Egyptian Arabic
Spoken varieties

Sa'īdi Arabic is a different variety than Egyptian Arabic in Ethnologue.com and ISO 639-3 and in other sources, and the two varieties have limited mutual intelligibility. It carries little prestige nationally but continues to be widely spoken, with 19,000,000 speakers.

The traditional division between Upper and Lower Egypt and their respective differences go back to ancient times. Egyptians today commonly call the people of the north بَحَارْوَة, baḥārwah () and those of the south صَعَايْدَة, ṣaʿāydah (). The differences throughout Egypt, however, are more wide-ranging and do not neatly correspond to the simple division. The language shifts from the eastern to the western parts of the Nile Delta, and the varieties spoken from Giza to Minya are further grouped into a Middle Egypt cluster. Despite the differences, there are features distinguishing all the Egyptian Arabic varieties of the Nile Valley from any other varieties of Arabic. Such features include reduction of long vowels in open and unstressed syllables, the postposition of demonstratives and interrogatives, the modal meaning of the imperfect and the integration of the participle.

The Western Egyptian Bedawi Arabic variety of the western desert differs from all other Arabic varieties in Egypt in that it linguistically is part of Maghrebi Arabic. Northwest Arabian Arabic is also distinct from Egyptian Arabic.
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