Saʽīdi Arabic
Upper Egyptian Arabic
صعيدى
Native to	Egypt
Region	Al Minya Governorate and south toSudan border;Red Sea area;Cairo area[1]
Ethnicity	Sa'idis
Speakers	27 million (2024)[2]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Saʽīdi Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	aec
Glottolog	said1239
Linguasphere	12-AAC-eb[3]
[image reference needed]
This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA.

Ṣaʽīdi Arabic (autonym:صعيدى[sˤɑˈʕiːdi],Egyptian Arabic:[sˤeˈʕiːdi]), orUpper Egyptian Arabic,^[4] is a variety ofArabic spoken by theUpper Egyptians in the area that is South/Upper Egypt, a strip of land on both sides of theNile that extends fromAswan and downriver (northwards) toLower Egypt.^[5] It shares linguistic features withEgyptian Arabic,Modern Standard Arabic, and theClassical Arabic of theQuran. Dialects include Middle and Upper Egyptian Arabic.^[6][7]

Speakers of Egyptian Arabic do not always understand moreconservative varieties of Ṣaʽīdi Arabic.^[8]

Ṣaʽīdi Arabic carries littleprestige nationally, but it continues to be widely spoken in the South, and in the north by Southern migrants who have also adapted toEgyptian Arabic. For example, the Ṣaʽīdigenitiveexponent is usually replaced with Egyptianbitāʿ, but the realisation of/q/ as[ɡ] is retained (normally realised in Egyptian Arabic as[ʔ]).

Ṣaʽīdi Arabic has various sub-dialects and varies widely between locales. Because of the tribal nature of Upper Egypt, and because some of the Upper Egyptian tribes have had links to the formal Arabic language with its proper pronunciations, or theclassical Arabic language could be vividly noticed in many sub-dialects. For example, the word "قعمز" meaning "sit", is used throughout Egypt, Sudan, and the Maghreb, and continues to be widely used in Upper Egypt. Furthermore, in addition to similar pronunciation of letters with Hejazi cities such asJeddah andMecca, words such as "لسع" meaning "still" and "قمرية" meaning "wild pigeon" are in wide use in Upper Egypt. Other examples are classical words such as "فروج" meaning "chicken", as opposed to "فرخة" that is used in Northern Egypt.

Second- and third-generation Ṣaʽīdi migrants aremonolingual in Egyptian Arabic but maintain cultural and family ties to the south.

The Egyptian poetAbdel Rahman el-Abnudi wrote in his native Sa'idi dialect and was the voice of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and a prominent Egyptian nationalist.

Behnstedt and Woidich classify the dialects of Upper Egypt into four broad groupings:^[9]

1. Upper Egyptian 1 — dialects spoken south ofAsyut to the region ofLuxor. Theniktib-níkitbu paradigm is dominant in this group.
2. Upper Egyptian 2^[9] — dialects spoken in the bend of the Nile fromNag Hammadi to south ofQena, which have some typical Upper Egyptian features (glottalization of /ṭ/, breaking of /ē/ and /ō/, /d/ for Ǧīm, and theaktib-niktibu paradigm of the imperfect) but which have a syllable structure akin to Middle Egyptian dialects.
3. Upper Egyptian 3^[9] — dialects spoken on the west bank of the Nile from el-Bi’irat (nearLuxor) toEsna. They are characterized by a form of umlaut, thegahawa-syndrome, the plural suffix -aw in the perfect and imperfect conjugation, and feminine plural pronouns/conjugations. These features indicate strongBedouin influence.
4. Upper Egyptian 4^[9] — dialects spoken south of Luxor, characterized by a ‘pure’ pronunciation of /ā/, and the presence of /a/ in the definite article, as well as some pronouns. Ǧīm is realized [ɟ]. In the north of the region,aktib-niktib oraktib-nikitbu paradigm is used, in the southniktib-nikitbu.

Ṣaʽīdi Arabic has the following consonants:^[10]

• /dʒ/ is heard as[ɟ] in the southern Upper Egyptian dialects.^[11]
• An emphatic/tˤ/ may also have a glottalized allophone of[tˀ] in complementary distribution.

• Sounds /e,o/ appear in the Qifṭi or southern dialects.
• /a/ can also be heard with an allophone of[ə].
• Vowels may also have pharyngeal (emphatic) allophones as well.^[10]

• Varieties of Arabic
• Sa'idi people
• Copts
• Nubians
• Egyptian Arabic

• Khalafallah, Abdelghany A. (1969).A Descriptive Grammar of Sa'i:di Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. The Hague: Mouton.LCCN 68-17886.
• Nishio, Tetsuo (1994).The Arabic dialect of Qifṭ (Upper Egypt): grammar and classified vocabulary. Asian and African lexicon series. Vol. 27. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
• Versteegh, Kees (2001).The Arabic Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.ISBN 0-7486-1436-2.

• Egyptian Arabic
• Languages of Egypt
• Upper Egypt

• Language articles citing Ethnologue 28
• Language articles citing Ethnologue 17
• Language articles citing Ethnologue 15
• CS1 German-language sources (de)
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use dmy dates from March 2024
• Articles containing Arabic-language text
• Language articles with Linguasphere code
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from November 2022
• ISO language articles citing sources other than Ethnologue
• Articles containing Sa'idi Arabic-language text
• Pages with Sa'idi Arabic IPA
• Pages with Egyptian Arabic IPA
• Pages with plain IPA