Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic

Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic
Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic
Gilit Arabic
اللهجة العراقية
Native to	Iraq, Iran, Syria
Speakers	20 million (2021–2024)
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Mesopotamian Arabic Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic; ; ; ; ; ;
Dialects	Baghdadi Arabic; Shawi Arabic; Khuzestani Arabic; South Mesopotamian Arabic;
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	acm Mesopotamian Arabic
Glottolog	meso1252

Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic,^[3] also known as Iraqi Arabic,^[3] Mesopotamian Gelet Arabic,^[4] or simply Mesopotamian Arabic^[3] is one of the two main varieties of Mesopotamian Arabic, together with North Mesopotamian Arabic.^[5]^[6]

Relationship to North Mesopotamian

Mesopotamian Arabic has two major varieties: Gelet Mesopotamian Arabic and Qeltu Mesopotamian Arabic. Their names derive from the form of the word for "I said" in each variety.^[7] Gelet Arabic is a Bedouin variety spoken by Muslims (both sedentary and non-sedentary) in central and southern Iraq and by nomads in the rest of Iraq. Qeltu Arabic is an urban dialect spoken by Non-Muslims of central and southern Iraq (including Baghdad) and by the sedentary population (both Muslims and Non-Muslims) of the rest of the country.^[8] Non-Muslims include Christians, Yazidis, and Jews, until most Iraqi Jews were exiled from Iraq in the 1940s–1950s.^[9]^[10] Geographically, the gelet–qeltu classification roughly corresponds to respectively Upper Mesopotamia and Lower Mesopotamia.^[11] The isogloss is between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, around Fallujah and Samarra.^[11]

During the Siege of Baghdad (1258), the Mongols killed all Muslims.^[12] However, sedentary Christians and Jews were spared and northern Iraq was untouched.^[12] In southern Iraq, sedentary Muslims were gradually replaced by Bedouins from the countryside.^[12] This explains the current dialect distribution: in the south, everyone speaks Bedouin varieties close to Gulf Arabic (continuation of the Bedouin dialects of the Arabian Peninsula),^[12]^[13] except urban Non-Muslims who continue to speak pre-1258 qeltu dialects while in the north the original qeltu dialect is still spoken by all, Muslims and Non-Muslims alike.^[12]

Gelet/qeltu verb contrasts^[14]
s-stem	Bedouin/gelet	Sedentary/qeltu
1st sg.	ḏạrab-t	fataḥ-tu
2nd m. sg.	ḏạrab-t	fataḥ-t
2nd f. sg.	tišṛab-īn	tǝšrab-īn
2nd pl.	tišṛab-ūn	tǝšrab-ūn
3rd pl.	yišṛab-ūn	yǝšrab-ūn

Dialects

Gelet dialects include:^[11]

Gilit
- Northwestern Mesopotamian group
  - Shāwi dialects (including Urfa and al-Raqqah)
  - Rural dialects of northern and central Iraq.
- Central Iraqi Group
  - Baghdad Arabic
  - The surrounding area around Baghdad
- Southern Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic group
  - Urban dialects
  - Rural dialects
  - Marshland dialects of the Marsh Arabs of the Mesopotamian Marshes

Baghdadi Arabic is Iraq's de facto national vernacular, as about half of the population speaks it as a mother tongue, and most other Iraqis understand it. It is spreading to northern cities as well.^[15] Other Arabic speakers cannot easily understand Moslawi and Baghdadi.^[15] The Iraqi dialect is notable for its diversity and its general closeness to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), with Iraqis often capable of pronouncing classical Arabic with proper phonetics.

References

^ Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025)
^ Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025)
^ ^a ^b ^c "Glottolog 4.7 - Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic". glottolog.org. Retrieved 2023-01-01.
^ Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025)
^ Hassan, Qasim. "Reconsidering the Lexical Features of the south-Mesopotamian Dialects." Folia Orientalia 56 (2019).
^ Jasim, Maha Ibrahim (2020). Tafxi:m in the vowels of Muslawi Qeltu and Baghdadi Gilit dialects of Mesopotamian Arabic (Thesis thesis). Newcastle University.
^ Mitchell, T. F. (1990). Pronouncing Arabic, Volume 2. Clarendon Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-19-823989-0.
^ Jasim, Maha Ibrahim (2022-12-15). "The Linguistic Heritage of the Maṣlāwī Dialect in Iraq". CREID Working Paper 18. doi:10.19088/creid.2022.015.
^ Holes, Clive, ed. (2018). Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. Oxford University Press. p. 337. ISBN 978-0-19-870137-8. OCLC 1059441655.
^ Procházka, Stephan (2018). "3.2. The Arabic dialects of northern Iraq". In Haig, Geoffrey; Khan, Geoffrey (eds.). The Languages and Linguistics of Western Asia. De Gruyter. pp. 243–266. doi:10.1515/9783110421682-008. ISBN 978-3-11-042168-2. S2CID 134361362.
^ ^a ^b ^c Ahmed, Abdulkareem Yaseen (2018). Phonological variation and change in Mesopotamia: a study of accent levelling in the Arabic dialect of Mosul (PhD thesis). Newcastle University.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Holes, Clive (2006). "The Arabian Peninsula and Iraq". In Ammon, Ulrich; Dittmar, Norbert; Mattheier, Klaus J.; Trudgill, Peter (eds.). The Arabian Peninsula and Iraq/Die arabische Halbinsel und der Irak. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. p. 1937. doi:10.1515/9783110184181.3.9.1930. ISBN 978-3-11-019987-1. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
^ Al-Wer, Enam; Jong, Rudolf (2017). "Dialects of Arabic". In Boberg, Charles; Nerbonne, John; Watt, Dominic (eds.). The Handbook of Dialectology. Wiley. p. 529. doi:10.1002/9781118827628.ch32. ISBN 978-1-118-82755-0. OCLC 989950951.
^ Prochazka, Stephan (2018). "The Northern Fertile Crescent". In Holes, Clive (ed.). Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. p. 266. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198701378.003.0009. ISBN 978-0-19-870137-8. OCLC 1059441655.
^ ^a ^b Collin, Richard Oliver (2009). "Words of War: The Iraqi Tower of Babel". International Studies Perspectives. 10 (3): 245–264. doi:10.1111/j.1528-3585.2009.00375.x.