Maknuune A Large Open Palestinian Arabic Lexicon Shahd DibasChristian KhairallahNizar Habash Omar Fayez SadiTariq SairafyKarmel SarabtaAbrar Ardah

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Maknuune: A Large Open Palestinian Arabic Lexicon

Shahd Dibas,†Christian Khairallah,‡Nizar Habash‡

Omar Fayez Sadi,*Tariq Sairafy,*Karmel Sarabta,*Abrar Ardah*

†University of Oxford, ‡New York University Abu Dhabi

*University College of Educational Sciences - UNRWA

shahd.dibas@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk,christian.khairallah@nyu.edu,nizar.habash@nyu.edu

Abstract

We present Maknuune 

éKñJºÓ, a large open lex-

icon for the Palestinian Arabic dialect. Maknu-

une has over 36K entries from 17K lemmas,

and 3.7K roots. All entries include diacritized

Arabic orthography, phonological transcrip-

tion and English glosses. Some entries are

enriched with additional information such as

broken plurals and templatic feminine forms,

associated phrases and collocations, Standard

Arabic glosses, and examples or notes on

grammar, usage, or location of collected entry.

1 Introduction

Arabic is a collective of historically related vari-

ants that co-exist in a diglossic (Ferguson,1959)

relationship between a Standard variant and geo-

graphically speciﬁc dialectal variants. Standard

Arabic (SA,

új

®Ë@ 

éJ

K.QªË@

) is typically used to

refer to the older Classical Arabic (CA) used in

Quranic texts and pre-islamic poetry, all the way to

Modern SA (MSA), the ofﬁcial language of news

and culture in the Arab World. Dialectal Arabic

(DA) is classiﬁed geographically into regions such

as Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi, and Gulf. The

dialects, which differ among themselves and SA,

are the primary mode of spoken communication, al-

though increasingly they are dominating in written

form on social media. That said, DA has no ofﬁcial

prescriptive grammars or orthographic standards,

unlike the highly standardized and regulated MSA.

In the realm of natural language processing (NLP),

MSA has relatively more annotated and parallel re-

sources than DA; although there are many notable

efforts to ﬁll gaps in all Arabic variants (Alyafeai

et al.,2022).

In this paper, we focus on Palestinian Arabic

(PAL), which is part of the South Levantine Ara-

bic dialect subgroup. PAL consists of several sub-

dialects in the region of Historic Palestine that vary

in terms of their phonology and lexical choice (Jar-

rar et al.,2016). PAL, like all other DA, has been

historically inﬂuenced by many languages, speciﬁ-

cally, in its case, Syriac, Turkish, Persian, English

and most recently Modern Hebrew (Halloun,2019),

as well as other Arabic dialects that came in interac-

tion with PAL after the Nakba. While this research

effort was originally motivated by the need to docu-

ment and preserve the cultural heritage and unique

identities of the various PAL sub-dialects, it has

expanded to cover PAL’s ever-evolving nature as a

living language, and provides a resource to support

research and development in Arabic dialect NLP.

Concretely, we present

Maknuune 

éKñJºÓ

large open lexicon for PAL, with over 36K entries

from 17K lemmas, and 3.7K roots.

All entries

include diacritized Arabic orthography and phono-

logical transcription following Habash et al. (2018),

as well as English glosses. Important inﬂectional

variants are included for some lemmas, such as bro-

ken plural and templatic feminine. About 10% of

the entries are phrases (multiword expressions) in-

dexed by their primary lemmas. And about 67% of

the entries include MSA glosses, examples, and/or

notes on grammar, usage, or location of collected

entry. To our knowledge, Maknuune is the largest

open machine-readable dictionary for PAL. Maknu-

une is publicly viewable and downloadable.3

We discuss some related work in Section 2, and

highlight some PAL linguistic facts that motivated

many of our design choices in Section 3. Section 4

presents our data collection process and annotation

guidelines. We present statistics for our lexicon

and evaluate its coverage in Section 5.

1

éKñJºÓ

/makn

une/ is a PAL farming term that refers to an

egg intentionally left behind in a speciﬁc location to encourage

the chicken to lay more eggs in that location. We hope that the

lexicon will encourage other researchers and citizen linguists

to contribute to it.

In this initial phase of Maknuune, we focus on the PAL

sub-dialects spoken in the West Bank, an area with dialectal

diversity across many dimensions such as lifestyle (urban,

rural, bedouin), religion, gender, and social class.

3www.palestine-lexicon.org

arXiv:2210.12985v2 [cs.CL] 1 Dec 2022

2 Related Work

Linguistic Descriptions

There are several lin-

guistic references describing various aspects of

PAL (Rice and Sa’id,1979;Herzallah,1990;Hop-

kins,1995;Elihai,2004;Talmon,2004;Bassal,

2012;Cotter and Horesh,2015). These are mostly

targeting academics and language learners. We

consulted many of these resources as part of devel-

oping our annotation guidelines.

Dialectal Corpora

We can group DA corpora

based on the degree of richness in their annota-

tions. Some noteworthy examples of unannotated

or lightly annotated corpora of relevance include

the MADAR Corpus (Bouamor et al.,2018), com-

prising 2K parallel sentences spread across 25 di-

alects of Arabic, including PAL (Jerusalem variety)

and the NADI corpus for nuanced dialect identi-

ﬁcation (Abdul-Mageed et al.,2021). The Shami

Corpus (Abu Kwaik et al.,2018) includes 21K

PAL sentences, and the Parallel Arabic Dialect

Corpus (PADIC) contains 6.4K PAL sentences

(Meftouh et al.,2015). In the spirit of genre di-

versiﬁcation and wider coverage across dialects, El-

Haj (2020) introduced the Habibi Corpus for song

lyrics, which comprises songs from many Arab

countries including all Levantine Arab countries.

Public and freely available morphologically an-

notated corpora are scarce for DA and often do not

agree on annotation guidelines. A notable anno-

tated dataset for PAL is the Curras corpus (Jarrar

et al.,2016), a 56K-token morphologically anno-

tated corpus. Other annotated Levantine dialect ef-

forts include the Jordan Comprehensive Contempo-

rary Arabic Corpus (JCCA) (Sawalha et al.,2019),

the Jordanian and Syrian corpora by Alshargi et al.

(2019), and the Baladi corpus of Lebanese Arabic

(Al-Haff et al.,2022).

We consulted some of the public corpora as part

of the development of Maknuune. However, most

of the above datasets are based on web scrapes,

which limits the amount of actual lemma coverage

that they could attain.

Dialectal Lexicons

Examples of machine-

readable DA lexicons include the 36K-lemma

lexicon used for the CALIMA EGY fully inﬂected

morphological analyzer (Habash et al.,2012),

based on the CALLHOME Egypt lexicon (Gadalla

et al.,1997), and the 51K-lemma Egyptian Arabic

Tharwa lexicon (Diab et al.,2014), which provides

some morphological annotations.

The Palestinian Colloquial Arabic Vocabulary

comprises 4.5K entries including expressions (You-

nis and Aldrich,2021), and the MADAR Lexicon

contains 2.7K entries dedicated to the Jerusalem

variety of PAL, including lemmas, phonological

transcriptions, and glosses in MSA, English and

French (Bouamor et al.,2018).

In addition to the above there are a number of

dictionaries for Levantine Arabic variants, e.g., Eli-

hai (2004) (9K entries and 17K phrases for PAL),

Halloun (2019) (for PAL), Freiha (1973) (ca. 5K

entries for Lebanese Arabic), and Stowasser and

Ani (2004) (15K entries for Syrian Arabic). These

resources include base lemma forms, occasional

plural forms, verb aspect inﬂections, and expres-

sions; however, none of them are available in a

machine-readable format, to the best of our knowl-

edge.

The lexicon presented in this work strives to be a

large-scale and open resource with rich entries cov-

ering phonology, morphology, and lexical expres-

sions, and with a wide-ranging coverage of PAL

sub-dialects. The lexicon may never be complete,

but by making it open to sharing and contribution,

we hope it will become central and useful to NLP

researchers and developers, as well as to linguists

working on Arabic and its dialects.

3 Linguistic Facts

In this section we present some general linguistic

facts about PAL and highlight speciﬁc challenging

phenomena that motivated many of our annotation

decisions.

3.1 Phonology and Orthography

Like all other DA, and unlike MSA, PAL has no

standard orthography rules (Jarrar et al.,2016;

Habash et al.,2018). In practice, PAL is primarily

written in Arabic script, and to a lesser extent in

Arabizi style romanization (Darwish,2014). Some

of the variations in the written form reﬂect the

words’ phonology, morphology, and/or etymologi-

cal connections to MSA. Orthogonal and detrimen-

tal to the orthography challenge, PAL has a high

degree of variability within it sub-dialects in phono-

logical terms. We highlight some below, noting that

some also exist in other DA.

Consonantal Variables

A number of PAL con-

sonants vary widely within sub-dialects. For exam-

ple, the voiceless velar stop /k/ is affricated to the

palatal /tsh/ in many PAL rural varieties (Herzal-

lah,1990), e.g.,



J



kayf ‘how’ appears as /k ee

f/ (urban) or /tsh ee f/ (rural).4Similarly, the MSA

voiceless uvular stop /q/ in the word

.

Ê



qal.b

‘heart’ is realized either as glottal stop /2alb/ in

urban dialects, as a voiceless velar stop /k a l b/

in rural dialects, or a voiced velar stop /g a l b/ in

Bedouin dialects (Herzallah,1990). It should be

noted that there are some exceptions that do not

conform to the above generalizations. For exam-

ple, in Beit Fajjar,

the word



è

ñ

ê



qah.wa

‘coffee’

typically varying elsewhere as /{2,q,g,k} a h w e/ is

realized as /tsh h ee w a/. Moreover, some words

do not have varying pronunciations such as

ÈA



®

ς.qaAl /3gaal/ ‘Egal headband’.

Monophthongization

Some PAL diphthongs

shift to different monophthongs in different loca-

tions. For example the /a y/ diphthong in







šayx

/sh a y kh/ ‘Sheikh’ shifts often to /ee/ (/sh ee kh/),

but also to /ii/ (/sh ii kh/).

Following the CODA*

guidelines for diacritizing DA (Habash et al.,2018),

we spell the /oo/ and /ee/ sounds using

ñ

aw and



ay (without a sukun on the

wor



y), respec-

tively, e.g.,

Ðñ

kawm /k oo m/ ‘pile’ and



I



bayt

/b ee t/ ‘house’.

Metathesis

In some rural dialects in villages near

Tulkarem, Jenin and Ramallah, there are words

with consonant pairs within a syllable that appear

in a different order than is the norm in PAL, e.g., a

word like

A

K.

Q

ê

kah.rabaA /kahraba/ ‘electricity’

realizes as /karhaba/.

Epenthesis

PAL exhibits systematic epenthesis

of the /i/ or /u/ sounds producing paired word al-

ternations such as /b a 3 d/ and /ba3id/ for

YªK.

‘still;after’ or /khubz/ and /khubuz/ or

/kh u b i z/ (in different sub-dialects) for



Q.

‘bread’.

We opted to use the fully epenthesized forms in the

lexicon, i.e.,

Yª



id,



Q

.

xubuz, and



Q.

xubiz,

for the above mentioned examples.

Arabic orthographic transliteration is presented in the

HSB Scheme (italics) (Habash et al.,2007). Arabic script

orthography is presented in the CODA* scheme, and Arabic

phonology is presented in the CAPHI scheme (between /../)

(Habash et al.,2018).

A Palestinian town located 8 kilometers south of Bethle-

hem in the West Bank.

In the Palestinian village of Ramadin, near Hebron in the

West Bank.

3.2 Morphology

Like other DA, PAL has a complex morphology em-

ploying templatic and concatenative morphemes,

and including a rich set of morphological features:

gender, number, person, state, aspect, in addition to

numerous clitics. We highlight some speciﬁc mor-

phological phenomena that we needed to handle.

Ta Marbuta

The so-called feminine singular suf-

ﬁx morpheme, or Ta Marbuta (



è~

), is a morpheme

that can be used to mark feminine singular nomi-

nals, but that also appears with masculine singular

and plural nominals. Morphophonemically, it has

a number of forms in PAL that vary contextually.

First, in some PAL sub-dialects, the Ta Marbuta is

pronounced as /a/ when preceded by an emphatic

consonant, velars, and pharyngeal fricatives, e.g.,



é



¢

.

baT

∼

/b a t. t. a/ ‘duck’; otherwise it re-

alizes as /e/, e.g.,



é



.

bis

∼

/b i s s e/. In some

northern PAL dialects, the /e/ variant appears as /i/;

and in some southern PAL dialects, the distinction

is gone and all Ta Marbutas are pronounced /a/.

Second, the Ta Marbuta turns into its allomorph

/i t/ in Idafa constructions, e.g., /b i s s i t/ ‘the/a

cat of’. Finally, for some active participle deverbal

nouns, the Ta Marbuta realizes as /aa/ or /ii t/ when

followed by a pronominal object clitic, e.g.,

èA

J.



KA¿

kaAt.baAh /k aa t b aa (h)/ or

é



J



J.



KA¿

kaAt.biy.tuh or

/katbiitu(h)/ ‘she wrote it’.

Complex Plural Forms

Besides the common

use of broken plural (templatic plural) in DA, we

encountered cases of blocked plurals where a typi-

cal sound plural or templatic plural is not generated

because another word form is used in its place

(Aronoff,1976). One example from Ramadin, is

the plural form of the word

É





«ς

∼

il /3 a y y i l/

‘child [lit. dependent]’, which is blocked by the

word form



¬ñ

ª



uwf /dh. 3 uu f/ ‘children [lit.

weaklings]’.

3.3 Syntax

Previous research on Arabic dialects reveals that

the syntactic differences between these dialects are

considered to be minor compared to the morpho-

logical ones (Brustad,2000). One particular chal-

lenging phenomenon we encountered is a class

of nouns used in adjectival constructions, but vi-

olating noun-adjective agreement rules, which in-

volve gender, number and rationality (Alkuhlani

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Maknuune:ALargeOpenPalestinianArabicLexiconShahdDibas,ChristianKhairallah,NizarHabashOmarFayezSadi,*TariqSairafy,*KarmelSarabta,*AbrarArdah*UniversityofOxford,NewYorkUniversityAbuDhabi*UniversityCollegeofEducationalSciences-UNRWAshahd.dibas@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk,christian.khairallah@nyu.edu,nizar....

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