Levantine Arabic

Levantine Arabic
Eastern Arabic
لهجات شامية
Native to	Levant
Native speakers	(18 million cited 1991–1996)
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Levantine Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: apc – North Levantine ajp – South Levantine

Levantine Arabic (Arabic: اللهجة الشامية, al-lahjat aš-šāmiyyah) and sometimes called Eastern Arabic) is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip. 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 oral use, while most of the written and official documents and media use Modern Standard Arabic.

On the basis of the criterion of mutual intelligibility, Levantine Arabic could be regarded as a self standing language (with different variants or dialects as explained below), as distinct from other members of the Arabic language family such as Egyptian Arabic, Maghrebi Arabic or Peninsular Arabic, in the same way as French, Spanish and Romanian are all descended from Latin but are separate languages within the family of Romance languages.

Generalities

Location

Levantine Arabic is spoken in the fertile strip on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. To the East, in the Desert, one finds North Arabian Bedouin varieties. The transition to Egyptian Arabic in the South via the Sinai desert where Bedouin varieties are spoken, was proposed by de Jong in 1999., while the region of el-Karak announces Hijazi Arabic. In the North, the limit between mesopotamian Gilit dialects starts from the Turkish border near el-Rāʿi, and the lake Jabbul is the eastern limit of Levantine Arabic, which includes further south el-Qaryatayn.

Main features

The most distinctive feature of Levantine Arabic is probably its stress pattern, which remains closest to the classical Arabic among all varieties. It ignores the gahawa syndrome ('qahwa > ga'hawa) typical of the Mesopotamian and Peninsula Arabic, it does not limit stress to penultimate syllable as Egyptian Arabic (['madrasa] > [mad'rasa]) and is foreign to North-African stress shift to last syllable ([baħr] > [bħar], ['marʔa] > [mra]). An important feature is the pronunciation of /q/, which is not voiced except in the southmost part. Another distinctive feature is the use of a prefixed b- in the imperfect to distinguish indicative mood (with b-) from subjunctive mood (without b-) e.g. ['btɪʃɾɑb] 'you drink' vs. ['tɪʃɾɑb] 'that you drink'.

As in most Arabic speaking areas, the spoken language differs significantly between urban, rural and nomad populations.

• In the Levant, nomads trace to various Peninsula tribes, and their dialect is consequently close to Peninsular arabic (Najdi). Note that although claiming a Bedouin ancestry sounds prestigious in the Levant, the Bedouin influence on the 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 more, and as in every old sedentary area, the changes are gradual, with more marked forms in extremal or isolated areas (e.g. general shift of /k/ to [tʃ] in rural Palestinian, or conservation of [aɪ] and [aʊ] diphthongs in the Lebanese mountains).
• The urban language spoken in the major cities is remarkably homogeneous, with a few markers only to distinguish the various cities (see below). It should be noted that Levantine Arabic is commonly understood to be this urban sub-variety. Teaching manuals for foreigners introduce systematically to this sub-variety, as it would sound very strange for a for a foreigner to speak a marked rural dialect, raising immediately questions on unexpected family links for instance.

Origin

The area where Levantine Arabic is spoken used to speak Canaanite languages (Eblaite, Ugaritic, and then Hebrew-Phoenician, characterized by shift of semitic /ā/ to /ō/ and /θ/ to /š/). It had then adopted the more Western Aramaic in the middle of the 1st millennium BC, generalized as official language by the Persian Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the area, which was then taken by the Romans. Just before arabization, the region certainly counted a significant number of Greek speakers as a part of the Byzantine empire.

Since Roman times, Arabic was a neighbor language, spoken in the desert immediately east of this area (Nabataeans in Petra). The Ghassanid kingdom established in the first centuries AD in the Hauran mountains was the first (Christian) Arab authority on the sedentary area. In the first years of the Islamic conquest, the Levant was taken to the Byzantine empire, and the first Caliphate established in Damascus. Arabic entered deeper in the population by then. It should be however considered that the language was adopted gradually (as well as Islam, that the new rulers would have kept as an elite religion in the first place, so as to maximize the amount of tax on non-Muslim "dhimmis"). The persistence of a spoken Aramaic dialect in a few villages in the north of Damascus is the last trace of this slow conversion. It is interesting to note that this Aramaic dialect share feature with rural Palestinian Arabic (e.g. /q/ > /k/).

It may thus be considered that Levantine Arabic results of the adoption of Arabic by speakers with a marked Aramaic substrate. The state of affairs in Aramaic before adoption is widely unknown, but it could have shown dialect variations linked to the language Aramaic replaced, and this might have left traces in the subsequent Arabic dialect. See e.g. the similarity of central Palestinian plural suffix pronouns (-kem, -ken, hem, -hen) with their Hebrew counterpart, or the variant of the same pronouns in the Nusairiyyah mountains (-ko:n, -ke:n, -ho:n, -he:n) compared to identical forms in Aramaic.

It is likely that the Arabic they adopted is a Hijazi (as opposed to Najdi spoken by Bedouins) variety of Arabic (as shows e.g. the treatment of internal hamza as semi vowels).

Urban Levantine Arabic

As mentioned above, the urban varieties are remarkably homogeneous throughout the whole area, compared to the changes the language undergo in rural populations. This homogeneity is probably inherited from the trading network among cities in the Ottoman Empire. It may also represent an older state of affairs. As a matter of facts, there is a current trend to diverge from this unity, the language of the cities taking on some of the features of their neighboring villages (e.g. Jerusalem used to say as Damascus ['nɪħna] (we) and ['hʊnne] (they) at the beginning of the 20th century, and this has moved to the more rural ['ɪħna] and ['hʊmme] nowadays.). The table below shows the main variants - which have shibboleth role, most of the rest of the language remaining the same.

City	/q/	/j/	we (subj.)	you (pl, compl.)	they (subj)	they (compl.)	I say	He says	I write	He writes	Write !	Now	it is not …
Aleppo	ʔ	dʒ	'nəħna	-kʊn	‘hənne	-hʊn	ba’ʔūl	bɪ’ʔūl	‘baktʊb	‘bɪktʊb	ktoːb !	‘hallaʔ	mʊ …
Damascus	ʔ	ʒ	'nəħna	-kʊn	‘hənne	-hʊn	bʔūl	bə’ʔūl	‘bəkteb	‘byəkteb	ktoːb !	‘hallaʔ	mʊ …
Beyrouth	ʔ	ʒ	'nɪħna	-kʊn	‘hɪnne	-ʊn	bʔūl	bɪ’ʔūl	‘bɪktob	‘byɪktob	ktoːb !	‘hallaʔ	mɪʃ …
Haifa	ʔ	ʒ	'ɪħna	-kʊ	‘hɪnne	-hen	baʔūl	bɪ’ʔūl	‘baktɪb	‘bɪktɪb	'ɪktɪb	‘ɪssa	mɪʃ
Jerusalem	ʔ	ʒ	'ɪħna	-kʊm	‘hʊmme	-hʊm	baʔūl	bɪ’ʔūl	‘baktʊb	‘bɪktʊb	'ʊktʊb	ha-l-ʔe:t	mʊʃ …
Hebron	ʔ	dʒ	'ɪħna	-kʊ	‘hʊmme	-hom	ba’ʔūl	bɪ’ʔūl	‘baktob	‘bɪktob	'ʊktob	haʔʔe:tɪ	mʊʃ …
Gaza city	ʔ	ʒ	'ɪħna	-kʊ	‘hʊmma	-hʊm	ba’ʔūl	bɪ’ʔūl	‘baktʊb	‘bɪktʊb	'ʊktʊb	‘hallaʔ	mɪʃ …
Amman	g	dʒ	'ɪħna	-kʊm	‘hʊmme	-hʊm	bagūl	bɪ’gūl	‘baktʊb	‘bɪktʊb	'ʊktʊb	has’sa:ʕ	mʊʃ …
al-Karak	g	dʒ	'ɪħna	-kʊm	‘hʊmmʊ	-hʊm	ba’gūl	bɪ’gūl	‘baktʊb	‘bɪktʊb	'ʊktʊb	has’sa:ʕ	mʊ(ʃ) …

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 form changes much less.

• Northern Levantine Arabic, spoken in Lebanon, Northern Israel and Syria except the Hauran area, south of Damascus. It is characterized by

• a widespread pronunciation of /q/ as [ʔ] (the Druzes however retain the uvular [q]).
• a strong tendency to pronounce /ā/ as [ɛː] ([imala]) in front phonemic context or [oː] ([tafkhim]) in back phonemic context. This is all the stronger as one goes northward. For instance Damascus and Beyrouth only have final /ā/ consistently uttered [e], e.g. /šitā/ is [ʃəte] rain. This feature may be used to distinguish Central from Northern levantine.
• a widespread prounciation of /j/ as [ʒ] especially along the Mediterranean coast. This feature may be used to distinguish north-west (coastal, Nusayriyyah) from north-east (e.g. Aleppo, Idlib) Levantine Arabic where /j/ is pronounced as [dʒ].
• the plural pronouns for persons 2 and 3 end in -n : /-kun/, /-hun/ (or -hen in Galilee).
• imperative has long vowels /'uktub/ > [ktoːb]
• first and third imperfect persons are /bqūl/ (I say) and /bəqūl/ (he says) in Lebanon / Damascus instead of /baqūl/ (I say) and /biqūl/ (he says) everywhere else, which may be used to further distinguish Central from Northern and Southern Levantine Arabic.

• South Levantine Arabic, spoken in Israel & the Palestinian Territories between Nazareth and Bethlehem, in the Syrian Hauran mountains, and in western Jordan.

• Tafkhim is there nonexistent, and imala affects only the feminine ending /-ah/ > [e] after front consonnants (and not even in Gaza where it remains /a/), while /šitā/ is [ʃɪta]
• In central Palestinian (Jaffa, West Bank, Nazareth, Tiberias) rural speech, /q/ changes to [k], k changes to [tʃ], interdentals are conserved, and /ǧ/ is pronounced [dʒ]. In southern Palestinian (Ashdod, Asqelon, Hebron countryside) as well as western Jordan and Syrian Hauran, /q/ changes to [g], k changes to [tʃ] in front vowel context, but remains as [k] in back vowel context. This latter feature reminds of the North Arabian bedouin dialects.

Note that in Israel, apart from Galilee and the Triangle area, rural dialects are almost extinct, and this description gives is the pre-1948 state of affairs. Palestinian refugees in Jordan have brought with them their typical features, although they tend to adopt the emerging Jordanian urban speech.

To these typical, widespread subdialects, one could add marginal varieties such as

• Outer south Levantine, spoken in the Gaza-Beersheva area in Israel & the Palestinian Territories, as well as in cities east of the Dead Sea in Jordan (Karak, Tafilah), which display different bedouin influences as compared to south Levantine. For instance, there, /k/ never changes to [tʃ]. This announces Hijazi or Sinai bedouin Arabic rather than North Arabian bedouin dialects.
• Bedouin dialects proper, which on top of the above mentioned features that influence the sedentary dialects, present typical stress patterns (e.g. gahawa syndrome) or lexical items.

Linguistic description

Phonetics

Consonants

The table below shows the correspondence between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) 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
/b/	[b]
/t/	[t]
/ṯ/	[t]	[s] in some words, [θ] in rural and outer Southern Levantine
/ǧ/	[ʒ]	[dʒ] in Northern Levantine and rural Palestinian
/ḥ/	[ħ]
/d/	[d]
/ḏ/	[d]	[z] in some words, [ð] in rural Southern Levantine
/r/	[ɾ]
/z/	[z]
/s/	[s]
/š/	[ʃ]
/ṣ/	[sˤ]
/ḍ/	[dˤ]
/ṭ/	[tˤ]
/ẓ/	[zˤ]	[dˤ] in some words, [ðˤ] in rural Southern Levantine
/tʃ/	[tʃ]	[tʃ] in some rural Southern Levantine or Palestine
/ʿ/	[ʕ]
/ġ/	[ɣ]
/f/	[f]
/q/	[ʔ]	[q] in the Druze and rural Lebanese speech, [k] in rural Palestinian, [g] in outer southern Levantine
/k/	[k]	[tʃ] in rural Palestinian (except Galilee)
/l/	[l]
/m/	[m]
/n/	[n]
/h/	[h]
/w/	[w]
/y/	[j]

NB. Hamza has a special treatment. At the end of a close syllable, it vanishes, giving more length to the preceding vowel e.g. /ra's/ > [ra:s]. If followed by i, it turns into [j], /nā'im/ > [na:jɪm]. These evolutions plead for a Hijazi origin of Levantine Arabic. Word initially, hamza is often changed to [h] in Southern Levantine.

Vowels and diphthongs

The table below shows the correspondence between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) phonemes, and their counterpart realization in Levantine Arabic.

Phoneme	Southern	Lebanese	Central	Northern
/a/	[ɑ] or [ʌ]	[æ]	[ɑ] or [ʌ]	[ɔ] or [ɛ]
/i/	[e]	[ɪ]	[ə] (stressed) or [ɪ] (unstressed)	[e]
/u/	[o] or [ʊ]	[ɪ] (stressed) or [ʊ] (unstressed)	[ə] (stressed) or [o] (unstressed)	[o]
-aʰ	[ɑ] after back consonants, [e] after front consonants	[ʌ] after back consonants, [e] after front consonants	[ʌ] after back consonants, [e] after front consonants	[ʌ] after back consonants, [e] after front consonants
/ā/	[a:], final [a]	[ɛ:] (front context) or [ɔ:] (back context), final [e:]	[ɑ:] (back context) or [æ:] (front context), final [e]	[o:] (back context) or [e:] (front context), final [e]
/ī/	[i:], final [i]	[i:], final [i]	[i:], final [i]	[i:], final [i]
/ū/	[u:], final [u]	[u:], final [u]	[u:], final [u]	[u:], final [u]
/ay/	[e:]	[eɪ]	[e:]	[e:]
/aw/	[o:]	[oʊ]	[o:]	[o:]

Levantine Arabic vowels can be represented in the Arabic script in many ways because of etymological and grammatical reasons, e.g. /ᵊljo:m/ اليَوم 'today'

Grammar

For Modern Standard and Classical Arabic grammar, see Arabic grammar

Morphology

Personal pronouns

In Levantine Arabic, personal pronouns can have anything between 8-12 forms depending on various locational and social factors: The 2nd and 3rd persons differentiate gender, while the 1st person does not, although many Levantine Arabic variants (especially Urban varieties) have not preserved gender in the plural whatsoever. Most variants of Levantine Arabic have lost the dual number. Traditionally, the pronouns are listed in order 3rd, 2nd, 1st.

Person	Common form	Arabic Script	Variants
1 p. sing. I	'ana	أنا	'ane (Nablus Samaritans)
2 p. sing. masc thou"	'ɪnte	انتَ	ɪnᵊt (rural Palestinian, Lebanese)
2 p. sing. fem.	'ɪnti	انتِ	ɪnᵊt (rural Palestinian, Lebanese)
3 p. sing. masc.	'huwwe	هو	hu:we (Syrian, Lebanese), hu: (rural Palestinian, Hauran), hu (as short, unstressed form)
3 p. sing. fem.	'hiyye	هي	hi:ye (Syrian, Lebanese), hi: (rural Palestinian, Hauran), hi (as short, unstressed form)
1 p. plur.	'nɪħna	نحن	'ɪħna (West Bank, Gaza, Jaffa, Jordan, Syrian Hauran), 'nɪħne (Nablus Samaritans)
2 p. plur. masc.	'ɪntu	انتم
2 p. plur. fem.	'ɪntɪn	انتن	'ɪntu (in most cities)
3 p. plur. masc.	'hʊmme	هم	'hɪnne (Lebanon), 'hənne (Damascus), 'hʊm (Hauran, West Bank)
3 p. plur. fem.	'hɪnne	هن	'hʊmme (Jerusalem, Jaffa, Amman), 'hənne (Damascus), 'hɪn (Hauran, West Bank)

The trend in the most evolutive variants (i.e. urban) is to lose the distinction between masculine and feminine in the plural. The result is an alignment on the masculine for both genders, but the feminine variant remains understood.

Enclitic pronouns

Enclitic forms of personal pronouns (Arabic: الضمائر المتصلة aḍ-ḍamāʾir al-muttaṣilah) are affixed to various parts of speech, with varying meanings:

• To the construct state of nouns, where they have the meaning of possessive demonstratives, e.g. "my, your, his"
• To verbs, where they have the meaning of direct object pronouns, e.g. "me, you, her"
• To prepositions, where they have the meaning of objects of the prepositions, e.g. "to me, to you, to him"
• To conjunctions and particles, e.g. "because I, because you, because she"

Person	Common form	Arabic script	variants
1 p. sing. I	-i / -iyye (-ni after verbs)	(ـي (ـنـي
2 p. sing. masc thou"	-ak / -k	ـَك	-ek (Lebanese)
2 p. sing. fem.	-ɪk / -ki	ـِك
3 p. sing. masc.	-ʰʊ / -ʰ	ـه	-ʰa / -ʰ (Central West Bank)
3 p. sing. fem.	-ʰa / -ha	ـها	-he (Nablus Samaritans)
1 p. plur.	-na / -na	ـنا	-ne (Nablus Samaritans)
2 p. plur. masc.	-kʊm	ـكم	-kʊn (Syrian, Lebanese), -ku (Galilee, Hebron), -kɪm (West Bank)
2 p. plur. fem.	-kɪn	ـكن	-kʊn (Syrian, Lebanese), -ku (Galilee, Hebron), -kʊm (Jerusalem, Jaffa)
3 p. plur. masc.	-ʰʊm / -hʊm	ـهم	-ʰʊn / -hʊn (Lebanese, Syrian), -ʰɪn/-hɪn (Galilee)
3 p. plur. fem.	-ʰɪn/-hɪn	ـهن	-ʰʊm / -hʊm (Jerusalem, Jaffa, Amman), -ʰʊn / -hʊn (Lebanese, Syrian)

See more

For more information, see

• Lebanese Arabic
• Jordanian Arabic
• Palestinian Arabic
• Syrian Arabic

References

• Ethnologue entry for North Levantine Arabic
• Ethnologue entry for South Levantine Arabic

External links

Lebanese Levantine Arabic