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Parallel Arabic blog
- September 3, 2026 6 min read
How many Egyptian Arabic words do you actually need?
Running the numbers on a 2,404-word frequency list built from 29.3 million tokens of Egyptian: a hundred words cover almost half of everything said, and you cannot study a single one of them.
- September 3, 2026 7 min read
Franco Arabic: why Egyptians write 3, 7 and 2 in text messages
The digits are not slang. Arabic has sounds the Latin alphabet has no letters for, so people reached for the numbers that look like the Arabic letters โ and kept doing it long after the phones stopped forcing them to.
- September 2, 2026 7 min read
Arabic games worth your time
Why most Arabic word games don't survive contact with a cursive script and unwritten vowels, the four questions worth asking about any of them, and the handful that hold up.
- June 19, 2026 12 min read
Writing Arabic in English
How I built a phonetic Arabic keyboard that maps English keys to Arabic sounds, and the problems I had to solve to get there: a cursive script, throat letters, hamza, and diacritics.
- June 17, 2026 8 min read
The Arabic alphabet, the Egyptian way
The 28 letters, but with the sounds you will actually hear on the street in Cairo, where ุฌ is a hard G, ู quietly disappears, and ุซ is almost never a "th".