# What are the Two Closest Dialects?



## Andrew___

May I ask, of all the 22 dialects in the Arab world, which 2 are the closest to each other?  I know there are more than 22 dialects, but I am talking now about comparing the most prominent dialects from each country.

My guess is that Palestinian Arabic and Jordanian Arabic are the closest, because these 2 are strikingly close to each other, correct?

I'd be interested to hear your views.

Merci awwy,
Andrew


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## Ayazid

Hey,

Well, I don't know if those might be called "major dialects", but the dialects of the Gulf States can't be that different from each other, for example the dialect of Bahrain and the one from Qatar  If I am not mistaken, they are just called indiscriminately "khaleeji" in most cases. The same for Lebanese and Syrian dialects, or the above mentioned Jordanian and Palestinian ones. In larger countries, the dialectical differences are generally greater, but I think that in border regions people speak in very similar way on both sides of the border.


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## elroy

I would say that more than likely, Palestinian and Jordanian are indeed the closest to each other, but I don't have any hard evidence to back that up.  The Gulf dialects all sound more or less the same to me )), and I can't really tell the difference between the different Northern African dialects - but that's probably just because I'm not very familiar with those two dialect groups, and not necessarily because they're that close to each other.


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## SofiaB

North African dialects :Border Morocco and Mauritania.Border Morocco and Algeria. Tunisia ,Malta Libya. Southern Egypt and Sudan. Bahrain and Qatif Saudi especially Shia dialects. Jordanian urban and Palestinian urban. Syrian and Lebanese . Safwa Saudi and Qatar. You get the  idea areas that have a common border and urban vs rural and bedouin. The bedouwi dialects of Saudi as opposed to urban.


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## WadiH

Your question is like asking what two numbers are closest to each other.  You seem to ignore the fact that political borders have no relation to how dialectical features are distributed.


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## clevermizo

I wanted to comment that there are two basic "Jordanian dialects." The urban Amman dialect is basically Palestinian Arabic because its origin is from Palestinians themselves (and there are many, many people of Palestinian descent in Jordan for obvious historical reasons).

Then there is the "traditional" Jordanian dialect, which is of Bedouin origin and is not very similar to Palestinian. 

Amman speech is some weird amalgam of these two but typically closer to the Palestinian because of more contact in urban areas of people from other urban areas of the Levant, making that speech a quasi koiné or mixed dialect.

Also, in general, I agree with Wadi Hanifa's sentiment, although I don't think political boundaries have absolutely no relation. To be sure, there is no such thing really as "Palestinian Arabic" or "Lebanese Arabic" or "Egyptian Arabic" because the dialects exist in continua that overlap in interesting ways. However, I think that political boundaries _can_ influence the distribution, especially in areas that are very strongly nationalistic. For example, in the early 20th century, there was a movement I believe in Egypt to standardize "Egyptian" and use it literarily instead of fus7a Arabic. Because of these sorts of political things and nationalism, I think the concept of a monolithic "national dialect" can arise. However, I don't really think any 2 dialects are closer to one another than any other 2, because for whatever features you can find similar between A and B and not C, you can find a different set of features similar between B and C and not A.


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## WadiH

clevermizo said:


> I wanted to comment that there are two basic "Jordanian dialects." The urban Amman dialect is basically Palestinian Arabic because its origin is from Palestinians themselves (and there are many, many people of Palestinian descent in Jordan for obvious historical reasons).
> 
> Then there is the "traditional" Jordanian dialect, which is of Bedouin origin and is not very similar to Palestinian.
> 
> Amman speech is some weird amalgam of these two but typically closer to the Palestinian because of more contact in urban areas of people from other urban areas of the Levant, making that speech a quasi koiné or mixed dialect.



Your description simplifies things.  Even before the Palestinians were expelled into Jordan, not all Jordanians were beduoins.  There were still many towns near the eastern bank of the River Jordan, including Amman, that were basically part of the same "country" as the ones lying on the opposite side of the valley, just like you find on the banks of any river or valley.  These "east bank" towns spoke dialects that were very similar to those of their cousins on the western side of the river.


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## clevermizo

You're right of course. I was just trying to point out that there isn't such a monolithic "Jordanian" dialect which is so close to Palestinian Arabic. But naturally you know this and your understanding of Arabic dialect distribution is much more expansive than mine.


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## WadiH

clevermizo said:


> I don't think political boundaries have absolutely no relation. To be sure, there is no such thing really as "Palestinian Arabic" or "Lebanese Arabic" or "Egyptian Arabic" because the dialects exist in continua that overlap in interesting ways. However, I think that political boundaries _can_ influence the distribution, especially in areas that are very strongly nationalistic. For example, in the early 20th century, there was a movement I believe in Egypt to standardize "Egyptian" and use it literarily instead of fus7a Arabic. Because of these sorts of political things and nationalism, I think the concept of a monolithic "national dialect" can arise.



Well, I meant to say that initially when the borders were drawn, there was no real relationship between the distribution of dialectical features and the new borders.  Sometimes a border would correspond to a family of dialects (e.g. Egypt), but most often it did not.

Sure once people are forced to live within common borders for 80 years, some "leveling" effects can occur (is that the correct term?) within the country, so that the dialectical situation becomes less complex, but I think that most of the leveling is actually a result of the advances in transportation and mass communications rather than "nationalism" or borders.  For example, the Arabian Peninsula is in effect much "smaller" than it was 100 years ago, so that instead of having a dialect every 10 km's, you have one, say, every 200 km's.


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## elroy

What Clevermizo says is right, of course, but it's not unique to Jordan.  The urban-rural dichotomy exists everywhere.  I wrote my post with the following statement from Post #1 in mind: 





> I know there are more than 22 dialects, but I am talking now about comparing the most prominent dialects from each country.


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## WadiH

How do we know what the most prominent dialect is?  Everyone thinks the way they speak is "the most prominent."


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## elroy

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Everyone thinks the way they speak is "the most prominent."


 I don't think so.

I interpreted the phrase to mean the most unmarked, "neutral" dialect spoken in the respective country, one that does not indicate the speaker's origin within that country.


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## WadiH

There is no such thing.  The most you can do is to affect a watered-down version of some other area's dialect, but it is still that area's dialect, and if I didn't know any better, I would have to conclude that you were from that area.


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## Abu Rashid

Has anyone seen the 'dialect map' that is in this wiki article?? It supposedly shows the distribution of Arabic 'varieties' in different colour codings. According to this map, most of Jordan (geographically) is more closely related in dialect to northern peninsula and south-western Iraqi dialects. Which means that the borders don't really seem to have much effect at all on people's language.

Can anyone with a decent knowledge of dialect distributions comment on the apparent accuracy of this map?


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## WadiH

Well if you look closely at Jordan, the areas hugging the river are depicted as part of the same group as the West Bank and Palestine in general, and that's where most of Jordan's population is located anyway.  The part that is shown as close to northern Arabia and westernmost Iraq is the sparsely-populated desert hinterland.  I think it's fair to say that people living in those desert areas of Jordan, as well as the sparsely inhabited western Iraqi desert and northern Saudi regions speak in a similar manner, since they're mostly bedouin tribes.  However, it would be more accurate to separate the dialects by tribes rather than by region.

The map is a good try, but it's not accurate.  The thing that many people simply insist on ignoring is that the social dimension (e.g. urban/rural/bedouin; Christian/Muslim; etc.) can be every bit as important as the geographic one.  That's why their mapping of the Peninsula and of Iraq, for example, is practically useless in my opinion.


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## elroy

Wadi Hanifa said:


> There is no such thing.  The most you can do is to affect a watered-down version of some other area's dialect, but it is still that area's dialect, and if I didn't know any better, I would have to conclude that you were from that area.


 This is an over-simplification.  Yes, the prominent dialect in a country generally originates in a specific area, but mobility and intermingling across regions often lead to the absorption of that dialect in regions in which it is not the native dialect.

Perhaps this isn't the case everywhere, but in Israel and the Palestinian Territories (and especially in the latter), you _can _speak in a certain way that does not identify your origins (at most your listener will know that you are _not _from a particular region, but they won't be able to pin down your origins).


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## Abu Rashid

wadi hanifa,



> Well if you look closely at Jordan, the areas hugging the river are depicted as part of the same group as the West Bank and Palestine in general, and that's where most of Jordan's population is located anyway.



Hence my point that I mean most of Jordan geographically, as opposed to demographically.

Also it doesn't invalidate the point that borders don't appear to effect dialects too much, because that doesn't rely so much on the population of border regions, obviously they'll be less populated in most cases, since nations were usually formed with their centre on heavily populated areas, rather than their borders on heavily populated areas.



> The map is a good try, but it's not accurate



Would you say it's roughly accurate then? Of course it would be difficult to represent things like different strata of society, and their differing dialects in such a simple map.


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## Mahaodeh

No, not very accurate. As an example, they used Gulf Arabic to include UAE, Kuwait, large parts of Nort Eastern SA and small parts of southern Iraq but not Basara; when in fact, the dialect of Basara and Kuwait are very close and very much distinguishable from the Emarati dialect; if the Riyadh dialect is similar to that in Taash ma Taash (Saudi show), then I'd have to say that it's also distinguishable from both.

I can give a lot of other notes.


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## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> Hence my point that I mean most of Jordan geographically, as opposed to demographically.


Sorry, I missed that.


> Also it doesn't invalidate the point that borders don't appear to effect dialects too much


I never meant to say that it did.


> Would you say it's roughly accurate then? Of course it would be difficult to represent things like different strata of society, and their differing dialects in such a simple map.


It's roughly accurate in some regions and wildly inaccurate in others.  The mapping of the Peninsula and Iraq, for example, bears very little resemblance to reality, even "roughly," as Maha has pointed out, and I would have divided Libya into two groups (western and eastern).  I think a lot of the rural/urban splits in places like Syria and the Hejaz can easily be represented on a geographic map, but this map simply ignores them.  I can't vouch for the mapping of the far west, since I am not familiar with the area.  I also see no justification for excluding the Arabic-speaking communities of southwestern Iran and southern Turkey, except maybe the author was afraid of a "wiki war."


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## Andrew___

elroy said:


> I would say that more than likely, Palestinian and Jordanian are indeed the closest to each other



I think you're right that PA and JA are perhaps the two closest to each other, but probably not as close as QA and KSA Arabic which I think are pretty much identical.


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## WadiH

What are QA and KSA?


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## elroy

Qatari and Saudi, I guess.


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## clevermizo

I'm not sure what "Saudi Arabic" is and how it is identical to a variety of Gulf Arabic, but fair enough.


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## Andrew___

elroy said:


> Qatari and Saudi, I guess.



Yes, I was referring to Qatari (urban) and Saudi Arabic (urban).

Cheers,
Andrew


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## clevermizo

What's urban Saudi Arabic mean?


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## Andrew___

Can we not say urban Saudi Arabic, to contrast to the Saudi bedouin dialect?


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## clevermizo

Nope. There's no such thing because there's more than one urban Saudi dialect.


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## Andrew___

OK in that case I will say Urban Hijazi to clarify.


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## clevermizo

You think Hejazi and Gulf Arabic are identical?


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## Mahaodeh

Andrew___ said:


> OK in that case I will say Urban Hijazi to clarify.


 
I would say that Hijazi is as close to Egyptian as it is to Gulf dialect!

Maybe you mean the dialect in the eastern parts of KSA; Al I7saa' or Hufuuf or some other region.


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## Andrew___

I did not realise that Hijazi is so different from the Gulf dialect, thanks for the information.  I am surprised there is so much variance within such a small geographical distance.


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## WadiH

Honestly, Andrew, I cannot for the life of me imagine what similarities you could possibly have seen between Qatari and Hejazi.  

Let me give you a little anecdote.  A few years ago a Qatari friend of mine told me that he'd just been to the supermarket and heard some guys talking who "looked Khaliji but sounded Sudanese" (شكلهم خليجي، بس حجيهم سوداني!) and that that's when he learned there was such a thing as a Hejazi dialect.


Mahaodeh said:


> I would say that Hijazi is as close to Egyptian as it is to Gulf dialect!



Grammatically, I would place it well within the same group as urban Egyptian, Syrian, Sudanese, and the like.


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## Andrew___

Cheers.  OK would you agree that Qatari Arabic is pretty much identical to the dialect of Al I7saa' or Hufuuf?


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## WadiH

They are very similar, yes, but not identical.  I'm by no means an expert on this so take it with a grain of salt, but I think 7asawis rarely turn the جيم into ياء, whereas this is a prominent feature of Qatari Arabic.  But yes they are part of the same family and I can see how it would be hard for an outsider to distinguish them.


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