Does Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Dominate Arabic Dialects in LLMs? A Representation-Level Analysis
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2610.11510 (cs)
[Submitted on 8 Oct 2026]
Title:Does Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Dominate Arabic Dialects in LLMs? A Representation-Level Analysis
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Abstract: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) (this https URL) 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 languages. Moreover, the strongest separability effects are not confined to intermediate layers, but can shift toward later layers depending on the architecture. These findings challenge a common interpretation of MSA-biased generation: output preference does not necessarily reveal internal representational dominance. Analyses of multilingual and dialectal LLMs should therefore distinguish generation bias from the geometry of internal representations.
| Comments: | EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.11510 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.11510v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.11510
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Does Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) Dominate Arabic Dialects in LLMs? A Representation-Level Analysis, by Abdu Sallouh and 2 other authors
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