lahga/arabic-dialects

Lahga: a dictionary of Arabic dialects

لهجة: معجم اللهجات العربية. معجم تشاركي مفتوح، كل صفحة فيه تبدأ من معنى بالعربية الفصحى، وتحته الأشكال التي يُقال بها في اللهجات، كل شكل منسوب إلى لهجته. هذه نسخة من بيانات الموقع lahga.fyi بتاريخ 2026-10-02.

Lahga is an open, collaborative dictionary of spoken Arabic. Every headword is a meaning stated in Modern Standard Arabic: a word, a short phrase or a proverb. Under it are the forms the dialects use for that meaning, each attributed to one variety. A form can carry a narrower meaning, usage notes, and example sentences written in the dialect with a gloss in MSA.

One row of the default table answers one question: how does this variety say this?

Headwords (MSA)	2,012
Dialect forms	25,072
Forms not yet confirmed by a speaker	3,606 (14%)
Example sentences	3,313
Varieties with at least one form	24
Snapshot	2026-10-02
Licence	CC BY-SA 4.0

Everything is in Arabic script. There is no English and no transliteration.

Read this before you build on it

More than half of the forms were first drafted by a language model, from the model's own knowledge of the dialects, and read by the maintainer before import. The maintainer is one person, not a speaker of thirty-three varieties.

The forms those drafts were least sure of, and whole batches drafted for Najdi, Libyan and Yemeni, carry needs_review: true. That is 3,606 of 25,072. On the site, the same forms show a mark and a yes/no question that any reader can answer; a form loses the mark when speakers confirm it.

needs_review: false therefore means not flagged, not verified by a native speaker. It covers forms taken from the published sources below, forms added or corrected by contributors, and drafted forms the maintainer saw no reason to doubt. The export does not yet say which of these a given row is.

If your use needs certainty, treat the whole file as a well-organised list of candidates. If you find a wrong form, the fastest fix is the «لا» under it on its page at lahga.fyi.

Where the rest comes from

• Maknuune, the open Palestinian Arabic lexicon of NYU Abu Dhabi (CC BY-SA 4.0): Palestinian forms and their examples.
• Wiktionary, through the kaikki.org extracts (CC BY-SA): Egyptian, Levantine, Hejazi, Gulf, Moroccan and Tunisian forms.
• Peace Corps Jordan language lessons (public domain): a few Jordanian forms.
• Speakers, through the site: additions, corrections and votes.

An imported source gives a variety at most two forms per headword, so that one large lexicon does not drown the others.

What the dictionary leaves out, on purpose

A meaning has a page only if dialects say it differently. A word that every Arab says the same way is not in the dictionary. So this is not a general lexicon of any one dialect, and a form's absence says nothing about whether the variety has the word.

Files

File	Config	One row is
entries.jsonl	entries (default)	one dialect form under one headword
examples.jsonl	examples	one example sentence, with its MSA gloss
dialects.jsonl	dialects	one variety
lahga.json		the site's own export, nested: words → entries → examples

from datasets import load_dataset

forms = load_dataset("lahga/arabic-dialects", split="train")
confirmed = forms.filter(lambda row: not row["needs_review"])
egyptian = forms.filter(lambda row: row["dialect_group"] == "egyptian")

examples = load_dataset("lahga/arabic-dialects", "examples", split="train")

entries

Field
headword	the meaning, in Modern Standard Arabic
kind	word, phrase or proverb
definition	a short definition of the headword in MSA; may be null
form	how the variety says it
dialect	the variety's id, e.g. egyptian, lebanese, najdi
dialect_name	its name in Arabic
dialect_group	the group it belongs to (lebanese → levantine); a group's own forms name themselves
language	a BCP-47 tag: arz, apc-LB, afb-KW, ary, …
meaning	a narrower meaning, when the form's use differs from the headword's; mostly null
notes	usage notes in Arabic: who says it, when, its register; mostly null
needs_review	true if drafted by a language model and not yet confirmed by a speaker (see above)
examples	how many example sentences the form has
entry_id, word_id	the site's ids, stable across snapshots
source	the headword's page on lahga.fyi, the URL to cite

A form filed under a group (levantine) is one the group shares; a form filed under a variety (lebanese) is that variety's own. The same form can appear under several headwords.

examples

text is the sentence in the dialect, gloss its meaning in MSA (may be null). The other fields repeat the form the sentence illustrates. Some examples come from Maknuune and Wiktionary; the rest were written for the site.

dialects

slug, name, language, parent, description (Arabic), url, and forms, the number of forms filed under it.

Coverage

Uneven, and the table says how. Groups are followed by their varieties.

Variety	dialect	language	Forms	Not yet confirmed
مصري	egyptian	arz	2,521	83
· قاهري	cairene	arz-EG	41	1
· صعيدي	saidi	aec	3	1
شامي	levantine	apc	2,603	135
· سوري	syrian	apc-SY	33	3
· لبناني	lebanese	apc-LB	32	5
· فلسطيني	palestinian	apc-PS	1,301	3
· أردني	jordanian	apc-JO	25	0
خليجي	gulf	afb	2,674	287
· كويتي	kuwaiti	afb-KW	12	2
· بحريني	bahraini	afb-BH	2	1
· إماراتي	emirati	afb-AE	6	1
· عماني	omani	acx	2	1
نجدي	najdi	ars	1,246	460
حجازي	hejazi	acw	732	1
يمني	yemeni	ar-YE	1,123	515
عراقي	iraqi	acm	2,410	328
سوداني	sudanese	apd	1,306	81
مغاربي	maghrebi	ar-015	5	0
· مغربي	moroccan	ary	2,722	432
· جزائري	algerian	arq	2,169	433
· تونسي	tunisian	aeb	2,526	563
· ليبي	libyan	ayl	1,087	267
حساني	hassaniya	mey	491	3

Spelling

Dialects have no standard spelling and none is imposed here: a form is written the way its speakers usually write it, mostly without diacritics. The same word can therefore differ by a letter between two varieties that pronounce it alike. No normalisation such as CODA has been applied.

Licence and attribution

CC BY-SA 4.0. Copy it and build on it for any purpose, on two conditions: say where it came from, and publish what you build on it under the same licence. That holds for a model trained on it as well.

لهجة: معجم اللهجات العربية، https://lahga.fyi، برخصة CC BY-SA 4.0.

For a single row, the URL in its source field is enough.

@misc{lahga,
  title        = {Lahga: a collaborative dictionary of Arabic dialects},
  author       = {{Lahga contributors}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://lahga.fyi}},
  note         = {Snapshot of 2026-10-02. CC BY-SA 4.0}
}

Staying current

The dictionary changes daily and this is a snapshot. The current files are always at https://lahga.fyi/data, rebuilt within the hour of any change. Corrections belong on the site, where they reach every later snapshot. Contact: info@lahga.fyi.