allophone in most modern Arabic dialects, mostly as a variant of (as in Arabian Peninsula and Northwest African dialects) or as a variant of (as in Egyptian and a number of Yemeni and Omani dialects). It is also considered a separate foreign phoneme that appears only in loanwords, as in most urban Levantine dialects where is and is . The phoneme represented by the Arabic letter () has many standard pronunciations: in most of the Arabian Peninsula and as the predominant pronunciation of Literary Arabic outside the Arab world, in most of Egypt and some regions in southern Yemen and southwestern Oman. This is also a characteristic of colloquial Egyptian and southern Yemeni dialects. In Morocco and western Algeria, it is pronounced as in some words, especially colloquially. In most north Africa and most of the Levant, the standard is pronounced , and in certain regions of the Persian Gulf colloquially with . In some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either or as it used to be in Classical Arabic. The foreign phonemes and are not necessarily pronounced by all Arabic speakers, but are often pronounced in names and loanwords. and are usually transcribed with their own letters and but as these letters are not present on standard keyboards, they are simply written with and , e.g. both and , or "November", both and "caprice" can be used. The use of both sounds may be considered marginal and Arabs may pronounce the words interchangeably; besides, many loanwords have become Arabized, e.g. or "Pakistan", or "virus". is another possible loanword phoneme, as in the word or (sandawitš or sāndwitš 'sandwich'), though a number of varieties instead break up the and sounds with an epenthetic vowel. Egyptian Arabic treats as two consonants () and inserts , as [C] or [C], when it occurs before or after another consonant. is found as normal in Iraqi Arabic and Gulf Arabic. Normally the combination (tā’-shīn) is used to transliterate the , while in rural Levantine dialects /k/ is usually substituted with while speaking and would be written as ك. Otherwise Arabic usually substitutes other letters in the transliteration of names and loanwords like the Persian character which is used for writing . Other Variations include: Split of original into two phonemes, distinguished primarily by how they affect neighboring vowels. This has progressed the farthest in North Africa. See Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Tunisian