Although it is the majority language in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, it is predominantly used as a spoken vernacular in daily communication, whereas most written and official documents and media in these countries use the official Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a form of literary Arabic only acquired through formal education that does not function as a native language.

[25] The term "Levantine Arabic" is not indigenous and, according to linguists Kristen Brustad and Emilie Zuniga, "it is likely that many speakers would resist the grouping on the basis that the rich phonological, morphological and lexical variation within the Levant carries important social meanings and distinctions.

[42] Sedentary vernaculars (also called dialects) are traditionally classified into five groups according to shared features: Peninsular, Mesopotamian, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi.

[46] Levantine is spoken in the fertile strip on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean: from the Turkish coastal provinces of Adana, Hatay, and Mersin in the north[48] to the Negev, passing through Lebanon, the coastal regions of Syria (Latakia and Tartus governorates) as well as around Aleppo and Damascus,[4] the Hauran in Syria and Jordan,[49][50] the rest of western Jordan,[51] Palestine and Israel.

[111] Initially restricted to the steppe, Arabic-speaking nomads started to settle in cities and fertile areas after the Plague of Justinian in 542 CE.

[113] These Arab communities stretched from the southern extremities of the Syrian Desert to central Syria, the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, and the Beqaa Valley.

[115] Arabic gradually replaced early Medieval Greek as the language of administration in 700 by order of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.

Simon Hopkins, this document shows that there is "a very impressive continuity in colloquial Arabic usage, and the roots of the modern vernaculars are thus seen to lie very deep".

Because its Arabic text is written in Greek characters, it reveals the pronunciation of the time;[124] it features many examples of imāla (the fronting and raising of /a/ toward /i/).

[138][139] Although Levantine dialects have remained stable over the past two centuries, in cities such as Amman[66] and Damascus, language standardization occurs through variant reduction and linguistic homogenization among the various religious groups and neighborhoods.

[143][24] MSA is the sole official language in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria;[24] it has a "special status" in Israel under the Basic Law.

[145] As in the rest of the Arab world, this linguistic situation has been described as diglossia: MSA is nobody's first acquired language;[146] it is learned through formal instruction rather than transmission from parent to child.

[2][47][151] MSA is the language of literature, official documents, and formal written media (newspapers, instruction leaflets, school books).

[146] In spoken form, MSA is mostly used when reading from a scripted text (e.g., news bulletins) and for prayer and sermons in the mosque or church.

[146] Traditionally in the Arab world, colloquial varieties, such as Levantine, have been regarded as corrupt forms of MSA, less eloquent and not fit for literature, and thus looked upon with disdain.

[159] Levantine is now regarded in a more positive light, and its use in informal modes of writing is acknowledged, thanks to its recent widespread use online in both written and spoken forms.

[27] Egypt was the most influential center of Arab media productions (movies, drama, TV series) during the 20th century,[173] but Levantine is now competing with Egyptian.

[180] Prose written in Lebanese goes back to at least 1892 when Tannus al-Hurr published Riwāyat aš-šābb as-sikkīr ʾay Qiṣṣat Naṣṣūr as-Sikrī, 'The tale of the drunken youth, or The story of Nassur the Drunkard'.

[179] In the 1960s, Said Akl led a movement in Lebanon to replace MSA as the national and literary language, and a handful of writers wrote in Lebanese.

[179] In a 2013 study, Abuhakema investigated 270 written commercial ads in two Jordanian (Al Ghad and Ad-Dustour) and two Palestinian (Al-Quds and Al-Ayyam) daily newspapers.

[203][204] Some collections of short stories and anthologies of Palestinian folktales (turāṯ, 'heritage literature') display full texts in dialect.

[206][27] Internet users in the Arab world communicate with their dialect language (such as Levantine) more than MSA on social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments of online newspapers).

[207] Levantine phonology is characterized by rich socio-phonetic variations along socio-cultural (gender; religion; urban, rural or Bedouin) and geographical lines.

[213][49][50] One of the most distinctive features of Levantine is word-final imāla, a process by which the vowel corresponding to ة tāʼ marbūṭah is raised from [a] to [æ], [ɛ], [e] or even [i] in some dialects.

Arabizi is a non-standard romanization used by Levantine speakers in social media and discussion forums, SMS messaging, and online chat.

[250] The first term must be in the construct state: if it ends in the feminine marker (/-ah/, or /-ih/), it changes to (/-at/, /-it/) in pronunciation (i.e. ة pronounced as /t/): مدينة نيويورك madīnet nyū-yōrk listenⓘ, 'New York City'.

Adjectives without an article after a definite noun express a clause with the invisible copula "to be":[257] The elative is used for comparison, instead of separate comparative and superlative forms.

[258] The elative is formed by adding a hamza at the beginning of the adjective and replacing the vowels by "a" (pattern: أفعل ʾafʕal / aCCaC, e.g.: ‏كبير‎ kbīr, 'big'; ‏أكبر‎ ʾakbar, 'bigger/biggest').

[59] ‏مش‎ miš or in Syrian Arabic ‏مو‎ mū negate adjectives (including active participles), demonstratives, and nominal phrases:[261][262] Levantine has eight persons and eight pronouns.

They belong to different fields of everyday life such as seasonal agriculture, housekeeping, tools and utensils, and Christian religious terms.