Arabic Dialectology

Geographically, Arabic is one of the most widespread languages of the world, and Arabic dialects are spoken in an unbroken expanse from western Iran to Mauritania and Morocco and from Oman to northeastern Nigeria, albeit with vast uninhabited or scarcely inhabited areas and deserts in between. It is not easy to give the exact number of speakers, estimates from 1999 (i.e., from eighteen years ago) count 206 million L1 speakers, a figure which today seems too low rather than too high.1 This geographical range is marked by extreme dialectal differences in all fields of phonology, grammar, and lexicon, at times to the extent that different varieties are mutually unintelligible.