| Languages of Palestine | |
|---|---|
 Warning sign in English, Hebrew and Arabic near Qasr al-Yahud | |
| Official | Arabic |
| Recognised | Armenian, Domari language |
| Vernacular | Palestinian Arabic |
| Foreign | English, French |
| Signed | Palestinian Sign Language |
| Keyboard layout | |
The primary language of Palestine is Arabic.
Palestinian Arabic is the main language spoken by Palestinians and represents a unique dialect. A variety of Levantine Arabic, it is spoken by Arab citizens of Israel and by Palestinian populations in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. [1] However, Palestinian refugees in other parts of the world may speak a different dialect from Palestinian Arabic. In the West Bank, there are many Israeli settlements in which, since the early 20th century, Hebrew has become more common. Russian and Amharic have also started to appear as a result of Aliyah from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, as have other European languages brought by Jewish settlers. [2]
In ancient and medieval times, many other languages had also been spoken in Palestine for ceremonial purposes or otherwise, including Latin and other Italic languages, French, Germanic languages, Classical Arabic and Greek. However, they gradually faded away along with geopolitical shifts and the end of feudalism. [3]
Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).
The Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of West Asia and core territory of the political term Middle East. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to Cyprus and a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea in western Asia: i.e. the historical region of Syria, which includes present-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and most of Turkey southwest of the middle Euphrates. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece in Southern Europe to Cyrenaica, Eastern Libya in Northern Africa.
Palestinians or Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinian Arabs, are an Arab ethnonational group native to Palestine.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
The Palestinian territories, also known as the Occupied Palestinian Territory, consist of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—two regions of the former British Mandate for Palestine that have been occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967.
Adyghe is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken by the western subgroups of Circassians. It is spoken mainly in Russia, as well as in Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Israel, where Circassians settled after the Circassian genocide by the Russian Empire. It is closely related to the Kabardian language, though some reject the distinction between the two languages in favor of both being dialects of a unitary Circassian language.
Levantine Arabic, also called Shami, is an Arabic variety spoken in the Levant, namely in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and southern Turkey. With over 54 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic comprehensible all over the Arab world.
Mizrahi Hebrew, or Eastern Hebrew, refers to any of the pronunciation systems for Biblical Hebrew used liturgically by Mizrahi Jews: Jews from Arab countries or east of them and with a background of Arabic, Persian or other languages of Asia. As such, Mizrahi Hebrew is actually a blanket term for many dialects.
Lebanese Arabic, or simply Lebanese, is a variety of North Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and primarily spoken in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages and is in some ways unique from other varieties of Arabic. Due to multilingualism and pervasive diglossia among Lebanese people, it is not uncommon for Lebanese people to code-switch between or mix Lebanese Arabic, French, and English in their daily speech. It is also spoken among the Lebanese diaspora.
The Arabic chat alphabet, Arabizi, Arabeezi, Arabish, Franco-Arabic or simply Franco refer to the romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals. These informal chat alphabets were originally used primarily by youth in the Arab world in very informal settings—especially for communicating over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones—though use is not necessarily restricted by age anymore and these chat alphabets have been used in other media such as advertising.
Domari is an endangered Indo-Aryan language, spoken by Dom people scattered across the Middle East and North Africa. The language is reported to be spoken as far north as Azerbaijan and as far south as central Sudan, in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon. Based on the systematicity of sound changes, it is known with a fair degree of certainty that the names Domari and Romani derive from the Indo-Aryan word ḍom. Although they are both Central Indo-Aryan languages, Domari and Romani do not derive from the same immediate ancestor. The Arabs referred to them as Nawar as they were a nomadic people that originally immigrated to the Middle East from the Indian subcontinent.
Demographic features of the population of the area commonly described as the Palestinian territories includes information on ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of that population.
The culture of Palestinians is influenced by the many diverse cultures and religions which have existed in the historical region of Palestine and the state of Palestine. The cultural and linguistic heritage of Palestinian Arabs along with Lebanese, Syrians, and Jordanians is integral part of Levantine Arab culturePalestinians also have their own dialect of Arabic called the Palestinian dialect.
Western Aramaic is a group of Aramaic dialects once spoken widely throughout the ancient Levant, predominantly in the south, and Sinai, including ancient Damascus, Nabatea, Judea, across the Palestine Region, Transjordan, Samaria as well as Lebanon in the north. The group was divided into several regional variants, spoken mainly by the Nabataeans, Mizrahi Jews, Melkites of Jewish descent, Samaritans and Maronites. All of the Western Aramaic dialects are considered extinct today, except for the modern variety Western Neo-Aramaic, which is still spoken by the Arameans (Syriacs) in the towns of Maaloula and Jubb'adin in Syria.
Varieties of Arabic are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related to geographical distance and some that are mutually unintelligible. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects as well as local native languages and dialects. Some organizations, such as SIL International, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be separate languages, while others, such as the Library of Congress, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic.
Jordanian Arabic is a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Arabic spoken by the population of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Palestinian Arabic is a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by Palestinians in Palestine, including the State of Palestine, Israel and in the Palestinian diaspora.
The Arabic language in Israel is spoken natively by over 20 percent of the Israeli population, predominantly by Israeli Arabs, but also by Jews who arrived in Israel from Arab countries. Some refer to the modern Hebrew-influenced Levantine Arabic vernacular as the "Israeli Arabic dialect" or colloquially as Aravrit, a portmanteau of the Hebrew words Ivrit and Aravit.
This article is about the phonology of Levantine Arabic also known as Shāmi Arabic, and its sub-dialects.
Levantine Arabic vocabulary is the vocabulary of Levantine Arabic, the variety of Arabic spoken in the Levant.
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