Your grandmother is on the phone from Nablus and she's talking fast. You catch the word for coffee, , and your own name, then three sentences slide past before you can grab anything else. She laughs and tells you, in English, that you'll learn. inshalla.
A lot of people start right there. They've tried an Arabic course, maybe two, and none of it sounded like her. So before you try a third: what Palestinian Arabic is, where it sits among the other Arabics, the sounds that mark it, and an order to learn it in that gets you back on that phone call within a few weeks.
What Palestinian Arabic is
Palestinian Arabic is the Arabic spoken at home in Palestine: the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the Palestinian towns inside Israel, from Nazareth and the Galilee down to Jaffa. Then it goes wherever Palestinians went: Jordan, where a large share of the population is of Palestinian origin, the camps in Lebanon and Syria, Chile, Dearborn, Chicago, Berlin, London, Sydney.
On the dialect map it's the southern end of Levantine Arabic, the family Arabs call shaami, which also takes in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Someone from Nablus and someone from Damascus talk at full speed without either of them slowing down.
Inside Palestine there are three broad varieties:
- Urban. Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Haifa. The
qturns into a glottal stop, the little catch in "uh-oh." This is what most courses teach, this site included. - Rural. The hill villages. Older sounds hang on, and the
qoften comes out as ak. - Bedouin. The south and the Naqab. The
qhardens into ag, and the vocabulary keeps words the cities dropped.
Everyone understands everyone. But when a course says "Palestinian Arabic" it nearly always means the urban Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem variety, and that's the one we spell, record and teach.
Palestinian Arabic vs Modern Standard Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic, il-fuS7a, is the written language: news, books, school, sermons. Every Arab learns it. Nobody's mother uses it in the kitchen. Palestinian is what the kitchen runs on, with its own grammar and its own way of saying no. The long version is in Palestinian Arabic vs MSA.
| English | Palestinian | Modern Standard |
|---|---|---|
| coffee | ||
| Jerusalem | ||
| heart | ||
| what? | / | |
| why? | ||
| I want |
Tap the first three rows. Each MSA word opens with a q from the back of the throat, and each Palestinian word opens with a catch instead. The lower rows are the bigger problem, because the everyday question words and "I want" don't overlap at all. A year of MSA lets you read a headline and still miss biddi when a four-year-old says it.
That's the case for learning the dialect before the standard. Arabs learn it in that order too: the dialect at home for six years, then il-fuS7a at school, out of a book.
The sounds and habits that give it away
Six things. Get them right and you sound like you learned Arabic in a Palestinian house.
The q becomes a glottal stop. You heard it in the table. Villages mostly say k and Bedouin speakers say g. Go with the city version unless your family is from a village.
th softens. The sound in "think" mostly becomes t, sometimes s, so three is where MSA has thalaatha. The voiced dh of "this" becomes d or z.
The b- on the present tense. , I write. Drop the b- and the verb becomes something wanted or planned: , I want to write. MSA has no such prefix, so hearing one tells you you're in spoken Arabic.
biddi for "I want." It isn't a verb. It's bidd with a pronoun ending, so biddi is mine and biddak is yours. The guide to saying I want has all the endings, and biddi haada covers pointing at things in shops.
ma...sh around a verb. , I don't want. , I don't know. , there isn't. For a noun or an adjective, one word does the job: . See there is, there isn't.
The helping vowel. Palestinian won't let two consonants crash together at the end of a word, so morning is with a vowel slipped in. Why it's Subu7 and never Sub7.
Under all six sit the two throat sounds we write as numbers, 3 and 7. , Arabic, opens with one. has the other in the middle. Those two come first, and the whole spelling system is laid out in the romanization guide.
Palestinian next to Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian
Closest is Jordanian. Urban Amman and urban Ramallah sit near enough that the driver in Amman may well be from Nablus. Then Syrian and Lebanese, close cousins with the same grammar, most of the same words and a different tune. The full ranking is in which dialect is closest to Palestinian.
What separates Palestinian from its northern neighbours is small and constant. Palestinians ask 'eesh for "what" where Beirut and Damascus say shu. "Thing" is , up north shi. "We" is 'i7na, up north ni7na. "They" is humme, up north hinne. That -sh on the end of a negated verb mostly stops at the border too; a Lebanese says ma ba3ref with no tail. And Lebanese pulls its long aa forward, so laazem comes out closer to lezem. There's a guide on the words that mark you as Palestinian and another on Palestinian vs Syrian.
Egyptian sits further out on its own branch. Palestinians follow it easily after a lifetime of Egyptian films. The reverse takes some work.
Who speaks it, and why people come to it
Levantine Arabic as a whole has tens of millions of speakers across the four countries and the diaspora, and Palestinians are a large share of that.
Most people who land on this page aren't planning a semester abroad. They have a Palestinian parent or grandparent. They grew up hearing it across the table and answering in English. Now there's a teta who's getting older, or a first trip to the village their father left, or a partner whose family is from Hebron and speaks nothing else at dinner. You understand Arabic but can't speak it is the most common starting point we see. The words are in there. What's missing is the habit of producing them.
Then there are the people going: students, volunteers, journalists, spouses. Either way the target is an ordinary conversation in Ramallah or Nazareth, and textbook Arabic doesn't get you there.
Family words come early for almost everyone: imm (mother), ab (father), sitti (my grandmother). The family words guide has the full set, and abu khaled, imm khaled explains why your uncle is called after his son.
How to learn Palestinian Arabic
Four rules, then an order.
Dialect first. Leave MSA for later. Every hour spent on the standard is an hour of ureedu when the person you want to talk to says biddi.
Audio first. 3 and 7 don't survive text. Learn every word from a Palestinian speaker's recording and say it back out loud, badly, then less badly.
Ten minutes a day. Daily beats a long Sunday session, and a habit that small survives a bad week.
Script last, if at all. Plenty of fluent speakers never read Arabic. Learn it when you want to read.
The order that works:
- Greetings. mar7aba, keef 7aalak, il-7amdilla, shukran. Greetings and small talk has the whole back-and-forth, and thank you covers what to say in reply.
- Family. Who everyone is and how to say "my."
- Wants. biddi plus a noun gets you through a shop, a café and most of a dinner table. Add tfaDDal, which you'll hear every time someone hands you something.
- Questions. ween (where), shoo (what), leesh (why), and qaddeesh for how much.
- Sentences with no verb. There's no word for "is", which makes your first fifty sentences shorter than you'd expect.
- Numbers, one to ten, and the past tense.
That's the order in how to speak Arabic step by step, and how to learn Arabic quickly explains why it beats starting with the alphabet. MSA fits in afterwards, as a reading project, and by then half its words will already be in your ear.
What's on this site
Sixty-odd free guides, sorted by topic: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, travel, culture. The dictionary and the how-to-say pages give you the Palestinian word with audio, so you can check what your aunt said.
The app is Tfaddalu, ours. Spoken urban Palestinian, a recording on every word and sentence, ten-minute sessions, the same 3 and 7 spelling you've been reading here, and free to try. The best app to learn Palestinian Arabic sets it against the alternatives, including where a tutor beats it.
Common questions
Is Palestinian Arabic a dialect or a language? A dialect of Arabic, the way Egyptian and Moroccan are. Palestinians write in Modern Standard Arabic and speak Palestinian, and the two are far enough apart that a learner has to pick one. Speaking Palestinian gets you understood across Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Is Palestinian Arabic the same as Levantine Arabic? Palestinian is one Levantine dialect, the southern one. Levantine, or shaami, covers Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, and speakers from all four understand each other at full speed. A course sold as Levantine is usually Syrian or Lebanese in flavour, so check before you commit.
Can I learn Palestinian Arabic without learning Modern Standard Arabic first? Yes, and that's the order we'd recommend. Every Palestinian learned the dialect first, at home, and met the standard later at school. Start with the spoken language, and pick up MSA afterwards if you want to read the news or formal texts.
How long does it take to learn Palestinian Arabic? At ten minutes a day, most people manage greetings, family talk and simple wants within a few weeks, and a slow, ordinary conversation within a few months. Fluency takes years, as in any language. Daily audio practice matters more than total hours.
Is Palestinian Arabic hard for English speakers? The two throat sounds, 3 and 7, take practice. The grammar is different, and in places simpler: there's no verb to be in the present, so early sentences are short. The main difficulty is finding material that teaches the spoken dialect at all.