page_title: Palestinian Arabic
section_title: Differences compared to other Levantine Arabic dialects
hierarchical_section_title: Palestinian Arabic / Differences compared to other Levantine Arabic dialects
caption_attribution_description: English: Manual of Palestinean Arabic, for self-instruction 1909
context_page_description: Palestinian Arabic is a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by most Palestinians in the Palestine, Israel and in the Palestinian diaspora populations. Together with Jordanian Arabic, it has the ISO 639-3 language code "ajp", known as South Levantine Arabic.
  Further dialects can be distinguished within Palestine, such as spoken in the northern West Bank, that spoken by Palestinians in the Hebron area, which is similar to Arabic spoken by descendants of Palestinian refugees living in Jordan and south-western Syria.
context_section_description: 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.
  A conservative stress pattern, closer to Classical Arabic than anywhere else in the Arab world.
  The indicative imperfect with a b- prefix
  A very frequent Imāla of the feminine ending in front consonant context (names in -eh).
  A [ʔ] realisation of /q/ in the cities, and a [q] realisation of /q/ by the Druzes, and more variants (including [k]) in the countryside.
  A shared lexicon
  The noticeable differences between southern and northern forms of Levantine Arabic, such as Syrian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic, are stronger in non-urban dialects. The main differences between Palestinian and northern Levantine Arabic are as follows:
  Phonetically, Palestinian dialects differ from Lebanese regarding the classical diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/, which have simplified to [eː] and [o:] in Palestinian dialects as in Western Syrian, while in Lebanese they have retained a diphthongal pronunciation: [eɪ] and [oʊ].
  Palestinian dialects differ from Western Syrian as far as short stressed /i/ and /u/ are concerned: in Palestinian they keep a more or less open [ɪ] and [ʊ] pronunciation, and are not neutralised to [ə] as in Syrian.
  The Lebanese and Syrian dialects are more prone to imāla of /a:/ than the Palestinian dialects are. For instance شتا 'winter' is ['ʃɪta] in Palestinian but ['ʃəte] in Lebanese and Western Syrian. Some Palestinian dialects ignore imala totally (e.g. Gaza).
  In morphology, the plural personal pronouns are إحنا['ɪħna] 'we', همه['hʊmme] 'they', كم-[-kʊm] 'you', هم- [-hʊm] 'them' in Palestinian, while they are in Syria/Lebanon نحنا['nɪħna] 'we', هنه['hʊnne] 'they', كن-[-kʊn] 'you', هن- [-hʊn] 'them'. The variants كو [-kʊ] 'you', ـهن [-hen] 'them', and هنه [hinne] 'they' are used in Northern Palestinian.
  The conjugation of the imperfect 1st and 3rd person masculine has different prefix vowels. Palestinians say بَكتب['baktʊb] 'I write' بَشوف[baʃuːf] 'I see' where Lebanese and Syrians say بِكتب['bəktʊb] and بْشوف[bʃuːf]. In the 3rd person masculine, Palestinians say بِكتب['bɪktʊb] 'He writes'  where Lebanese and Western Syrians say بيَكتب['bjəktʊb].
  Hamza-initial verbs commonly have an [o:] prefix sound in the imperfect in Palestinian. For example, Classical Arabic has اكل /akala/ 'to eat' in the perfect tense, and آكل /aːkulu/ with [a:] sound in the first person singular imperfect. The common equivalent in Palestinian Arabic is  اكل /akal/ in the perfect, with imperfect 1st person singular بوكل /boːkel/ (with the indicative b- prefix.) Thus, in the Galilee and Northern West Bank, the colloquial for the verbal expression, "I am eating" or "I eat" is commonly ['bo:kel] / ['bo:tʃel], rather than ['ba:kʊl] used in the Western Syrian dialect. Note however that ['ba:kel] or even ['ba:kʊl] are used in the South of Palestine.
  The conjugation of the imperative is different too. 'Write!' is اكتب ['ʊktʊb] in Palestinian, but كتوب [ktoːb], with different stress and vowel and length, in Lebanese and Western Syrian.
  For the negation of verbs and prepositional pseudo-verbs, Palestinian, like Egyptian, typically suffixes ش [ʃ] on top of using the preverb negation /ma/, e.g. 'I don't write' is مابكتبش [ma bak'tʊbʃ] in Palestinian, but مابكتب [ma 'bəktʊb] in Northern Levantine (although some areas in southern Lebanon utilise the ش [ʃ] suffix). However, unlike Egyptian, Palestinian allows for ش [ʃ] without the preverb negation /ma/ in the present tense, e.g. بكتبش [bak'tubɪʃ].
  In vocabulary, Palestinian is closer to Lebanese than to Western Syrian, e.g. 'is not' is مش [məʃ] in both Lebanese and Palestinian (although in a few villages مهوش [mahuʃ] and مهيش [mahiʃ], which are found in Maltese and North African dialects, are used)
caption: Manual of Palestinean Arabic, for self-instruction (1909)
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