Words R Us
- Palestinian (jpa)

Palestinian Arabic is a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by most Palestinians in Palestine, Israel and in the Palestinian diaspora. There are 7.2 million native speakers. In two dialect comparison research, Palestinian Arabic was found to be the closest Arabic dialect to Modern Standard Arabic, mainly the dialect of the people in Gaza Strip.

Further dialects can be distinguished within Palestine, such as spoken in the northern West Bank, that spoken by Palestinians in the Hebron area, which is similar to Arabic spoken by descendants of Palestinian refugees living in Jordan and south-western Syria. As is very common in Arabic-speaking countries, the dialect spoken by a person depends on both the region he/she comes from, and the social group he/she belongs to.

The Urban ('madani') dialects resemble closely northern Levantine Arabic dialects, that is, the colloquial variants of western Syria and Lebanon. Rural or farmer ('fallahi') variety is retaining the interdental consonants and is closely related with rural dialects in the outer southern Levant and in Lebanon. The Bedouins of Southern Levant use two different ('badawi') dialects in Galilee and the Negev. The Negev desert Bedouins, who are also present in Palestine and Gaza Strip use a dialect closely related to those spoken in the Hijaz, and in the Sinai.

Sources: Wikipedia