The Dictionary of Levantine Idioms: +300 Idioms of Everyday Syrian Dialect

By Ahmad Borhan

We introduce to you our newest book on the idioms used by Syrians in everyday life. The everyday Levantine dialect you find in Syria or between Syrians around the world now is unique and full of words and sentences that are far away from Formal Arabic.

As an advanced learner of Levantine Arabic, you feel the need to know the idioms that Syrians use in their life to understand their perspective on the usage of language.

Languages used in the book: EN-AR

Number of pages: 42

The number of chapters: Four. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borhan Ahmad
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018

Book preview

Idioms

Contents

Preface

A guide on how to use this book

Chapter One Men’s Idioms

Chapter Two Women’s Idioms

Chapter Three Folk Idioms

Chapter Four Everyone’s Idioms

Preface

The everyday dialect you find in Syria or between Syrians around the world now is unique and full of words and sentences that are far away from Formal Arabic. Historians consider that the Syrian dialect has a huge number of words that were made as a mixture between the Aramaic and the Syriac languages that prevailed in Syria in the past, alongside Arabic that came later to the region.

Syrian soap operas helped during the past years in introducing the Syrian dialect into the different Arab communities in the Arab world and introduced these unique words and sentences and made them an understandable dialect for most of Arabic speakers.

A lot of these idioms are unique and confined to the Syrian communities, while other idioms are mutual with the Lebanese, Palestinians, and Jordanian dialects.

Many of these idioms nowadays are recent, some cannot be understood by elders, and the majority of these idioms was born by coincidence and prevailed among young people.

A guide on how to use this book

As the learners of Arabic know, there are a lot of Arabic letters that have no equivalent in English. Therefore, we have used some punctuation marks to refer to some letters while we used a combination of letters to refer to others.

Dh: ض

Kh: خ

Gh: غ

H: can be ح or هـ, you will understand the difference since the Arabic word is provided.

The letters ع