[3] Research is needed to establish whether the Maʿāzah dialect is the southwestern extremity of Northwest Arabian on the Egyptian mainland.
[4] The Northwest Arabian Arabic dialects display several innovations from Proto-Arabic:[2] Northwest Arabian Arabic can be divided into a western branch spoken in Sinai and the Negev, and an eastern branch spoken to the east of the Wadi Araba.
Vowels occur in both long and short positions:[7] Vowels are recognized as allophones in the following positions:[8] Some varieties of Negev Arabic are characterized by word-internal imala of *-ā- to /ē/ in patterns where /i/ historically occurred in an adjacent syllable.
The following examples are from Negev Arabic:[10] In the dialects of southern Sinai, word-final imala typically results in /iʾ/.
Like the dialects of central Sinai and Negev, the imala of feminine adjectives of color and defect on the pattern CaCCāʾ results in stressed /íy/: sōdíy “black; bad”.