Levantine Arabic

Levantine Arabic (Arabic: شامي (Shami) and sometimes called Eastern Arabic) is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip.^[1] It is considered one of the five major varieties of Arabic ^[2] 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 may be considered as a self standing language (with different variant or dialects as explained below), and opposed to other Arabic languages such as Cairene Arabic, Maghreb Arabic or Peninisular arabic, in the same kind of relation as French, Spanish or Romanian among latine 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.^[3] In the North, between Aleppo and Euphrates valley, there may be a transition zone towards North Mesopotamian qeltu varieties (to be confirmed, since the Raqqah variety in the Syrian Euphrates valley still seems to be quite close to South Iraqi and Bedouin varieties.).

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]). 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.
• 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 (e.g. the way to translate "now", or the 3rd person imperfect conjugation). This homogeneity was probably due to the trading network among cities in the Ottoman Empire. 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.) ^[4]

It should be noted that Levantine Arabic is commonly understood to be the 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.^[5]

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 eastern 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 taxes 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).

Sub dialects

It can be divided into three "mutually intelligible" sub-dialects^[6]

• Northern Levantine Arabic, spoken in Syrian in the region of Aleppo, in An-Nusayriyah Mountains and the region of Tripoli, Lebanon in northern Lebanon. It is characterized by

• a strong tendency to pronounce /ā/ as [ɛː] ([imala]) in front phonemic context or [oː] ([tafkhim]) in back phonemic context.
• first and third imperfect persons /baqūl/ (I say) and /biqūl/ (he says).
• /q/ remains [q] or changes to [ʔ], and /ğ/ is pronounced [dʒ]

• Central Levantine Arabic, spoken in central southern Lebanon, north of Galilee, and between Damascus and Hama in Syria, with

• a weaker tendency to imala and tafkhim - yet final /ā/ is consistently uttered [e], e.g. /šitā/ is [ʃəte] rain.
• first and third imperfect persons /bqūl/ (I say) and /bəqūl/ (he says).
• imperative has long vowels /'uktub/ > [ktoːb]
• /q/ changes to [ʔ], and /ğ/ is pronounced [ʒ] or [dʒ]

• South Levantine Arabic, spoken in Palestine/Israel 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, while /šitā/ is [ʃɪta]
• first and third imperfect persons /baqūl/ (I say) and /biqūl/ (he says).
• In rural speech, /q/ changes to [k], k changes to [tʃ], interdentals are conserved, and /ğ/ is pronounced [dʒ], while urban speech is as Central Levantine Arabic.

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

• Outer south Levantine, spoken in the Beersheva-Hebron area in Palestine-Israel, as well as in cities east of the Dead Sea in Jordan (Karak, Tafilah), which differ from south Levantine Arabic by bedouin features such as the realisation of /q/ as [ɡ].
• Bedouin dialects, which are closely related to the Northern dialects of the Peninsular arabic language spoken by Bedouins mostly in eastern Egypt, and also in Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Syria. Dialects include Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic, South Levantine Bedawi Arabic, and North Levantine Bedawi Arabic.

Linguistic description

Phonetics

Consonants

The table below shows the correspondance 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.

NB. Hamza has a special treatment. At the end of a close syllable, it vanishes, giving more length to the preceeding 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 correspondance between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) phonemes, and their counterpart realization in Levantine Arabic.

Morphology

Independent pronouns

The following pronouns are used as subject, for progressive constructions or copulas.

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.

Suffix pronouns

The following pronouns are used as object or possessive pronouns.

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

Links