Central Asian Arabic
• * Bactrian Arabic –
• * Uzbeki Arabic –
• * Khorasani Arabic
• Shirvani Arabic †

  Jewish varieties

• Judeo-Arabic
• * Judeo-Algerian
• * Judeo-Egyptian
• * Judeo-Iraqi
• ** Judeo-Baghdadi
• * Judeo-Lebanese
• * Judeo-Moroccan
• * Judeo-Syrian
• * Judeo-Tripolitanian
• * Judeo-Tunisian
• * Judeo-Yemeni
• * Palestinian Judeo-Arabic">Palestinian Arabic">Palestinian Judeo-Arabic

  Creoles and pidgins

Creoles

• Nubi –

  Pidgins

• Maridi Arabic †
• Bongor Arabic

  Diglossic variety

• Modern Standard Arabic –

  Language mixing and change

• Iraq and Kuwait:
• Egypt, the Levant, and most of the Arabian Peninsula:
• Tunisia:
• Morocco and Algeria:
• Yemen:
• Modern Standard Arabic:

Sedentary and nomadic varieties

Examples of major regional differences

Other regional differences

Mutual intelligibility

Formal and vernacular differences

• فصحى التراث fuṣḥá at-turāṯ, 'heritage classical': The Classical Arabic of Arab literary heritage and the Qur'an. This is primarily a written language, but it is heard in spoken form at the mosque or in religious programmes on television, but with a modernized pronunciation.
• فصحى العصر fuṣḥá al-ʿaṣr, 'contemporary classical' or 'modernized classical': This is what Western linguists call Modern Standard Arabic. It is a modification and simplification of Classical Arabic that was deliberately created for the modern age. Consequently, it includes many newly coined words, either adapted from Classical Arabic, or borrowed from foreign, chiefly European, languages. Although it is principally a written language, it is spoken when people read aloud from prepared texts. Highly skilled speakers can also produce it spontaneously, though this typically occurs only in the context of media broadcasts – particularly in talk and debate programs on pan-Arab television networks such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya – where the speakers want to be simultaneously understood by Arabic speakers in all the various countries where these networks' target audiences live. If highly skilled speakers use it spontaneously, it is spoken when Arabic speakers of different dialects communicate with each other. Commonly used as a written language, it is found in most books, newspapers, magazines, official documents, and reading primers for small children; it is also used as another version of literary form of the Qur'an and in modernized revisions of writings from Arab literary heritage.
• عامية المثقفين ʿāmmiyyat al-muṯaqqafīn, 'colloquial of the cultured' : This is a vernacular dialect that has been heavily influenced by MSA, i.e. borrowed words from MSA ; loanwords from MSA replace or are sometimes used alongside native words evolved from Classical Arabic in colloquial dialects. It tends to be used in serious discussions by well-educated people, but is generally not used in writing except informally. It includes a large number of foreign loanwords, chiefly relating to the technical and theoretical subjects it is used to discuss, sometimes used in non-intellectual topics. Because it can generally be understood by listeners who speak varieties of Arabic different from those of the speaker's country of origin, it is often used on television, and it is also becoming the language of instruction at universities.
• عامية المتنورين ʿāmmiyyat al-mutanawwarīn 'colloquial of the basically educated': This is the everyday language that people use in informal contexts, and that is heard on television when non-intellectual topics are being discussed. It is characterized, according to Badawi, by high levels of borrowing. Educated speakers usually code-switch between ʿāmmiyyat al-muṯaqqafīn and ʿāmmiyyat al-mutanawwarīn.
• عامية الأميين ʿāmmiyyat al-ʾummiyyīn, 'colloquial of the illiterates': This is very colloquial speech characterized by the absence of any influence from MSA and by relatively little foreign borrowing.

Linguistic distance to MSA

Sociolinguistic variables

Religion

Variation

Writing system

Morphology and syntax

• The order subject–verb–object may be more common than verb–subject–object.
• Verbal agreement between subject and object is always complete.
• * In CA, there was no number agreement between subject and verb when the subject was third-person and the subject followed the verb.
• Loss of case distinctions.
• Loss of original mood distinctions other than the indicative and imperative.
• * The dialects differ in how exactly the new indicative was developed from the old forms. The sedentary dialects adopted the old subjunctive forms, while many of the Bedouin dialects adopted the old indicative forms.
• * The sedentary dialects subsequently developed new mood distinctions; see below.
• Loss of dual marking everywhere except on nouns.
• * A frozen dual persists as the regular plural marking of a small number of words that normally come in pairs.
• * In addition, a productive dual marking on nouns exists in most dialects. This dual marking differs syntactically from the frozen dual in that it cannot take possessive suffixes. In addition, it differs morphologically from the frozen dual in various dialects, such as Levantine Arabic.
• * The productive dual differs from CA in that its use is optional, whereas the use of the CA dual was mandatory even in cases of implicitly dual reference.
• * The CA dual was marked not only on nouns, but also on verbs, adjectives, pronouns and demonstratives; the dual in those varieties that have them is analyzed as plural for agreement with verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and demonstratives.
• Development of an analytic genitive construction with the usage of حق ḥagg, بتاع bitāʕ, تاع tāʕ, ديال diyāl etc. to rival the constructed genitive.
• * The Bedouin dialects make the least use of the analytic genitive. Moroccan Arabic makes the most use of it, to the extent that the constructed genitive is no longer productive, and used only in certain relatively frozen constructions.
• The relative pronoun is no longer inflected.
• * In CA, it took gender, number and case endings.
• Pronominal clitics ending in a short vowel moved the vowel before the consonant.
• * Hence, second singular and rather than and ; third singular masculine rather than.
• * Similarly, the feminine plural verbal marker became.
• * Because of the absolute prohibition in all Arabic dialects against having two vowels in hiatus, the above changes occurred only when a consonant preceded the ending. When a vowel preceded, the forms either remained as-is or lost the final vowel, becoming,, and, respectively. Combined with other phonetic changes, this resulted in multiple forms for each clitic, depending on the phonetic environment.
• * The verbal markers and both became, while second singular feminine remained. Mesopotamian dialects in southeastern Turkey are an exception for they retain the ending for first person singular.
• * In the dialect of southern Nejd, the second singular masculine has been retained, but takes the form of a long vowel rather than a short one as in CA.
• * The forms given here were the original forms, and have often suffered various changes in the modern dialects.
• * All of these changes were triggered by the loss of final short vowels.
• Various simplifications have occurred in the range of variation in verbal paradigms.
• * Third-weak verbs with radical and radical have merged in the form I perfect tense. They had already merged in CA, except in form I.
• * Form I perfect ' verbs have disappeared, often merging with '.
• * Doubled verbs now have the same endings as third-weak verbs.
• * Some endings of third-weak verbs have been replaced by those of the strong verbs.

• Loss of the inflected passive in finite verb forms.
• * New passives have often been developed by co-opting the original reflexive formations in CA, particularly verb forms V, VI and VII.
• * Hassaniya Arabic contains a newly developed inflected passive that looks somewhat like the old CA passive.
• * Najdi Arabic has retained the inflected passive up to the modern era, though this feature is on its way to extinction as a result of the influence of other dialects.
• Loss of the indefinite suffix on nouns.
• * When this marker still appears, it is variously,, or.
• * In some Bedouin dialects it still marks indefiniteness on any noun, although this is optional and often used only in oral poetry.
• * In other dialects it marks indefiniteness on post-modified nouns.
• * All Arabic dialects preserve a form of the CA adverbial accusative suffix, which was originally a tanwiin marker.
• Loss of verb form IV, the causative.
• * Verb form II sometimes gives causatives, but is not productive.
• Uniform use of in imperfect verbal prefixes.
• * CA had before form II, III and IV active, and before all passives, and elsewhere.
• * Some Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula have uniform.
• * Najdi Arabic has when the following vowel is, and when the following vowel is.

• Loss of a separately distinguished feminine plural in verbs, pronouns and demonstratives. This is usually lost in adjectives as well.
• Development of a new indicative-subjunctive distinction.
• * The indicative is marked by a prefix, while the subjunctive lacks this.
• * The prefix is or in Egyptian Arabic and Levantine Arabic, but or in Moroccan Arabic. It is not infrequent to encounter as an indicative prefix in some Persian Gulf states; and, in South Arabian Arabic, is used in the north around the San'aa region, and is used in the southwest region of Ta'iz.
• * Tunisian Arabic, Maltese and at least some varieties of Algerian and Libyan Arabic lack an indicative prefix. Rural dialects in Tunisia however, may use /ta/.
• Loss of in the third-person masculine enclitic pronoun, when attached to a word ending in a consonant.
• * The form is usually or in sedentary dialects, but or in Bedouin dialects.
• * After a vowel, the bare form is used, but in many sedentary dialects the is lost here as well. In Egyptian Arabic, for example, this pronoun is marked in this case only by lengthening of the final vowel and concomitant stress shift onto it, but the "h" reappears when followed by another suffix.
• ** ramā "he threw it"
• ** maramahūʃ "he didn't throw it"

• Agreement with inanimate plurals is plural, rather than feminine singular or feminine plural, as in CA.
• Development of a circumfix negative marker on the verb, involving a prefix and a suffix.
• * In combination with the fusion of the indirect object and the development of new mood markers, this results in morpheme-rich verbal complexes that can approach polysynthetic languages in their complexity.
• * An example from Egyptian Arabic:
• **
• ** ---bring--to.us-
• ** "You aren't bringing her to us."
• *
• In Egyptian, Tunisian and Moroccan Arabic, the distinction between active and passive participles has disappeared except in form I and in some Classical borrowings.
• * These dialects tend to use form V and VI active participles as the passive participles of forms II and III.

• In the imperfect, Maghrebi Arabic has replaced first person singular with, and the first person plural, originally marked by alone, is also marked by the suffix of the other plural forms.
• Moroccan Arabic has greatly rearranged the system of verbal derivation, so that the traditional system of forms I through X is not applicable without some stretching. It would be more accurate to describe its verbal system as consisting of two major types, triliteral and quadriliteral, each with a mediopassive variant marked by a prefixal or.
• * The triliteral type encompasses traditional form I verbs.
• * The quadriliteral type encompasses strong : "slap", "break", "speak nasally"; hollow-2 : "wait", "inflate", "eat" ; hollow-3 : "choose", "redden"; weak : "show", "inquire"; hollow-2-weak : "end", "roll", "shoot"; irregular: - "send".
• * There are also a certain number of quinquiliteral or longer verbs, of various sorts, e.g. weak: "pedal", "scheme, plan", "dodge, fake"; remnant CA form X: "use", "deserve"; diminutive: "act bourgeois", "deal in drugs".
• * Those types corresponding to CA forms VIII and X are rare and completely unproductive, while some of the non-CA types are productive. At one point, form IX significantly increased in productivity over CA, and there are perhaps 50–100 of these verbs currently, mostly stative but not necessarily referring to colors or bodily defects. However, this type is no longer very productive.
• * Due to the merging of short and, most of these types show no stem difference between perfect and imperfect, which is probably why the languages has incorporated new types so easily.

• Egyptian Arabic, probably under the influence of Coptic, puts the demonstrative pronoun after the noun and leaves interrogative pronouns in situ rather than fronting them, as in other dialects.

  Phonetics

Emphasis spreading

Consonants

• The pronunciation of standard depends on the region or the country, but is the predominant pronunciation outside the Arab world and the only accepted pronunciation for Quranic recitation, the other common pronunciations are, or.
• The usage of the sounds for and or for are more common in the traditional Najdi dialects.
• Moroccan is sometimes pronounced in some words as in جلس "He sat".

• in most of the Arabian Peninsula, Northern and Eastern Yemen and parts of Oman, Southern Iraq, some parts of the Levant, Upper Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Mauritania, Chad and to lesser extent in some parts of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, but it is also used partially across those countries in some words.
• in most of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, Southern and Western Yemen and parts of Oman, Northern Iraq, parts of the Levant, especially Druze dialects. However, most other dialects of Arabic will use this pronunciation in learned words that are borrowed from Standard Arabic into the respective dialect.
• in most of the Levant and Lower Egypt, as well as some North African towns such as Tlemcen and Fez.
• other variations include in Sudanese and some forms of Yemeni, In rural Palestinian, in some positions in Iraqi and Gulf Arabic, or in some positions in Sudanese and consonantally in the Yemeni dialect of Yafi', in some positions in Najdi, though this pronunciation is fading in favor of.

• in most of the Arabian peninsula, Algeria, Iraq, Upper Egypt, Sudan, parts of the Levant and Yemen.
• in most of the Levant and North Africa.
• in Lower Egypt, parts of Yemen and Oman.
• other variations include in the Persian Gulf and southern Iraq and coastal Hadhramaut. in some Arabian Bedouin dialects, and parts of Sudan, as the 8th-century Persian linguist Sibawayh described it.

• CA is lost.
• * When adjacent to vowels, the following simplifications take place, in order:
• ** V₁ʔV₂ → V̄ when V₁ = V₂
• ** aʔi aʔw → aj aw
• ** iʔV uʔV → ijV uwV
• ** VʔC → V̄C
• ** Elsewhere, is simply lost.
• * In CA and Modern Standard Arabic, is still pronounced.
• * Because this change had already happened in Meccan Arabic at the time the Qur'an was written, it is reflected in the orthography of written Arabic, where a diacritic known as hamzah is inserted either above an ʾalif, wāw or yāʾ, or "on the line" ; or in certain cases, a diacritic ʾalif maddah is inserted over an ʾalif..
• * has reappeared medially in various words due to borrowing from CA.
• CA often becomes in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, some Rural Palestinian dialects and in some Bedouin dialects when adjacent to an original, particularly in the second singular feminine enclitic pronoun, where replaces Classical or ). In a very few Moroccan varieties, it affricates to. Elsewhere, it remains.
• CA is pronounced in a few areas: Mosul, for instance, and the Jewish variety in Algiers. In all of northern Africa, a phonemic distinction has emerged between plain and emphatic, thanks to the merging of short vowels.
• CA is affricated to in Moroccan Arabic; this is still distinguishable from the sequence.
• CA ) is pronounced in Iraqi Arabic and Kuwaiti Arabic with glottal closure:. In some varieties is devoiced to before, for some speakers of Cairene Arabic → "hers". The residue of this rule applies also in the Maltese language, where neither etymological nor are pronounced as such, but give in this context: tagħha "hers".
• The nature of "emphasis" differs somewhat from variety to variety. It is usually described as a concomitant pharyngealization, but in most sedentary varieties is actually velarization, or a combination of the two. Usually there is some associated lip rounding; in addition, the stop consonants and are dental and lightly aspirated when non-emphatic, but alveolar and completely unaspirated when emphatic.
• CA is also in the process of splitting into emphatic and non-emphatic varieties, with the former causing emphasis spreading, just like other emphatic consonants. Originally, non-emphatic occurred before or between and a following consonant, while emphatic occurred mostly near.
• * To a large extent, Western Arabic dialects reflect this, while the situation is rather more complicated in Egyptian Arabic..
• Certain other consonants, depending on the dialect, also cause pharyngealization of adjacent sounds, although the effect is typically weaker than full emphasis spreading and usually has no effect on more distant vowels.
• * The velar fricative and the uvular consonant often cause partial backing of adjacent . For Moroccan Arabic, the effect is sometimes described as half as powerful as an emphatic consonant, as a vowel with uvular consonants on both sides is affected similarly to having an emphatic consonant on one side.
• * The pharyngeal consonants and cause no emphasis spreading and may have little or no effect on adjacent vowels. In Egyptian Arabic, for example, adjacent to either sound is a fully front. In other dialects, is more likely to have an effect than.
• * In some Gulf Arabic dialects, and/or causes backing.
• * In some dialects, words such as الله has backed 's and in some dialects also velarized.

  Vowels

• Classical Arabic short vowels, and undergo various changes.
• * Original final short vowels are mostly deleted.
• * Many Levantine Arabic dialects merge and into a phonemic except when directly followed by a single consonant; this sound may appear allophonically as or in certain phonetic environments.
• * Maghreb dialects merge and into, which is deleted when unstressed. Tunisian maintains this distinction, but deletes these vowels in non-final open syllables.
• * Moroccan Arabic, under the strong influence of Berber, goes even further. Short is converted to labialization of an adjacent velar, or is merged with. This schwa then deletes everywhere except in certain words ending.
• ** The result is that there is no distinction between short and long vowels; borrowings from CA have "long" vowels uniformly substituted for original short and long vowels.
• ** This also results in consonant clusters of great length, which are syllabified according to a sonority hierarchy. For some subdialects, in practice, it is very difficult to tell where, if anywhere, there are syllabic peaks in long consonant clusters in a phrase such as "you must write". Other dialects, in the North, make a clear distinction; they say /xəssək təktəb/ "you want to write", and not */xəssk ətkətb/.
• ** In Moroccan Arabic, short and have merged, obscuring the original distribution. In this dialect, the two varieties have completely split into separate phonemes, with one or the other used consistently across all words derived from a particular root except in a few situations.
• *** In Moroccan Arabic, the allophonic effect of emphatic consonants is more pronounced than elsewhere.
• *** Full is affected as above, but and are also affected, and are to and, respectively.
• *** In some varieties, such as in Marrakesh, the effects are even more extreme, where both high-mid and low-mid allophones exist, in addition to front-rounded allophones of original , all depending on adjacent phonemes.
• *** On the other hand, emphasis spreading in Moroccan Arabic is less pronounced than elsewhere; usually it only spreads to the nearest full vowel on either side, although with some additional complications.
• * and in CA completely become and respectively in some other particular dialects.
• * In Egyptian Arabic and Levantine Arabic, short and are elided in various circumstances in unstressed syllables. In Levantine, however, clusters of three consonants are almost never permitted. If such a cluster would occur, it is broken up through the insertion of between the second and third consonants in Egyptian Arabic, and between the first and second in Levantine Arabic.
• CA long vowels are shortened in some circumstances.
• * Original final long vowels are shortened in all dialects.
• * In Egyptian Arabic and Levantine Arabic, unstressed long vowels are shortened.
• * Egyptian Arabic also cannot tolerate long vowels followed by two consonants, and shortens them.
• In most dialects, particularly sedentary ones, CA and have two strongly divergent allophones, depending on the phonetic context.
• * Adjacent to an emphatic consonant and to , a back variant occurs; elsewhere, a strongly fronted variant ~ is used.
• * The two allophones are in the process of splitting phonemically in some dialects, as occurs in some words even in the absence of any emphatic consonants anywhere in the word.
• * Unlike other Arabic varieties, Hejazi Arabic did not develop allophones of the vowels /a/ and /aː/, and both are pronounced as or.
• CA diphthongs and have become or and or . The diphthongs are maintained in [Maltese language|the Maltese language] and some urban Tunisian dialects, particularly that of Sfax, while and also occur in some other Tunisian dialects, such as Monastir.
• The placement of the stress accent is extremely variable between varieties; nowhere is it phonemic.
• * Most commonly, it falls on the last syllable containing a long vowel, or a short vowel followed by two consonants; but never farther from the end than the third-to-last syllable. This maintains the presumed stress pattern in CA, and is also used in Modern Standard Arabic.
• ** In CA and MSA, stress cannot occur on a final long vowel; however, this does not result in different stress patterns on any words, because CA final long vowels are shortened in all modern dialects, and any current final long vowels are secondary developments from words containing a long vowel followed by a consonant.
• * In Egyptian Arabic, the rule is similar, but stress falls on the second-to-last syllable in words of the form...VCCVCV, as in.
• * In Maghrebi Arabic, stress is final in words of the form CaCaC, after which the first is elided. Hence جَبَل "mountain" becomes.
• * In Moroccan Arabic, phonetic stress is often not recognizable.