Levantine Arabic

Levantine Arabic (Arabic: اللهجة الشامية‎, al-lahja š-šāmiyya) and sometimes called Eastern Arabic) is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip. It is considered one of the five major varieties of Arabic In the frame of the general diglossia status of the Arab world, Levantine Arabic is used for daily oral use, while most of the written and official documents and media use Modern Standard Arabic.

On the basis of the criterion of mutual intelligibility, Levantine Arabic could be regarded as a self standing language (with different variants or dialects as explained below), as distinct from other members of the Arabic language family such as Egyptian Arabic, Maghrebi Arabic or Peninsular Arabic, in the same way as French, Spanish and Romanian are all descended from Latin but are separate languages within the family of Romance languages.