Palestinian Arabic
Levantine Arabic as spoken across Palestine and by one of the most widely scattered Arabic-speaking communities anywhere.
Where it is spoken
Palestinian Arabic is spoken in the West Bank, Gaza, inside Israel, and by very large communities in Jordan, Lebanon, Chile, the United States and the Gulf. It sits in the Levantine group with Lebanese and Syrian, and the three are mutually intelligible. Within Palestinian there is real internal variety, particularly between urban, rural and Gazan speech.
How it differs
Urban Palestinian turns qaf into a glottal stop, while rural varieties often keep it as a hard k. That single sound tells a listener where a speaker grew up. Vowels sit close to Syrian, and present-tense verbs take the Levantine b- prefix. Vocabulary overlaps heavily with Syrian and Lebanese, alongside a set of distinctly Palestinian everyday words.
Words you can hear
Each of these is recorded by a native speaker of this dialect. Tap any card to hear it.
A note on the written forms below. Spoken dialects are rarely written down, so most words appear in their standard spelling. Where this dialect has its own written form, it is marked.
For many Palestinian families the dialect carries something a passport does not. Children raised in Santiago, Amman, Detroit or Dubai often learn Palestinian Arabic as the thing that connects them to a place they may never have seen. Small words matter here. A child who says sitti for grandmother is using the word their family chose, and PopPond records it the way the family says it.
Who should learn it
Anyone with Palestinian family, anyone learning to stay in touch with relatives, and anyone who wants a Levantine dialect. Because the community is so scattered, Palestinian is one of the dialects most often learned outside the region.
Dialects
Hear all seven dialects
PopPond records the same words in Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, Moroccan, Algerian and Fus-ha.