Talk:Urban Qatari Arabic

@Elspamo4 Hello friend. I have some thoughts on the "Phonology" section, and from looking through the edit history I think you were the one who added it (along with basically everything else! Impressive!)?

As an Arabic speaker who is not a linguist, most of the content of the section seems to me to be things that are true about Arabic in general, and not really what makes Qatari Arabic special within the category of Gulf Arabic, or even within Arabic more widely. Have I perhaps missed something here?

If you concur with these thoughts, I wonder whether you think I should try and look through that thesis and/or other sources to find stuff more specific to the dialect, or perhaps we should make a post on some more linguisticy part of Wikipedia looking for a linguist to help us parse things and renew the section?

Thanks and good tidings, غوّاص العلم (talk) 15:25, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Please make any changes you see fit, even if this means removing entire sections or paragraphs. I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about linguistics or Qatari Arabic; I was just trying to add what few things I could understand from reliable sources. This unfortunately resulted in a lot of redundant information not specific to Qatari Arabic. As I am not a native Qatari Arabic speaker, I'd appreciate it if you could remove any information you think is too generalized or inaccurate to be in the article, particularly from the phonology section (even if it's the whole section, we could rewrite it later). It'd also be awesome if you could help expand it using reliable sources, but in my experience, reliable sources are hard to come by on this dialect (hence my use of a thesis) and linguistics is a really tricky subject (at least for me!), so no pressure. Elspamo4 (talk) 20:26, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll see what I can do.

Good tidings, غوّاص العلم (talk) 07:25, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

I made the change to the phonology section. As mentioned in the edit summary, I used AI to research and rephrase, but I went over and edited it carefully, and believe that it should be good. lmk what you think. غوّاص العلم (talk) 13:57, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello all (and @Elspamo4) in particular.

I want to suggest changing the name of the article to "Urban Qatari Arabic". As noted in a footnote on the first page of a thesis by the name of "The Vowles of Urban Qatari Arabic":

"In some previous studies, the variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in Qatar has been called Qatari Arabic. Previous research has shown that both Gulf Arabic and Najdi Arabic are spoken in Qatar. Therefore, the term Urban is employed here for Qatari tribes and social groups that speak Gulf Arabic, as opposed to the Bedouin groups that speak Najdi Arabic."

In essence, there's no one dialect which can just be called "Qatari Arabic", since there are major dialects from different branches of Arabic present in the country. The article as is was written about Urban Qatari Arabic, and I just tried to improve it and specify that that was the case. So I suggest changing the name of the article in accordance with that. I just did not want to do that without consultation.

Thanks and good tidings, غوّاص العلم (talk) 14:06, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello @غوّاص العلم, this is an interesting distinction I wasn't fully aware of. After trying to find more sources for Qatari Arabic, I've concluded that most sources cite Shockley's thesis so he's clearly one of the foremost experts on the dialect. I also found another study which noted the distinction between Urban Qatari Arabic and Bedouin Qatari Arabic: (page 15). It states that, in that specific study they conducted, there weren't many differences they observed between the two dialects, however they stated that this was due to the limitations of the study, and basically reiterate that they are two distinct dialects with some morpho-syntactic differences. So, having established that there are two distinct dialects, and seeing as how the article is almost entirely about Urban Qatari Arabi in its current form, then I support the move to rename it Urban Qatari Arabic. (Though in the future, once better sources hopefully become available, I think we should have a Qatari Arabic parent article that discusses the differences between the sub dialects). Elspamo4 (talk) 19:34, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that linguistically speaking, or perhaps photogenically speaking, the Bedouin Qatari Arabic and the Urban Qatari Arabic are from different branches, which are just both present within Qatar, meaning that they are not both branching from a higher category called "Qatari Arabic". That would be a political definition, not a linguistic one. Not to say that it is not a legitimate and relevant thing. But I think we would want to name that article "Arabic in Qatar". What do you think?

Looking at the other articles under Gulf Arabic, it looks like they suffer from similar issues, especially the Emirati Arabic one, which seems kinda like a political attempt to argue for all varieties of Arabic in the country to be of one family... The only two times the term "Bedouin" appears there are in a throwaway statement in the lead, and in the side template saying "Emirati Bedouin Arabic" under "dialects", except as you can see it just links to "Bedouin Arabic". My autistic ass is driving me to go there and start trying to change things there lol, but I don't think I actually have it in me to get all up in other people's business over this, especially given how complicated all this linguistics stuff is. غوّاص العلم (talk) 10:15, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

lmao idk why I wrote "photogenically ", I meant phylogenetically. غوّاص العلم (talk) 10:17, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

You're probably totally correct but I wouldn't know for sure since linguistics can be very opaque. I remember reading from a source that Bedouin Qatari Arabic is the same dialect of Arabic spoken by Bedouins in KSA's eastern province, Bahrain and the UAE, while Qatari Urban Arabic is more unique to the country. As for Qatari Arabic being a political definition, I think it's just a common bias from sources to conflate Qatari Arabic with Qatari Urban Arabic. Like I said earlier though, I know zero about linguistics and unfortunately there's very few sources for this topic.

Just so I'm being clear: since Bedouin Qatari Arabic and Urban Qatari Arabic don't have a common origin and are sufficiently different from eachother, then they can't be grouped under the same "Qatari Arabic" article. Which makes sense. I like your idea of creating an "Arabic language in Qatar" article that describes these differences, tbh. That article could be used to discuss Arabic use in education, government, the different dialects of Arabic spoken by Qataris, etc. That's more of an idea for the near future though. For now, I think it'd be best to go with your idea of renaming this article to "Qatari Urban Arabic" since it only covers that at the moment. Elspamo4 (talk) 04:20, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Great :) Thanks yet again for the helpful discussion and guidance. I will try to do the name change. غوّاص العلم (talk) 09:00, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello @LinguisticsEditorGuy!

Thanks for getting involved!

I understand your instinct to merge sources, but please note that this lead to a loss of the page numbers which showed where each piece of information comes from, which could make it harder for future readers and editors who want to look into the sources.

Thanks and good tidings, User:غوّاص العلم (Ghawwas) (talk) 10:15, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

I agree that specific page numbers are preferable so I re-added them in a more readable format. Elspamo4 (talk) 01:23, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

Thanks!

I'm always hesitant about using shortened references, because their prone to breaking on future edits. But it makes sense on this one.

Thanks and good tidings, User:غوّاص العلم (Ghawwas) (talk) 08:25, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

When i checked the sources, i thought "Why are there 7 copies of the same source?" and i decided to merge them all. I didn’t know that these copies had a purpose. LinguisticsEditorGuy (talk) 17:33, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

It's a very easy mistake to make, just be sure to look out for page numbers and page titles (as some from the same source can look very similar) in the future when merging sources. Thank you for trying to improve the article. Elspamo4 (talk) 21:33, 29 December 2025 (UTC)