Does Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Dominate Arabic Dialects in LLMs? A Representation-Level Analysis
Large language models (LLMs) often default to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) when generating Arabic, even when prompted with dialectal Arabic. A natural explanation is that their internal representations are dominated by MSA. We test this hypothesis by adapting the language-dominance framework of Shani and Basirat (2025) (https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.blackboxnlp-1.7) to 26 Arabic varieties. Across layers and model families, we find no evidence that MSA acts as a dominant internal representation for Arabic dialects. Instead, dialect representations form a dense and highly overlapping space: normalized mutual information drops sharply compared to patterns reported for more distinct langua...
| Authors | Abdu Sallouh, Nicholas Popovič, Michael Färber |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 October 2026 |
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