Get in a shared taxi at Amman's north bus station. The driver is Jordanian. The radio is playing Fairuz, who is Lebanese. The couple in the back are arguing in Syrian, and the man next to you is on the phone to his mother in Nablus. Nobody in the car slows down for anybody, and every word of it is Levantine Arabic.
That's the short definition. Levantine Arabic is the spoken Arabic of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, plus the millions who left. Tens of millions of people speak it at home. It's also the dialect most learners with family or friends in the region end up wanting, so here's what it is, where it splits, and how to start.
What Levantine Arabic is
The Levant is the strip of land along the eastern Mediterranean: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. Arabs call the region ish-shaam and the way of talking shaami, which is why you'll see the same dialect sold under the name Shami Arabic. Same thing.
Nobody writes Levantine. Newspapers, school books and the evening news use Modern Standard Arabic, which every Arab learns at school and nobody speaks at home. Levantine is what people say at home. The count of native speakers is in the tens of millions across the four countries, and it climbs once you add the diaspora: Palestinians and Jordanians in the Gulf, Lebanese in São Paulo and Montreal, Syrians in Berlin and Istanbul, all four in Detroit and Chicago.
Inside the family there's plenty of variety. A grandmother in a village above Nablus and a barista in Beirut are both speaking Levantine, and each would place the other within a sentence. The grammar underneath is shared. What moves is the accent and a few dozen everyday words.
North and south
The group splits in two. North: Syrian and Lebanese. South: Jordanian and Palestinian. Palestinian is southern Levantine, and the Palestinian Arabic page covers that variety on its own.
The two halves share almost everything. Same verbs, same b- on the front of the present tense, same word for bread, for money, for tired. Put someone from Homs and someone from Hebron at a table and neither one slows down. What differs is the tune and a set of small words. "We" is in Palestine and Jordan and ni7na in Beirut and Damascus. "They" is humme in the south and hinne up north. The south wraps a negated verb in ma...sh. Damascus mostly leaves the -sh off, and Aleppo barely uses it at all.
Jordanian and Palestinian are the closest pair on the whole map, close enough that a man from Hebron and a man from Irbid are hard to sort by ear. Syrian and Palestinian come next. Palestinian vs Syrian Arabic goes through the vowels and the small words one at a time, and which dialect is closest to Palestinian ranks the whole neighbourhood.
Levantine vs Modern Standard Arabic
This is the gap that catches people. A year of MSA on an app gets you a newspaper headline and no way to answer the driver. The most common words in the two are often different words entirely.
| English | Modern Standard | Levantine (Palestinian) |
|---|---|---|
| what? | ||
| why? | ||
| now | ||
| here | ||
| only | ||
| very | ||
| I want | ||
| coffee |
Every Arab reads the left column and speaks the right one. The MSA words aren't wrong in Amman. They're what a newsreader says, and using them across a counter gets you understood and gently mocked. The full split, pronouns and verb endings included, is in Palestinian Arabic vs MSA, and MSA or dialect first takes on the order question.
What every Levantine variety shares
From Aleppo to Gaza, these habits hold. Learn them once and they work in all four countries.
- The
b-present. An ordinary present-tense verb takes ab-on the front. , I write. Drop it and you're talking about wanting or intending to do something. MSA has no such prefix, which is why one verb tells you whether a course teaches speech. - Wanting with biddi. "I want" isn't a verb. It's a stub, bidd-, with a possessive ending on it: biddi, biddak, biddna. Saying I want has the whole set.
ma...sharound a verb. "I don't know" is , with ma in front and-shon the tail. The south does this constantly, the north more lightly, and everyone understands it.- No "to be" in the present. "He's not here" is . Three words and no "is". There's no word for is explains why that's easier than it sounds.
- No verb for "have". You say "at me": , I have. Having with 3ind covers the endings. "There is" works the same way with fee, and there is, there isn't shows how to flip it.
The small splits
Three things place a Levantine speaker within a sentence.
The q. In the cities, the deep q of the written language becomes a glottal stop, the catch in the middle of "uh-oh". Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus, Damascus, Beirut and much of Amman all do it, so MSA comes out as . Outside the cities it splits by countryside rather than by country. The hill villages around Ramallah and Nablus turn it into a hard k. Bedouin and southern speakers, and the Hawran plain below Damascus, make it a g. The Druze keep the full q on both sides of the line.
Lebanese vowels. Beirut and Damascus pull a long aa forward, toward the vowel in "bed", so laazem (must) drifts toward lezem. Lebanon goes furthest with it. Palestine and Jordan keep the aa broad and open. It's slight, and it's on every long vowel, which is why you hear it as an accent before you can point at a word.
'eesh or shu. Palestinians have two words for "what": shoo, from the table above, and . North of the border it's shu, nearly always. Reach for 'eesh and you've signed your Arabic "from the south". A handful of other words work the same way, and zaaki, not Tayyeb collects them.
Levantine vs Egyptian vs Gulf
A few everyday words show the distances. The Levantine column is Palestinian, with audio. The other two are in italics because we don't record them.
| English | Levantine | Egyptian | Gulf |
|---|---|---|---|
| what? | eh | shnoo / wesh | |
| how? | izzaay | shloon | |
| I want | 3aayiz | abi | |
| now | dilwa'ti | al7een |
Egyptian is the one you'll already half-know from films. It says the letter j as a hard g, points at things with da and di, and shares the ma...sh negation with the southern Levant. Gulf keeps the old q as a g, drops the -sh altogether, and has its own question words. A Levantine speaker follows Egyptian easily after a lifetime of Cairo television and follows Gulf with a little more effort. Moroccan is another matter. A Palestinian dropped into a café in Fes catches maybe a third. Which Arabic dialect should you learn sorts the whole set by who you'll be talking to.
Why learners pick Levantine
Reach, mostly. Lebanese pop and Syrian television dramas have played across the Arab world for decades, and when Turkish series took over Arab screens in the 2000s they were dubbed into Syrian Arabic. So a listener in Cairo or Riyadh follows Levantine without effort. Egyptian still has the widest reach of any dialect. Levantine is second, and the gap is small.
Then there's who you know. The Arabic-speaking neighbours in Detroit, Berlin, Santiago or Sydney are more likely to be Levantine than anything else, and a large share of the people learning Arabic for a partner or an in-law are learning it for someone from Amman, Beirut, Damascus or Ramallah.
And the grammar is friendlier than the standard's, with no case endings and no separate feminine plural to memorise. The sounds are the real work, and they're the same sounds in every dialect.
How to learn Levantine Arabic
Dialect first. Every Arab did it that way and so should you. If a reason to read the newspaper turns up later, add MSA then.
Audio first, too. The two throat sounds, 3 and 7, don't survive text, and a course that records the dialogues and skips the individual words will teach you to mispronounce half your vocabulary for months. 3 and 7 explains the sounds. Read in plain letters while your ear catches up; the simplified romanization is the system this site uses, and the script can come once the words are in your mouth.
Pick one country's variety and stay with it. Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian are all fine choices, and splitting a first year across two of them leaves you with two half-accents. Most courses labelled "Levantine" quietly teach a Syrian-Lebanese blend, which matters if the people you're learning for are in Hebron.
Ten minutes a day. An hour on Sunday doesn't do what ten minutes on seven days does, because Sunday's words are gone by Wednesday unless something brings them back.
As for order: sounds, then greetings, then the shared habits above, then the couple of hundred words that carry a conversation, then numbers and prices, then the past tense. How to speak Arabic, in order lays it out week by week, and every guide on this site is free, with audio on each word.
For a course, the field is small. The best app to learn Levantine Arabic has the comparison in one table, with the news that Duolingo doesn't teach Levantine at all. Mango and Pimsleur both teach a real Levantine that leans Syrian and Lebanese. Tfaddalu, our app, teaches spoken urban Palestinian, the Arabic of Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem, with a recording on every word, a ten-minute lesson a day, and plain-letter spelling with 3 for ع and 7 for ح. It's free to try. If your people are Palestinian, that's the shortlist. If they're in Beirut, Mango's accent is closer and we'd send you there.
Common questions
Is Levantine Arabic the same as Shami? Yes. Shami is what Arabs call it, from ish-shaam, the old name for greater Syria. Levantine is the English label for the same group of dialects, spoken in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.
Which Levantine dialect should I learn? The one spoken by the people you'll talk to. Palestinian, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese speakers follow each other at full speed, so nothing you learn transfers badly. Pick the country first, find material recorded in that country's accent, and stay with it for the first year.
Can Levantine speakers understand Egyptian Arabic? Mostly, because everyone in the region grew up on Egyptian films and songs. It runs one way. An Egyptian with no exposure to Levantine has to work harder in reverse, and neither side follows Moroccan easily.
Do I need Modern Standard Arabic before Levantine? No. Every Arab child learns the dialect first and meets the standard at school. If you want to read newspapers or the Quran, add MSA later. If you want to talk to people, start with the dialect.
How long does it take to learn Levantine Arabic? Ten minutes a day gets you to greetings, ordering and simple questions within a couple of months, and to short conversations inside a year. The two throat sounds and the b- present tense are the early hurdles. The vocabulary after that is steady work.