Mesopotamian Arabic in the context of "North Mesopotamian Arabic"

Mandaeans (Mandaic: ࡌࡀࡍࡃࡀࡉࡉࡀ) (Arabic: المندائيون al-Mandāʾiyyūn), also known as Mandaean Sabians (الصابئة المندائيون al-Ṣābiʾa al-Mandāʾiyyūn) or simply as Sabians (الصابئة al-Ṣābiʾa), are an ethnoreligious group who are followers of Mandaeism. They believe that John the Baptist was the final and most important prophet.

They may have been among the earliest religious groups to practise baptism, as well as among the earliest adherents of Gnosticism, a belief system of which they are the last surviving representatives. The Mandaeans were originally native speakers of Mandaic, an Eastern Aramaic language, before they nearly all switched to Mesopotamian Arabic or Persian as their main language.

Syrians (Arabic: سوريون) are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic gradually became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians (particularly the Assyrians and Syriac-Arameans) retained Aramaic (Syriac), which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.

The national name "Syrian" was originally an Indo-European corruption of Assyrian and applied to Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, however by antiquity it was used to denote the inhabitants of the Levant. Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Arab identity gradually became dominant among many Syrians, and the ethnonym "Syrian" was used mainly by Christians in Levant, Mesopotamia and Anatolia who spoke Syriac. In the 19th century, the name "Syrian" was revived amongst the Arabic speakers of the Levant. Following the establishment of the Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920, the name "Syrian" began to spread amongst its Arabic speaking inhabitants. The term gained more importance during the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, becoming the accepted national name for the Arabic speakers of the Syrian Republic.

Najdi Arabic (Arabic: اللهجة النجدية, romanized: al-lahja an-najdiyya, Najdi Arabic: نجدي, Najdi pronunciation: [nadʒˈdi]) is the group of Arabic varieties originating from the Najd region of Saudi Arabia. Outside of Saudi Arabia, it is also the main Arabic variety spoken in the Syrian Desert of Iraq, Jordan, and Syria (with the exception of Palmyra oasis and settlements dotting the Euphrates, where Mesopotamian Arabic is spoken) as well as the westernmost part of Kuwait.

Najdi Arabic can be divided into four region-based groups:

Al-Fāw (Arabic: ٱلْفَاو; sometimes transliterated as Fao) is a port town on Al-Faw Peninsula in Iraq near the Shatt al-Arab and the Persian Gulf. The Al Faw Peninsula is part of the Basra Governorate. Al-Faw is located about 100 kilometers from the provincial capital, Basra, and has a population of approximately 52,000 people.

Until 1960, Al-Faw was part of Abu al-Khasib District, before being established as an independent district on August 30, 1960. The city is known for its marine products such as fish, shrimp, and salt, as well as for cultivating henna and date palms, the latter of which declined significantly due to the military and economic conflicts that lasted for 23 years under the rule of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The people of Al-Faw, like other residents of Basra, speak an Iraqi Arabic dialect similar to that of Kuwait, where the letter jīm (ج) is often pronounced as yā (ي), for example, the word rajul (man) is pronounced rayyāl.