Hijazi Arabic

Hejazi Arabic
حجازي Ḥijāzi
Pronunciation	/ħi'd͡ʒaːzi/
Native to	Hejaz region, Saudi Arabia
Native speakers	6 million (1996)
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Peninsular Hejazi Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	hija1235
regions where Hejazi is the language of the majority   regions considered as part of modern Hejaz region
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Hejazi Arabic or Hijazi Arabic (Arabic: حجازي‎‎ ḥijāzī), also known as West Arabian Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. Strictly speaking, there are two main groups of dialects spoken in the Hejaz region, one by the urban population who consist the majority, and another by the bedouin rural population. However, the term most often applies to the urban variety, spoken in the major cities such as Jeddah, Mecca, Medina, Ta'if, and Yanbu.

Urban Hejazi Arabic belongs to the western Peninsular Arabic branch of the Arabic language, which itself is a Semitic language. It includes features of both urban and bedouin dialects giving its history between the ancient urban cities of Medina and Mecca and the bedouin tribes that lived on the outskirts of these cities. The main phonological characteristic features that differentiate Urban Hejazi from the neighbouring Najdi ِdialect and other bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula is the absence of vowel reduction, the classical pronunciation of the letter ⟨ض⟩, the distinction between it and ⟨ظ⟩, and the pronunciation of the letters ⟨ث⟩, ⟨ذ⟩, and ⟨ظ⟩.