Levantine Dictionary: Arabic-English

The Levantine colloquial dictionary (LCA) was the third dictionary added to the site and the first one started working on after I had conceived this project after graduating. Initially frustrated with the lack of resources, I found that Arabs from the Levant (Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria) had done significant amounts of research on their own dialects. I was able to translate original Arabic-Arabic material and then expanded beyond that by transcribing entire films, documenting my interactions with native speakers, and going through textbooks and other linguistic books. I had to make sure to act as though I were in a vacuum and had no inherent knowledge of the dialect, so as not to bias the data in any way. The Levantine dictionary was also where I developed a sub-dialect tagging system to differentiate between different dialects based on where I had learned the word or phrase (not necessarily the extent of its usage) within a single dictionary.