Ливан араб тілінің диалектісі

Dialect of North Levantine Arabic

Lebanese Arabic (عَرَبِيّ لُبْنَانِيّ ; autonym: ), or simply Lebanese (لُبْنَانِيّ ; autonym: ), 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 (a majority of the Lebanese people are bilingual or trilingual), 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. Lebanese Arabic is a descendant of the Arabic dialects introduced to the Levant and other Arabic dialects that were already spoken in other parts of the Levant in the 7th century AD, which gradually supplanted various indigenous Northwest Semitic languages to become the regional lingua franca. As a result of this prolonged process of language shift, Lebanese Arabic possesses a significant Aramaic substratum, along with later non Semitic adstrate influences from Ottoman Turkish, French, and English. As a variety of Levantine Arabic, Lebanese Arabic is most closely related to Syrian Arabic and shares many innovations with Palestinian and Jordanian Arabic.

Lebanese Arabic shares many features with other modern varieties of Arabic. Lebanese Arabic, like many other spoken Levantine Arabic varieties, has a syllable structure very different from that of Modern Standard Arabic. While Standard Arabic can have only one consonant at the beginning of a syllable, after which a vowel must follow, Lebanese Arabic commonly has two consonants in the onset. Morphology: no mood or grammatical case markings. Number: verbal agreement regarding number and gender is required for all subjects, whether already mentioned or not. Vocabulary: many borrowings from other languages; most prominently Syriac Aramaic, Western Aramaic, Persian, Phoenician, Ottoman Turkish, French, Coptic, as well as, less significantly, from English. Some authors, such as the Lebanese statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, believe that a significant part of the Lebanese grammatical structure is due to Aramaic influences.

The following example demonstrates two differences between Standard Arabic (Literary Arabic) and Spoken Lebanese Arabic: coffee (قهوة), Literary Arabic: ; Lebanese Arabic: The voiceless uvular plosive corresponds to a glottal stop , and the final vowel commonly written with (ة) is raised to As a general rule, the voiceless uvular plosive is replaced with glottal stop , e. g. دقيقة 'minute' becomes This debuccalization of is a feature shared with Syrian Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Maltese. The exception for this general rule is the Druze of Lebanon who, like the Druze of Syria and Israel, have retained the pronunciation of in the centre of direct neighbours who have replaced with (for example 'heart', which is in Literary Arabic, becomes or The use of by Druze is particularly prominent in the mountains and less so in urban areas. Unlike most other varieties of Arabic, a few dialects of Lebanese Arabic have retained the classical diphthongs and (pronounced in Lebanese Arabic as and ), which were monophthongised into and elsewhere, although the majority of Lebanese Arabic dialects realize them as and In urban dialects (i. e. Beiruti) has replaced and sometimes medial , and has replaced final making it indistinguishable with tāʾ marbūtah (ة). Also, has replaced ; replacing some short s. In singing, the , and medial are usually maintained for artistic values. The sound from Modern Standard Arabic is sometimes replaced with in words from MSA like , (second as in the number) when it becomes Other times, it may be replaced with in words like (second as in the time measurement) when it becomes It is assumed that this is to maintain an audible difference between the two words which were originally homophones. In some dialects, the sound is replaced with for both words.

Lebanese literary figure Said Akl led a movement to recognize the "Lebanese language" as a distinct prestigious language and oppose it to Standard Arabic, which he considered a "dead language". Akl's idea was relatively successful among the Lebanese diaspora. Several non linguist commentators, most notably the statistician and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, have said that the Lebanese vernacular is not in fact a variety of Arabic at all, but rather a separate Central Semitic language descended from older languages including Aramaic; those who espouse this viewpoint suggest that a large percentage of its vocabulary consists of Arabic loanwords, and that this compounds with the use of the Arabic alphabet to disguise the language's true nature. However, this classification is at odds with the comparative method of historical linguistics; the lexicon of Lebanese, including basic lexicon, exhibits sound changes and other features that are unique to the Arabic branch of the Semitic language family, making it difficult to categorize it under any other branch, and observations of its morphology also suggest a substantial Arabic makeup. However, this is disputable as Arabic and Aramaic share many cognates, so only words proper to the Arabic language and cognates with Arabic specific sound changes can certainly only be from Arabic. It is plausible that many words used in Lebanese Arabic today may have been influenced by their respective Aramaic and Canaanite cognates. In essence, the linguistic consensus is that Lebanese too is a variety of Arabic.