Compared with other varieties of Aramaic, it is notable for the occurrence of a number of loanwords and grammatical borrowings from Arabic or other North Arabian languages.

As a result, its latest stage gave rise to the earliest form of the Arabic script, known as Nabataeo-Arabic.

The Nabataean lexicon is also largely Aramaic in origin, with notable borrowings from Arabic, Greek, and other languages.

With the collapse of the Achaemenid Empire (330s BC), Aramaic lost importance as the lingua franca of the Near East.

The language of the Nabataean inscriptions, attested from the second century BCE, is close to the Imperial Aramaic of the Achaemenid Empire[4] but with local developments.

[8] Evidence of Nabataean writings can be found in the burial and dedicatory inscriptions of the cities of Petra, Bosra and Hegra (Mada'in Salih).

Many shorter inscriptions have been found in the southern Sinai Peninsula as well as other areas that were at one point ruled by the Nabataean kings.

[11] This inscription lacks some of the Nabataean features and resembles uniform Imperial Aramaic and Jewish script.

[11] Therefore, some scholars propose that the earliest Nabataean inscription is one found in Petra, Jordan, which can be dated back to the late Hellenistic era in the years 96 or 95 BC.

[13] The earliest inscription found to be written in a cursive Nabataean script was unearthed in Horvat Raqiq, close to the city of Beersheba, Israel.

[13] This dates to the reign of the Nabataean king Rabbel II Soter, who ruled between the years 70 and 106 AD.

From the period of its earliest attestation, Nabataean Aramaic is notable for the use of Arabic or Ancient North Arabian loanwords and grammar, reflecting strong contact with these languages.

[2] A first- or second-century AD Nabataean inscription from Ein Avdat even contains three lines of Arabic poetry, of debated meaning.

Prominent examples include the mixed Aramaic-Arabic epitaph of RQWŠ daughter of ʕBDMWNTW (JSNab 17) and the entirely Arabic Namara inscription.

According to Jean Cantineau, this marked the beginning of the end of the widespread use of Nabataean Aramaic, which came to be replaced by Arabic.

The longer texts from this period mainly concern a few funerary inscriptions from North Arabian oasis towns.

[12][19][20] An even later graffito, dated to 455/6 AD and written in Nabataeo-Arabic characters, was discovered in 2004 at Jabal Umm Jadhayidh in north-western Saudi Arabia, but its Aramaic content is limited to stock formulas, the non-formulaic text being entirely Arabic.

[21] The existence of thousands of Nabataean graffiti in the Sinai desert, originally referred to as "Sinaitic", had long been known.

[26] Important finds after this publication include the legal documents written on papyrus discovered in the Nahal Hever Cave of Letters in the 1960s.

[37] As the Nabataean script does not indicate short vowels, the only information on vocalic phonemes comes from names in foreign transcription.

Unlike many other dialects of Aramaic which simply have -(a)n, Nabataean preserves the final vowel *-ā here, as indicated by the mater lectionis ʔ.

[42] The third person masculine singular suffixed pronoun is normally -h. After long vowels and diphthongs (both marked by matres lectionis), -hy is used instead, as in ʔbwhy 'his father', ywmwhy 'his days'.

In the later period, the gender distinction in the singular breaks down and both forms occur with both masculine and feminine antecedents.

[54] Nouns distinguish two genders, masculine and feminine; two numbers, singular and plural; and three states, absolute, construct, and emphatic.

One set of plural endings consists of absolute -yn (rarely -n), construct -y (which changes to -w- before the suffix -hy), used for masculine and some feminine nouns.

For other feminine nouns, the construct plural form is written the same as the construct singular form (although the plural was probably marked by a long ā vowel, as in -āt-, that was absent in the singular; this is not expressed in the writing); based on other varieties of Aramaic, the expected absolute suffix for these nouns is -n, but this is unattested.

The prefix conjugation expresses the future tense, as in wmn ybʕʔ ... 'and whoever shall want ...' and can be used modally as a subjunctive, as in ... dy tʕbd bh ... '... so that she make of it ...', conditional, as in hn yhwʔ ... bḥgrʔ 'if ... be in Hegra', or optative, like the suffix conjugation, as in wylʕn dwšrʔ wmnwtw ... 'and may Dushara and Manat curse ...'.

[59] If a sentence includes a verb, the normal word order is verb—subject—object(s), as in lʕnw (V) dwšrʔ wmnwtw wqyšh (S) kl mn dy ... (O) 'may Dushara and Manat and Qayshah curse anyone who ...'.