In the Turkish province of Şanlıurfa, approximately 300,000 people—both in the city itself and in more than one hundred villages and several district towns—speak an Arabic dialect that is typologically very close to those of the semi-nomadic populations of the Syrian steppe. In contrast to speakers of these related dialects in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan, all members of this minority are, on the one hand, bilingual in Turkish and, on the other hand, have no knowledge of the Arabic written standard. Moreover, contact with other Arabic dialects, and particularly with prestige varieties, is extremely limited.

These factors have led to the emergence, here on the northern periphery of the Arabic-speaking world, of a form of the dialect that is characterized by a number of archaisms in phonology, morphology, and syntax in comparison with related dialects in Syria and other countries. At the same time, numerous interesting intradialectal innovations can be observed (e.g., the development of new prepositions through the grammaticalization of body-part terms), as well as innovations in phraseology, lexicon, and syntax (including calques, semantic extension, and changes in word order), which can be attributed to language contact with Turkish.