Palestinian Arabic
| Palestinian Arabic | |
|---|---|
| لهجة فلسطينية lahja Filasṭīniyya | |
| Native to | Palestine |
|
Afro-Asiatic
|
|
| No standard, Arabic alphabet and Roman transcriptions both used | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Palestinian Arabic is a name of several dialects of the subgroup of Levantine Arabic spoken by the Palestinians in Palestine, by Arab citizens of Israel and in most Palestinian populations around the world.
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.
The Palestinian Arabic dialects are varieties of Levantine Arabic because they display the following characteristic Levantine features.
The noticeable differences between southern and northern forms of Levantine Arabic, such as North Syrian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic, are stronger in non-urban dialects. The main differences between Palestinian and northern Levantine Arabic are as follows:
There are also typical Palestinian words that are shibboleths in the Levant.
As is very common in Arabic-speaking countries, the dialect spoken by a person depends on both the region he/she comes from, and the social group he/she belongs to.
The Palestinian urban dialects ('madani') resemble closely northern Levantine Arabic dialects, that is, the colloquial variants of western Syria and Lebanon. This fact, that makes the urban dialects of the Levant remarkably homogeneous, is probably due to the trading network among cities in the Ottoman Levant, or to an older Arabic dialect layer closer to the qeltu dialects still spoken in northern Iraq/Syria and Southern Turkey. Nablus takes a special place. The Nablus dialect distributed accents on the various syllables of the word. Almost each syllable has a stressed accent, which gives the dialect a slow and sluggish tone. The ancient dialect of Nablus even articulates every single syllable in the same word separately. Moreover, word endings blatantly slant according to a regulated system. For example, you may say sharqa with an [a:] sound at the end of the word to refer to the eastern part of the city and gharbeh with the [e] sound at the end of the word to refer to the western side of the city. You may also want to describe the colour of your bag and say safra (yellow) with an [a:] sound at the end of the word or sode (black) with an [e] sound at the end of the word. The nun and ha (n and h) are always slanted and end with the [e] sound; and they are the bases for the distinctive Nablusi accent. The two letters appear frequently at the end of words in the form of inescapable objective pronouns. In the ancient dialect of Nablus, the letters tha’, thal, thaa’, and qaf do not exist. The dialect of old Nablus is now to be found among the Samaritans, who have managed to preserve the old dialect in its purest form.
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