Arabic Dialect Map: 21 Countries Colored by Dialect Group

Arabic Dialects > Arabic Dialect Map

Arabic dialects fall into five main groups, and each has its own color on this map of Arabic dialects: Maghrebi across North Africa, Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan, Levantine in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, Mesopotamian in Iraq, and Peninsular across Arabia. Chadian Arabic has a sixth color. Tap a country to see its dialect and three everyday words.

The groups follow Wikipedia's Varieties of Arabic article, the same scheme as our overview of the Arabic dialect groups. Every Arabic word on the map comes from one of our dialect pages, and the table below says which.

How to read the map

Each color is one dialect group, and a country takes the color of the dialect most of its people speak at home. A country in grey is one where Arabic is not the main spoken language. Bahrain is too small to draw at this scale, so it appears as a green dot between Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Tap a country, or pick it from the list next to the map, and a card opens with four things:

• the dialect group and the dialect itself, such as Peninsular and Kuwaiti Arabic;
• the number of speakers, linked to its Ethnologue entry;
• how to say "how are you?", "what?" and "I want" there, in Arabic script and transliteration;
• a link to our full guide to that dialect.

Speaker figures are total speakers, first and second language, as Wikipedia reports them from Ethnologue, the same figures as our dialect overview. Most cards give the figure for the whole dialect in every country where it is spoken. The four Levantine countries are counted one by one, using the Ethnologue 2025 figures on our Levantine Arabic page with 38 recordings.

Every country at a glance

The table lists all 21 countries and territories on the map, with the same three words from each dialect page. A dash means no dialect page on the site gives the word yet. Transliteration is in plain letters, as on most of our dialect pages, and a note in brackets says who the form is said to or by, or where it is used.

Three cells come from a neighboring page, because the country's own page does not give the word. The Palestinian "how are you?" and the Jordanian "I want" are from the four-country table on our Levantine Arabic page, and the Emirati "what?" is from the Gulf comparison table in our Bahraini Arabic guide.

What the three words show

The word for "what" alone sorts most of the map. The Levant and the Emirates say شو shu, Kuwait, Bahrain and Sudan say شنو shinu, Egypt says إيه eh, and Algeria and the Najd both say wesh (واش and وش), two dialects at opposite ends of the map. Muscat's مو mu appears nowhere else in the table.

"I want" splits along group lines more cleanly. The Levant says بدي biddi or baddi, the Gulf and Najd say أبي abi, Egypt says عايز ʿayiz, Morocco says بغيت bghit, and Tunisia and Algeria use نحب nheb, which our Algerian page glosses as both "I like" and "I want". Sanaa's أشتي ashti is the word that marks a speaker as Yemeni.

"How are you?" cuts across the groups. شلونك shlonak, literally "what is your color", runs from Iraq down the Gulf into Najd, while the Emirates say شحالك shahalak. Palestine, Oman, Yemen and the Hejaz keep a form close to Modern Standard Arabic, كيف حالك (kif halak, kef halak, kayf halak), and Egypt has its own إزيك izzayyak.

Where the borders mislead

A country's color shows the dialect most of its people speak. Other dialects live inside the same borders, and several dialects cross them:

• Levantine has about 4.3 million speakers in Turkey and 2.1 million in Israel, on the Ethnologue figures quoted on our Levantine Arabic page.
• Mesopotamian crosses into Syria and Turkey: North Mesopotamian Arabic, the qeltu type our Iraqi Arabic guide places around Mosul, is spoken in all three countries, according to Wikipedia's North Mesopotamian Arabic article.
• Saudi Arabia has more than one dialect: Najdi in the center, Hejazi on the Red Sea, Gulf Arabic in the Eastern Province and southern varieties along the Yemeni border, as our Saudi Arabic guide sets out. Najdi also reaches tribal areas across the borders in Jordan, Iraq and Syria.
• Hassaniya, the Arabic of Mauritania and Western Sahara, is also spoken in Mali, Niger, Senegal, Burkina Faso and parts of Morocco and Algeria (Wikipedia, Hassaniya Arabic).
• Chadian Arabic reaches Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger around Lake Chad, and Darfur in western Sudan (Wikipedia, Chadian Arabic).

The grey countries on the right edge, Iran and Pakistan, are a different case. Persian and Urdu are written in Arabic letters, but they are not Arabic: they belong to a different language family. Our page on the Perso-Arabic alphabet and the letters it adds explains how one script serves those languages.

From the map to a dialect

Most cards link to our guide for that dialect, with the courses, books and tutors we recommend for it. Egyptian and Levantine are the two dialects understood almost everywhere, and our guide to which Arabic dialect to learn scores them against the rest on speakers, media and resources.

Greetings for the holidays also change from country to country. Our pages on Christmas greetings in the Levant and Egypt and New Year wishes in Arabic, dialect by dialect use the same groups as this map.

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