Algeria, Iraq, Levant. This is also the commonly taught pronunciation outside the Arabic speaking countries when Literary Arabic is taught as a foreign language. : In the Levant, Southern Iraqi Arabic and Northwestern Africa. : In Egypt, coastal Yemen (West and South), southwestern Oman, and eastern Oman. : In Sudan and hinterland Yemen, as well as being a common reconstruction of the Classical Arabic pronunciation. Non-literary pronunciation : In eastern Arabian Peninsula in the most colloquial speech, however or sometimes to pronounce Literary Arabic loan words. Historical pronunciation While in all Semitic languages, e.g. Aramaic, Hebrew, Ge'ez, Old South Arabian the equivalent letter represents a , Arabic is considered unique among them where the Jīm was palatalized to an affricate or a fricative in most dialects from classical times. While there is variation in Modern Arabic varieties, most of them reflect this palatalized pronunciation except in coastal Yemeni and Omani dialects as well as in Egypt, where it is pronounced . It is not well known when palatalization occurred or the probability of it being connected to the pronunciation of Qāf as a , but in most of the Arabian peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE and parts of Yemen and Oman) which is the homeland of the Arabic language, the represents a and represents a , except in coastal Yemen and southern Oman where represents a and represents a , which shows a strong correlation between the palatalization of to and the pronunciation of the as a as shown in the table below: Character encodings See also The serif form of the Hebrew letter gimel is occasionally used for the gimel function in mathematics. References External links The Mystical Significance of the Hebrew Letters: Gimel Phoenician alphabet Hebrew letters