Sudanese Arabic Resources

Arabic Learning Resources > Sudanese Arabic Resources

Sudanese Arabic is the Arabic spoken in Sudan, with around 41 million first-language speakers according to Ethnologue. It is closest to Egyptian Arabic, but it keeps older sounds Egypt lost, pronounces qaf as a hard g, and carries hundreds of words from Nubian, Beja and Sudan's other languages. Egyptian material is the practical fallback for learners.

That last sentence is the reason this page exists. Almost every write-up of Sudanese Arabic tells you it is similar to Egyptian and stops there, which is useless advice: you can only rely on Egyptian material if you know where it stops working. Below are the two things nobody publishes. The first is a word-by-word list of where Sudanese and Egyptian split. The second is the vocabulary Sudanese Arabic took from the country's non-Arabic languages, which is what makes an ordinary Khartoum sentence opaque to an Egyptian.

Transliteration. One scheme throughout, the same one used on our table of common Arabic phrases in three dialects: kh is the ch of Scottish loch, gh is a gargled r, ʿ is the throat squeeze of ع, and ʾ is a glottal stop. Emphatic letters carry no dots. Where Sudanese pronounces ق as a hard g, the transliteration writes g.

Who speaks Sudanese Arabic, and where

Ethnologue's 28th edition (2025) counts about 41 million first-language speakers of Sudanese Arabic and a further 11 million second-language speakers, roughly 52 million people in total, under the ISO code apd. Beyond Sudan itself, the dialect is spoken in South Sudan, Egypt, Chad, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the war that began in April 2023 pushed millions more Sudanese into Egypt, Chad and the Gulf. That makes Sudanese Arabic one of the largest spoken varieties of Arabic in the world and, by a wide margin, the worst served by published learning material. See where Sudanese sits among the Arabic dialect families if you are still choosing.

Sudan is not linguistically uniform and never has been. Minority Rights Group puts around 70 percent of the population in the Sudanese Arab category and 30 percent in others, among them the Fur, Beja, Nuba, Zaghawa, Masalit and Fallata, with more than 500 ethnic groups inside the country's borders. Being counted as Arab in Sudan is a matter of Arabic being a mother tongue and of claimed descent from the Arab tribes that migrated south from the fourteenth century onward. It is not a claim about a single ancestry: most Sudanese Arabs also descend from the Nubian, Beja and Nilotic populations that were there first and shifted to Arabic over the centuries that followed. Sudan's non-Arab populations are a separate matter, and many of them do not identify as Arab at all.

The prestige variety, and the one every course teaches, is the Arabic of Khartoum and the Nile valley. Regional speech in Darfur, Kordofan and the east differs from it, sometimes a lot. And the dialect map does not run north to south the way people assume: on its hard-g qaf and its bare negation, Sudanese lines up with Hejazi Arabic across the Red Sea, the Peninsula dialect closest to Sudanese, rather than with Cairo.

Sudanese Arabic vs Egyptian Arabic: the words that do not transfer

Sudanese and Egyptian Arabic share most of their grammar and a large part of their vocabulary, but they diverge on exactly the words a beginner learns first: the question words, the verb for want, the everyday adjectives, and two consonants. A learner working through our Egyptian Arabic courses and resources and aiming at Sudan can keep almost all of the sentence patterns and will have to replace the items below. This is the delta, not a phrasebook.

Two rows in that table are grammar rather than vocabulary. Sudanese negates a verb with ما (ma) in front of it and nothing after it, while Egyptian wraps the verb in ma-...-sh or uses the standalone mish. The wrap-around form is the innovation; the bare preverbal ma is the older pattern, and Sudanese shares it with Iraqi and the Peninsula dialects rather than with its northern neighbour. And زول (zol) is worth learning on its own: it is a Classical Arabic word that survived in Sudan as the ordinary everyday word for a person, and hearing it is how Arabic speakers place a stranger as Sudanese within a sentence or two.

The sounds Sudanese kept and Egyptian dropped

Sudanese Arabic is phonologically conservative in two specific places, and both of them are audible in the first minute of conversation. The letter ج keeps an archaic pronunciation as a voiced palatal stop, a soft j made with the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth, where Egyptian has hardened it into a g and the Levant has turned it into the zh of measure. The letter ق is pronounced as a hard g, the old Bedouin realisation, where Cairo drops it to a glottal stop. So جمل is jamal in Khartoum and gamal in Cairo, while قلب is galb in Khartoum and ʾalb in Cairo. The two dialects have swapped the g between two different letters, which is the single most confusing thing about moving between them.

Do not extend that conservatism further than it goes. Urban Sudanese has lost the interdental sounds: ث is commonly said as s, so ثياب comes out siyab, and ظ merges into ض, so ظل is said dill. That is the same simplification Egyptian made. If you want a dialect that held on to the interdentals, that is San'ani and the other Yemeni dialects, not Sudanese.

Rutana: the words Nubian, Beja and Sudan's other languages left behind

Sudanese Arabic contains a large layer of vocabulary borrowed from the non-Arabic languages of Sudan, concentrated in farming, food, household objects and ritual, which are precisely the domains where the incoming Arabic had no word for what was already there. Nobiin and the other Nubian languages of the northern Nile supplied most of it, with a further set from Beja, spoken along the Red Sea coast. Sudanese Arabic has a collective name for those languages, رطانة (rutana). The word is generally taken as pejorative, and it belongs to the post-independence Arabization policy that made Arabic the sole language of schooling. The words below travelled the other way.

The standing reference for this vocabulary is Aoun al-Sharif Qasim's Qamus al-Lahja al-Ammiyya fi al-Sudan, the dictionary of Sudanese colloquial published in 1972, which tags entries by origin. English-language coverage of the same material is thin, which is why the loanwords keep getting mentioned in passing and never listed. None of these words will be in an Egyptian course, and several of them, عنقريب and ويكة especially, come up on a first visit.

How to learn Sudanese Arabic

There is one real textbook, one real course provider, and after that you need a tutor. The book is Sudanese Colloquial Arabic for Beginners by Andrew and Janet Persson, published by SIL and now in its fourth edition (2017); it teaches Khartoum Arabic from zero through dialogues, drills and grammar notes, with a glossary of every word used, and its authors both did their graduate work on Sudanese and African languages. It is the only book of its kind. Penn Language Center runs credit-bearing Sudanese Arabic courses under the code SARB, which is unusual enough to be worth checking if you are near a university that accepts visiting students.

Online, Speak Sudanese has more than 1,400 vocabulary items and over 300 phrases with audio for 9.99 US dollars a month, which is the largest structured collection of Sudanese Arabic anywhere; prices change, so check before subscribing. Talk In Arabic includes a Sudanese track with video and transcripts. Then find a Sudanese tutor on italki and tell them which region you care about, because a Khartoum teacher and a Darfuri teacher will not model the same speech.

A realistic plan is the Persson book for structure, Speak Sudanese for the ear, and a weekly tutor from the start rather than later, because there is no Sudanese equivalent of the Egyptian film industry to carry your listening for you. Reading Egyptian material alongside it is worth doing, and you will get more out of it once the table above tells you which half to ignore. If Sudanese turns out not to be your dialect, our guide to choosing an Arabic dialect sets the major varieties side by side, and Libyan Arabic, the other large dialect with almost nothing published for learners, is in a near-identical position on the map.

Frequently asked questions

Is Sudanese Arabic the same as Arabic?

It is Arabic, but it is not Modern Standard Arabic. Sudanese Arabic is the spoken variety of Sudan, with its own vocabulary, its own pronunciation of several letters, and a layer of words from Nubian, Beja and other Sudanese languages. Sudanese people read and write Modern Standard Arabic and speak Sudanese Arabic.

How do you say I love you in Sudanese Arabic?

Bahibbak to a man, bahibbik to a woman. It is the same form used in Egyptian and Levantine Arabic, so this is one phrase that does not change at the Sudanese border. Most lists of romantic Sudanese phrases online are really just general Arabic ones. Habibi to a man and habibti to a woman work the same way.

Are Sudanese people considered Arab?

Around 70 percent of Sudan's population is counted as Sudanese Arab, according to Minority Rights Group. The category is defined by Arabic as a mother tongue and by claimed Arab descent, not by a single ancestry: most Sudanese Arabs also descend from Nubian, Beja and Nilotic populations that adopted Arabic over several centuries. Sudan's Fur, Beja, Nuba, Zaghawa and Masalit populations are not counted as Arab and many do not identify that way.

Does Sudan speak Arabic?

Yes. Arabic is an official language of Sudan alongside English, and Sudanese Arabic is the everyday spoken language of most of the country. Sudan also has hundreds of other living languages, including Nobiin and other Nubian languages, Beja, Fur and Zaghawa.

Is Sudanese Arabic close to Egyptian Arabic?

Close, but not as close as most sources suggest. The two share a large amount of grammar and vocabulary and Sudanese speakers understand Egyptian easily because of Egyptian film and television. Going the other way is harder: Sudanese question words, the word for want, everyday adjectives and hundreds of Nubian and Beja loanwords have no Egyptian equivalent.

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