Peninsular Arabic
variety of the Arabic language spoken around the Arabian Peninsula
Peninsular Arabic (Arabic: عربية شبه الجزيرة) are the varieties of Arabic spoken throughout the Arabian Peninsula. This includes the countries of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Southern Iran, Southern Iraq and Jordan.
The modern dialects spoken in the Arabian Peninsula are closer to Classical Arabic than elsewhere in the Arab world. Some of the local dialects have retained many archaic features lost in other dialects, such as the conservation of nunation for indeterminate nouns. They retain most Classical syntax and vocabulary but still have some differences from Classical Arabic like the other dialects.
Varieties
Ingham and Holes both note the existence of two peninsular dialect groups:
A southwestern dialect group that includes most of the dialects of South Arabia, stretching as far north as Al Bahah. Holes generalizes it to a "sedentary" or "peripheral" group that also includes dialects of historically sedentary populations on the Persian Gulf coast, such as Omani Arabic and Bahrani Arabic. These dialects share certain syntactic features with Modern South Arabian languages.
A central-eastern dialect group originating in the center, that spread with the migration of Arab tribes. This group includes the dialects of most bedouin tribes in the peninsula, spanning an area extending from the Syrian Desert to the Empty Quarter.
“Peninsular Arabic” enters the record as variety of the Arabic language spoken around the Arabian Peninsula. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Peninsular, Arabic and variety can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peninsular Arabic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.