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Nabataean Arabic was the dialect of Arabic spoken by the Nabataeans in antiquity.
In the first century AD, the Nabataeans wrote their inscriptions, such as the legal texts carved on the façades of the monumental tombs at Mada'in Salih, ancient Ḥegrā, in Nabataean Aramaic.
It is probable, however, that some or all of them, possibly in varying proportion depending on the region of the Nabataean Kingdom where they lived, spoke Arabic.
The term Nabataean Arabic may also refer to the script that succeeded Nabataean Aramaic and preceded Paleo-Arabic.
| + Consonant phonemes of Nabataean Arabic ! colspan="2" rowspan="2" | ! rowspan="2" Labial consonant ! rowspan="2" | Dental consonant ! colspan="2" | Denti-alveolar ! rowspan="2" | Palatal ! rowspan="2" | Velar consonant ! rowspan="2" | Pharyngeal ! rowspan="2" | Glottal |
| + Monophthong phonemes ! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2" Short ! colspan="2" | Long |
In contrast with Old Hejazi and Classical Arabic, Nabataean Arabic may have undergone the shift < * and < *, as evidenced by the numerous Greek transcriptions of Arabic from the area. This may have occurred in Safaitic as well, making it a possible Northern Old Arabic isogloss.
Nabataean א in دوسرا ( dwsrʾ) does not signal ; it would seem that *ay# collapsed to something like . Scribes must have felt that this sound was closer to א when the spelling conventions of Nabataean were fixed. In Greek transcription, this sound was felt to be closer to an e-class vowel, yielding Δουσαρης.
| + Proto-Arabic (unattested) !rowspan=2 | !rowspan=2 Triptote !rowspan=2 | Diptote !rowspan=2 | Dual !colspan=2 | Plural |
Proto-Arabic nouns could take one of the five above declensions in their basic, unbound form. The definite article spread areally among the Central Semitic languages and it would seem that Proto-Arabic lacked any overt marking of definiteness.
| + Pre-Nabataean Arabic (unattested) !rowspan=2 | !rowspan=2 Triptote !rowspan=2 | Diptote !rowspan=2 | Dual !colspan=2 | Plural |
Final short vowels were lost, then nunation was lost, producing a new set of final short vowels. The definite article /ʾal-/ entered the language shortly after this stage.
| + Nabataean Arabic (ʿEn ʿAvdat, c. 125 CE) !rowspan=2 | !rowspan=2 Triptote !rowspan=2 | Diptote !rowspan=2 | Dual !colspan=2 | Plural |
The ʿEn ʿAvdat inscription shows that final n had been deleted in undetermined triptotes, and that the final short vowels of the determined state were intact. The reconstructed text of the inscription is as follows:
| + Nabataean Arabic (JSNab 17, 267 CE) !rowspan=2 | !rowspan=2 Triptote !rowspan=2 | Diptote !rowspan=2 | Dual !colspan=2 | Plural |
In JSNab 17, All Arabic triptotes terminate in w regardless of their syntactic position or whether they are defined.
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