World Language Map

Where is Levantine Arabic spoken?

Levantine Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and 2 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

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  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Levantine Arabic is spoken

Levantine Arabic is spoken in 6 countries: Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and 2 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Syria85%20,285,590
Jordan66%7,374,840
Lebanon100%5,364,480
Palestine87%4,684,959
Turkey5.2%4,374,214
Israel17%1,598,445

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Levantine Arabic is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Levantine Arabic.

How many people speak Levantine Arabic?

Wikidata gives about 44 million speakers (Ethnologue, 2022). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Levantine Arabic sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Levantine Arabic as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Semitic
  3. West Semitic
  4. Central Semitic
  5. Arabian
  6. Arabic
  7. Levantine-Cypriot Arabic
  8. Levantine Arabic

Related languages

Other languages in the Levantine-Cypriot Arabic group:

More about Levantine Arabic

Codes: ISO 639-3 apc, Glottolog nort3139. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Levantine Arabic

Where is Levantine Arabic spoken?

Levantine Arabic is spoken in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and 2 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 85% of the population of Syria, which is about 20,285,590 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Levantine Arabic?

Wikidata gives about 44 million speakers (Ethnologue, 2022). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Levantine Arabic in?

Glottolog places Levantine Arabic in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Semitic, West Semitic, Central Semitic, Arabian, Arabic and Levantine-Cypriot Arabic.

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