A few examples illustrating similarities and differences across MSA and three Arabic dialects: Levantine, Gulf, and Egyptian. Even when a word is spelled the same across two or more varieties, the pronunciation might differ due to differences in short vowels (which are not spelled out). Also, due to the lack of orthography standardization, and variance in pronunciation even within a single dialect, some dialectal words could have more than one spelling (e.g., Egyptian “I drink” could be bAšrb, Levantine “He drinks” could be byšrb). (We use the Habash-Soudi-Buckwalter transliteration scheme to represent Arabic orthography, which maps each Arabic letter to a single, distinct character. We provide a table with the character mapping in Appendix A.)