The official language of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is MSA (Modern Standard Arabic). In Jordan, MSA is taught in schools and used in newspapers and formal TV programs. However, the everyday spoken language is the Jordanian dialect, which isn’t considered an official language but, rather, is a colloquial. Jordanian Arabic is considered a Levantine dialect. The Levant (al-Sham) is the region of the northwestern Middle East that includes Jordan, Syria, Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Turkey’s Hatay Province. Jordanian Arabic encompasses three slightly different dialects—urban, rural, and Bedouin. The colloquial of this book is the urban dialect, the Arabic that is spoken in Amman. The Jordanian dialect was influenced by many factors such as MSA, the kingdom’s Bedouin community, and the Palestinian inhabitants who settled in Jordan following their displacement during the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli Wars.
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