Answers to common questions

Dialect Atlas is a quiet, offline-first platform for documenting and learning the world's spoken dialects. It brings together multi-dialect language apps, region pages, and reference material — designed for learners, heritage speakers, and linguists who want depth instead of a single flattened standard.

Standard languages are useful, but most people don't speak the standard form at home. Dialects carry memory, identity, migration, and belonging — and many of them are under-documented or actively endangered. Treating dialects as first-class citizens gives a fuller picture of how a language actually lives in the world.

We currently focus on Persian (Farsi, Dari, Tajik, Hazaragi), Arabic (Levantine, Egyptian, Gulf, Maghrebi), Kurdish (Kurmanji, Sorani, Hawrami), and Romanes. Each app starts with a few well-documented dialects and grows from there. The Languages page lists the latest coverage.

Yes — the apps are free, with no paywalled lessons. We do show native ads to sustain the project, and we try to keep them quiet and unobtrusive. If you'd rather not see them, you can support the project with a one-time lifetime premium purchase that removes ads for good.

Yes. The mobile apps are offline-first by design: lessons, vocabulary, grammar references, and dialect data are bundled inside the app, so you can study on a flight, in transit, or anywhere connectivity is unreliable. The web platform requires a connection.

We work from native-speaker contributions, published linguistic sources, and community review. Every dialect-data change is logged in each app's changelog with the files touched, dialects affected, and source or rationale, so the provenance stays visible and auditable.

No. If a word, form, or example doesn't exist in a given dialect, we leave the field empty rather than invent something to achieve symmetry. Honest coverage matters more than tidy parity, and learners deserve to see where the data is genuinely thin.

Native speakers, linguists, teachers, and learners are all welcome. You can submit dialect corrections, audio recordings, regional vocabulary, or longer-form articles. Visit the Contribute page or write to us — we read every message and reply.

We collect very little, share nothing for advertising, and keep what we have only as long as we need it. Server logs are retained for up to 14 days for security and stability. The Privacy page has the full breakdown.