Arabic Dialect Phrasebook: 252 Everyday Phrases in 19 Dialects, with MSA

Arabic Dialects > Arabic Dialect Phrasebook

This phrasebook puts the everyday Arabic of 19 dialects side by side: Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Iraqi, Yemeni, Sudanese and Maghrebi. Search 252 phrases copied from our dialect pages, each in Arabic script with a transliteration and the Modern Standard Arabic form beside it.

How to use the phrasebook

Type a word in English and the table keeps only the phrases that contain it, in every dialect at once. "want" brings up the words for "I want" from Cairo to Casablanca, and "how are you" brings up 21 greetings. You can also type a transliteration, with or without its long-vowel marks (kifak finds kīfak), or Arabic, with or without vowel marks.

The dialect menu narrows the table to one dialect, or to a whole group: all the Levantine, Gulf or Maghrebi dialects. Choose Yemeni Arabic, for example, to see the six phrases our Yemeni page gives, or Jordanian Arabic for twelve. The rows are sorted by meaning, so the forms that mean the same thing stand next to each other. A dash in the Modern Standard Arabic column means none of our pages gives a standard form for that phrase, as with the Saudi أبشر (absher, consider it done).

Each of our dialect pages shows the same table for that dialect alone, with one more column: pick another dialect and it lines up that dialect's forms for the same meanings, so you can see what changes between, say, Damascus and Cairo.

How to say "I want" and "what?" in 15 dialects

Fifteen of our dialect pages give "I want", "what?" or both, which makes them a good pair for comparing dialects. The table copies them from the phrasebook. In Modern Standard Arabic they are أريد (ureed) and ماذا (matha).

The Levant uses one word for "I want", بدي, which Damascus and Beirut say baddi and Palestine and Amman say biddi. The Gulf and Najd share أبي (abi), while Hejazi speech in Jeddah says أبغى (abgha). In the Maghreb, Algerian and Tunisian both start the verb with n-, which there means "I" and not "we" as it does in Cairo or Damascus. Our page on Moroccan Darija and its n- verbs explains that split.

Why every phrase is copied from our pages

Machine translation into a dialect is weaker than translation into Modern Standard Arabic, because translation software learns from written text and the dialects are written far less. Our Libyan Arabic page says Libyan is a spoken language, written down mostly in folk poetry and text messages, with no standard spelling. Even this phrasebook spells one word two ways, because two of our pages do: the Lebanese page writes "now" هلق and the Palestinian page هلأ, and both transliterate it halla'.

A Maastricht University research team building a machine translation model for Moroccan Darija grew its training set from 10,000 to 45,000 sentences, and reports a score of about 10 from English into Darija and about 27 from Darija into English, on a scale where, it says, a good model scores above 40.

That is why every phrase in this phrasebook is copied from a page on this site instead of being generated by software, and why the table names the page each phrase comes from. If a phrase is wrong, it is wrong on that page too, and one correction through our contact page fixes both.

Where the 252 phrases come from

The phrasebook holds between 6 and 20 phrases per dialect: as many as each dialect's page gives with a script form, a transliteration and a meaning, up to 20. Six dialects have fewer than eight, because their pages are shorter: Iraqi, Gulf, Yemeni, Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian. A few rows come from our Levantine Arabic page, where it compares Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan in one table.

The transliteration is the one each page prints, so the Syrian rows mark long vowels (shū, mnīḥ) and most others do not (shu, mnih). The Modern Standard forms come from the same row of the same page where it gives one, and otherwise from another dialect page or from our common Arabic phrases in Modern Standard, Levantine and Egyptian.

Which dialect's phrases to learn

Learn the phrases of the dialect of the people you will talk to. Modern Standard Arabic is the written standard, but as our guide to Maghrebi Arabic puts it for North Africa, it is the language of news and paperwork, not of conversation. If you do not know where they are from, our map of Arabic dialects by country shows which dialect each country speaks, and our guide to which Arabic dialect to learn first weighs Egyptian against Levantine and the rest if you are choosing one to study.

Some everyday words have more than one meaning, and a phrasebook row shows only one. يلا (yalla) is in the phrasebook as Syrian for "come on, let's go", and our Syrian page adds that it also means hurry up, fine and goodbye, depending on tone. Our page on what yalla means and how to use it covers it in full, and for terms of affection, see what habibi means, and who you can say it to.

Frequently asked questions

More free tools

All free tools →

• ض ص ث قArabic Keyboard: Type Arabic Online
• مرحباArabic Transliteration: Convert Arabic, Arabizi and English Letters
• وشمArabic Tattoo Checker: Catch Stencil Errors Before the Ink
• پ چ ژPerso-Arabic Alphabet: Which Language Uses Which Letter

Keep learning Arabic

• Up one levelArabic DialectsArabic dialects compared: the five main groups, where each is spoken and by how many, one sentence in six dialects, and a guide page for every dialect.
• In this topicHow to Learn Egyptian Arabic: A 6-Month PathLearn Egyptian Arabic online with a 6-month plan: which course, app and show to use at 30, 90 and 180 days, what each costs, and every Masri resource we rate.
• In this topicGulf Arabic ResourcesLearn Gulf (Khaleeji) Arabic: how it differs from MSA, key words like shlonak and wayed, and the books, courses, and tutors we recommend.
• Also on OpenArabicLearn Arabic GuidesRead our guides to help you learn Arabic. The guides cover everything from learning basic Arabic to more advanced topics for Arabic.