Arabic dialects by country

A text map: which Arabic is spoken in each country, and which dialect group it belongs to.

Maps of the Arabic dialects usually colour the region in five or six broad bands. That is a fair picture of the linguistic groupings, but it does not answer the question people actually ask, which is "what Arabic do they speak in Yemen?" or "is Iraqi Arabic the same as Gulf Arabic?" This page answers it country by country. For how the groupings relate to each other and to Modern Standard Arabic, see the dialect map.

Two caveats apply everywhere. First, every Arab country uses Modern Standard Arabic for writing, news, and formal speech, so the dialect named below is the spoken variety. Second, national borders are not dialect borders: most countries contain several varieties, and the one named first is the capital-city or prestige form that dominates media and that a visitor is most likely to hear.

North Africa (Maghreb)

Nile Valley

The Levant (Sham)

Mesopotamia

The Arabian Peninsula

Reading the groupings

Put together, the countries above fall into six clusters — Maghrebi, Egyptian, Sudanese, Levantine, Mesopotamian, and Peninsular — and the pattern of mutual intelligibility follows geography in a rough east–west line. A speaker from Baghdad, Kuwait, and Damascus will follow each other with modest effort; a speaker from Casablanca and Baghdad will struggle in both directions and may fall back on MSA or Egyptian. The khaleeji (Gulf) and shaami (Levantine) dialects are frequently contrasted in the Arab world itself: Gulf speech keeps a hard g for ق and more Bedouin vocabulary, while Levantine has the glottal-stop ق of the cities and a softer, faster rhythm. Neither is "more correct"; both are equally far from the written standard.

If you are choosing a variety to study, the country list matters less than the group: learn one member of a group and the rest of that group opens up quickly. Which dialect should you learn? walks through the trade-offs.