Egyptian

About Egyptian Arabic

Most guides in this category give Egyptian Arabic, the everyday spoken Arabic of Egypt, with about 65 million native speakers. Thanks to Egyptian films, music and television it is the most widely understood Arabic dialect across the Arab world. It differs from Modern Standard Arabic, which Egyptians use for writing and formal speech. A few guides are about the ancient Egyptian language of the hieroglyphs, which is a different and long extinct language. See also Arabic.

Egyptian Arabic is mostly spoken rather than written, and the guides give it in Arabic script and in Latin letters. Two sounds mark it out: the letter jīm is a hard g, so "camel" is gamal, and the letter qāf is often a short catch in the throat. The word for "you" changes with the person you speak to: enta to a man and enti to a woman.

LanguageArabic, Egyptian variety
FamilyAfroasiatic, Semitic
Native speakersabout 65 million (2019)
Where spokenEgypt
ScriptArabic script, informally Latin letters
Codearz (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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