Alyah ⭐️: Toward Robust Evaluation of Emirati Dialect Capabilities in Arabic LLMs
Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with hundreds of millions of speakers across more than twenty countries. Despite this global reach, Arabic is not a monolithic language. Modern Standard Arabic coexists with a rich landscape of regional dialects that differ significantly in vocabulary, syntax, phonology, and cultural grounding. These dialects are the primary medium of daily communication, oral storytelling, poetry, and social interaction. However, most existing benchmarks for Arabic large language models focus almost exclusively on Modern Standard Arabic, leaving dialectal Arabic largely under-evaluated and under-represented.
This gap