Syrian Arabic
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| Syrian Arabic | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Syria |
| Native speakers | – |
| Language family |
Afro-Asiatic
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| Writing system | Arabic alphabet |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | ara |
| ISO 639-3 | ajp |
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Syrian Arabic (Arabic: اللهجة السورية) is a variety of Arabic spoken in Syria.
History
Syrian Arabic proper is a form of Levantine Arabic, and may be divided into South Syrian Arabic, spoken in the cities of Damascus, Homs and Hama, and North Syrian Arabic, spoken in the region of Aleppo. Allied dialects are spoken in the coastal mountains. Lebanese Arabic is in some ways part of the South Syrian family, but is more properly viewed as a transitional dialect between it and Palestinian Arabic. Due to Syria's long history of multiculturalism and foreign imperialism, Syrian Arabic exhibits a vocabulary strata that includes word borrowings from Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Syriac, Persian, and French.
Other forms of Arabic natively spoken in Syria, but not forming part of the "Syrian Arabic" linguistic group, include:
- a southern dialect group, resembling Jordanian Arabic;
- the dialect spoken in the Jabal al-Druze (Jabal Al-Arab) mountains;
- the eastern dialect group (Al-Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor), properly speaking a form of North Mesopotamian Arabic;
- Bedawi Arabic, spoken by the Badu (nomads).
In each of the above areas, people use different patterns of speech and different vocabularies (synonyms). Representatives of all groups may be found and heard in the capital Damascus and in Syrian songs and movies.
The diagnostic features of Syrian Arabic (also found in Lebanese Arabic and urban Palestinian Arabic) are:
- the pronunciation of final -ah as "é";
- the pronunciation of qaf as a glottal stop (/ʔ/) in a fashion similar to Egyptian Arabic and unique to Levantine Arabic and Egyptian Arabic.
Within Syria itself, non-indigenous dialects of Arabic, most notably Iraqi Arabic and Palestinian Arabic, are frequently used within their respective refugee diasporas, especially in Damascus.
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