Mesopotamian Arabic

Mesopotamian Arabic (Arabic: لهجة بلاد ما بين النهرين), also known as Iraqi Arabic or the Iraqi dialect (Arabic: اللهجة العراقية), or just as Iraqi (Arabic: عراقي), are the varieties of Arabic spoken in the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as parts of Syria, southeastern Turkey, Iran, and Kuwait and in Iraqi diaspora communities.

History

Aramaic was the lingua franca in Mesopotamia from the early 1st millennium BCE until the late 1st millennium CE, and as may be expected, Mesopotamian Arabic shows signs of an Aramaic substrate. Gelet and the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic varieties have retained features found in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.

Varieties

Mesopotamian Arabic has two major varieties: Gelet and Qeltu, also called "North Mesopotamian". Their names derive from the form of the word for "I said" in each variety. Gelet Arabic is a Bedouin variety spoken by Muslims (both sedentary and non-sedentary) in central and Lower Mesopotamia and by nomads in the rest of Iraq. Qeltu Arabic is an urban dialect spoken by non-Muslims in this same region, including Baghdad, and by the sedentary population (both Muslims and non-Muslims) in Upper Mesopotamia. Non-Muslims include Christians, Yazidis, and Jews, until most Iraqi Jews were exiled from Iraq in the 1940s–1950s. Geographically, the gelet–qeltu classification roughly corresponds to respectively Upper Mesopotamia and Lower Mesopotamia. The isogloss is between the Tigris and Euphrates, around Fallujah and Samarra.