Levantine Arabic phonology
This article is about the phonology of Levantine Arabic also known as Shāmi Arabic, and its sub-dialects.
Varieties
As in most Arabic-speaking areas, the spoken language differs significantly between urban, rural and nomad populations.- In the Levant, nomads trace to various tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and their dialect is consequently close to Peninsular Arabic. Note that although claiming a Bedouin ancestry sounds prestigiousin the Levant, the Bedouin influence on this old sedentary area should not be overestimated. These dialects are not covered in detail here, as they are not specific to the area.
- The rural language is the one that changes most, and as in every old sedentary area, the changes are gradual, with more marked forms in extremal or isolated areas.
- The urban language spoken in the major cities is remarkably homogeneous, with a few shibboleths only to distinguish the various cities. Levantine Arabic is commonly understood to be this urban sub-variety. Teaching manuals for foreigners provide a systematic introduction to this sub-variety, as it would sound very strange for a foreigner to speak a marked rural dialect, immediately raising questions on unexpected family links, for instance.
Urban Levantine Arabic
| City | q | ǧ | we | you | they | they | I say | he says | I write | he writes | write! | now | it is not … |
| Aleppo | |||||||||||||
| Damascus | |||||||||||||
| Beirut | |||||||||||||
| Haifa | |||||||||||||
| Jerusalem | |||||||||||||
| Hebron | |||||||||||||
| Gaza | |||||||||||||
| Amman | , | ||||||||||||
| al-Karak | |||||||||||||
| Irbid | , |
Rural subdialects
Rural Levantine Arabic can be divided into two groups of mutually intelligible subdialects. Again, these dialect considerations have to be understood to apply mainly to rural populations, as the urban forms change much less.- Northern Levantine Arabic, spoken in Lebanon, Northern Israel and Syria. It is characterized by:
- South Levantine Arabic, spoken in Israel and the Palestinian territories between Nazareth and Bethlehem, in the Syrian Hauran mountains, and in western Jordan.
To these typical, widespread subdialects, one could add marginal varieties such as:
- Outer South Levantine, spoken in the Gaza–Beersheva area in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as well as in cities east of the Dead Sea in Jordan, which display different Bedouin influences as compared to south Levantine. For instance, there, never changes to. This reflects Hijazi or Sinai Bedouin Arabic pronunciation rather than that of North Arabian Bedouin dialects.
- Bedouin dialects proper, which on top of the above-mentioned features that influence the sedentary dialects, present typical stress patterns or lexical items.
Linguistic description
Phonetics
Consonants
The table below shows the correspondence between Modern Standard Arabic phonemes, and their counterpart realization in Levantine Arabic. The Urban speech is taken as reference, the variations are given relative to it.| MSA phoneme | Common realisation | Variants |
| in some roots, in rural and outer Southern Levantine | ||
| in Northeastern Levantine and rural Palestinian | ||
| in some roots, in rural Southern Levantine | ||
| in some words, in rural Southern Levantine | ||
| in the Druze and rural Lebanese speech, in rural Palestinian, in rular Hebron and Gaza Strip and outer Southern Levantine | ||
| in rural Palestinian | ||
NB. Hamza has a special treatment: at the end of a closed syllable, it vanishes and lengthens the preceding vowel, e.g. > . If followed by, it is realized as, >. These evolutions plead for a Hijazi origin of Levantine Arabic. Word initially, hamza is often realized as in Southern Levantine.
Vowels and diphthongs
The table below shows the correspondence between Modern Standard Arabic phonemes and their counterpart realization in Levantine Arabic.| Phoneme | Southern | Lebanese | Central | Northern |
| or | or | or | ||
| , | ||||
| or | , | , | ||
| after back consonants, after front consonants | after back consonants, after front consonants | after back consonants, after front consonants | after back consonants, after front consonants | |
| , final | , , final | , , final | , , final | |
| , final | , final | , final | , final | |
| , final | , final | , final | , final | |
Levantine Arabic vowels can be represented in the Arabic script in many ways because of etymological and grammatical reasons, e.g. اليَوم.