There are considerable differences between, for instance, Kuwaiti Arabic and the dialects of Qatar and the UAE, especially in pronunciation, that may hinder mutual intelligibility.

However, it is most commonly referred to as Khaliji (خليجي Khalījī [xɑˈliːdʒi]), in which the noun خليج ([xɑˈliːdʒ]; Khalīj) has been suffixed with the Nisba, literally meaning 'of the bay' or 'of the gulf'.

[16][20] Voiced stops tend to devoice in utterance-final position, especially as the final element in clusters, e.g. كلب ('dog') /kalb/ [tʃælp].

After these changes occurred, the original sounds (or close approximations to them) were reintroduced as a result of contact with other dialects, as well as through influence of Modern Standard Arabic as a language of media, government, and religion.

[20] The following table provides a rough outline of these differences: Gulf Arabic has five long vowels and three or four short monophthongs.

[31] For example: Similarly, the normal realization of short /i/ is [ɪ] except in final position, where it is [i]; when adjacent to emphatic, uvular, or bilabial consonants, /i/ is centralized to [ɨ].

Similarly, /u/ is realized [ʊ] except when unstressed, in which case it is reduced to [ə] if it is not deleted altogether (e.g. /bujuːt/ → [bəjʊːt] or [bjʊːt] 'houses').

[31] The short vowel phoneme /o/ occurs rarely as a variant of the diphthong /aw/ in a handful of words (e.g. لو /lo/ 'if').

With the subject (which is normally initial), it is moved to final position:[38] /xarrabruined-3msgil-beːtthe-housemin/who/xarrab il-beːt min/ruined-3msg the-house who'who ruined the house?

'The moved element receives strong stress; in the case of a question word, the intonation is a high fall.