Cairo

Level: Beginner Audience: Family / all ages Geo: Egypt → Cairo (the numbers a child hears at a Khan el-Khalili stall, on a Metro ticket and in a grandmother's kitchen)

Egypt uses two sets of written numerals side by side. Shop signs, car plates and many price tags use the Eastern Arabic numerals (١ ٢ ٣), while the "Western" digits most of the world uses (1 2 3) are increasingly common too; a Cairo child learns to read both. Note that in Cairo the letter ث is usually said as t, which is why "three" is talata rather than the Standard Arabic thalatha, and the letter ق in "two" has disappeared entirely, leaving itnein. The table gives the spoken word first, because that is what a child needs, with the Eastern Arabic numeral for reading signs.

One to ten

Number	Egyptian Arabic	Simple transliteration	Eastern Arabic numeral	Notes
1	واحد	wahid	١	Omniglot: waḥid; the h is breathy.
2	اتنين	itnein	٢	Omniglot: itnayn.
3	تلاتة	talata	٣	Standard Arabic thalatha; Cairo says t.
4	أربعة	arba'a	٤	The apostrophe marks the throaty letter ع.
5	خمسة	khamsa	٥	Also the name of the hand-shaped charm.
6	ستة	sitta	٦	Double t, held slightly.
7	سبعة	sab'a	٧
8	تمانية	tamanya	٨	Omniglot: tamānya.
9	تسعة	tis'a	٩
10	عشرة	'ashara	١٠	Begins with the throaty ع.

[Audio: a native speaker counting from wahid to 'ashara, slowly, then clapping once per number]

Where a child will hear them

• In the bazaar: prices are bargained out loud in Khan el-Khalili, and the numbers fly.
• On the Metro: fares depend on how many stations you travel, so counting stops is a real skill.
• In the kitchen: recipes, spoonfuls of sugar in the tea, and the dates on the iftar plate.

Try it at home

1. Count the chairs around the dinner table: wahid, itnein, talata.
2. Read the Eastern Arabic numerals on a photograph of a Cairo shop sign or a banknote.
3. Play "hide the date": one person hides a date under one of five cups and the other guesses with a number word.

[Image: five small tea glasses in a row, numbered ١ to ٥]

Number words from Omniglot: Numbers in Egyptian Arabic and Wikivoyage: Egyptian Arabic phrasebook; numerals from Wikipedia: Eastern Arabic numerals (all accessed 2026-10-04). Only 1 to 10 are given; higher numbers and ordinals belong to an Intermediate module.

Level: Beginner Audience: Family / all ages Geo: Egypt → Cairo (the Cairene dialect of Egyptian Arabic is the one heard across the Arab world in Egyptian films and songs; Modern Standard Arabic is the written and official language)

Egyptian Arabic, which Egyptians call Masri, is what a child will hear in a Cairo kitchen, a microbus or a Khan el-Khalili shop. It is written in the Arabic script, read right to left. Two sounds mark a Cairo speaker out at once: the letter ج is said as a hard g (as in "go"), and the letter ق usually becomes a glottal stop, the little catch in the middle of "uh-oh". Many greetings change their ending depending on whether you speak to a man or a woman (-ak for a man, -ik for a woman). Transliterations below are simplified for English readers; Omniglot's fuller spellings are given in the notes where they help.

Greeting someone

Egyptian Arabic	English	Notes
أهلاً (Ahlan)	Hello; hi	The everyday greeting at any hour. Warmer: أهلاً و سهلاً (Ahlan wa sahlan), "welcome".
السلام عليكو (Es-salamu 'aleku)	Peace be upon you (formal hello)	The respectful greeting for elders and strangers; Wikivoyage gives the Cairo form with -ku.
صباح الخير (Sabah el-kheir)	Good morning	Literally "morning of goodness".
مساء الخير (Misa' el-kheir)	Good evening
إزيك؟ (Izzayak? / Izzayik?)	How are you? (to a man / to a woman)	Omniglot: izayyak / izayyik. Cairenes say it to everyone, even shopkeepers they have never met.
كويس / كويسة (Kwayyis / Kwayyisa)	I'm fine (a man says / a woman says)	Usually followed by الحمد لله (al-hamdulillah), "praise God", and "wa inta?" / "wa inti?", "and you?"
تصبح على خير (Tisbah 'ala kheir)	Good night (to a man)	Literally "may you wake to goodness". Wikivoyage gives forms for a woman and a group.

[Audio: a Cairo parent or grandparent recording each greeting in the male and female forms]

Courtesy words a child should know

Egyptian Arabic	English	Notes
شكراً (Shukran)	Thank you	The one word every visitor learns first.
عفواً (Afwan)	You're welcome	Wikivoyage also gives العفو (el-'afw).
لو سمحت (Law samaht)	Please; excuse me	Literally "if you permit". Also من فضلك (Min fadlak / Min fadlik), "please", to a man / a woman.
عن إذنك (An iznak)	Excuse me (leaving, or getting past)	Omniglot gives the form to a man; to a woman the ending becomes -ik.
آسف / أسفة (Aasif / Asfa)	Sorry (a man says / a woman says)
أيوا (Aywa)	Yes
لا (La)	No
إسمك إيه؟ (Ismak eh? / Ismik eh?)	What is your name? (to a man / to a woman)	"Eh" is the Egyptian word for "what".
اسمي ... (Ismi ...)	My name is ...
مع السلامة (Ma'a salama)	Goodbye	Literally "with peace"; said to the person leaving.

[Audio: the courtesy words said slowly and then at normal speed]

Try it at home

1. Child knocks; grandparent answers; child says: Es-salamu 'aleku. Grandparent: Ahlan wa sahlan!
2. Grandparent: Izzayak? (to a boy) or Izzayik? (to a girl). Child: Kwayyis, al-hamdulillah / Kwayyisa, al-hamdulillah.
3. Child is handed a plate: Shukran. Grandparent: Afwan.
4. At bedtime: Tisbah 'ala kheir.

[Image: a family greeting a grandmother at the door of a Cairo flat with kisses on both cheeks]

Only well-attested Egyptian Arabic forms are listed (Omniglot: Useful Egyptian Arabic phrases; Wikivoyage: Egyptian Arabic phrasebook; all accessed 2026-10-04). Pronunciation varies by family and neighbourhood; let a relative's voice be the final authority.

In the month of Ramadan, the alleys of Khan el-Khalili do not go to sleep. They wake up when the sun goes down. Youssef, who was eight, knew this because his grandfather's shop was there, deep in the old bazaar near the mosque of al-Hussein, and every evening after the iftar meal his mother let him run down the lane to help.

Grandfather Sayed made lanterns. Not electric ones from a box, but the real fanous, cut from sheets of tin and bent into shapes like little mosques and stars, with windows of coloured glass: ruby, emerald, honey, and the deep blue of the Nile at night. When you put a candle inside, the colours came out and painted the walls.

"Why do we hang lanterns in Ramadan?" Youssef asked, as he always did, because he liked the answer.

"People tell a story," said Grandfather, filing the edge of a piece of tin so that it would not cut anyone, "that more than a thousand years ago, when the Caliph al-Mu'izz came to live in his brand-new city of al-Qahira, he arrived at night, in Ramadan, and the people came out into the dark streets holding lanterns so that he could see his way. Nobody can prove it. But every year since, Cairo has lit up for the month, and so the story must be at least a little bit true."

That year Youssef had been given a job of his own. He was to make one small fanous from start to finish, and if it was good enough, Grandfather would hang it in the shop window with the others.

He cut the tin, and cut his thumb, and tried again. He bent the little roof. He fitted the panes of glass one by one, and the last pane, the blue one, the best one, slipped from his fingers and cracked across the middle.

Youssef sat down on the step of the shop and did not cry, but only because the lane was full of people.

Grandfather picked up the cracked blue glass and held it to the light of the alley. "Hm," he said. He went to his box of pieces and came back with a thin strip of brass. He laid it along the crack and pressed and folded, and the crack became a shining line, like a river running down the middle of the blue.

"Now the Nile runs through it," he said. "No other lantern in the Khan has that."

At midnight the lane was as bright as noon. Tourists photographed the strings of lights; old men played backgammon outside El-Fishawy, where tea has been poured since before anyone's great-great-grandfather was born; children ran past swinging their own small lanterns and singing. A girl Youssef did not know stopped in front of the window and pointed at the blue fanous with the brass river, and her father bought it, and Grandfather let Youssef take the money.

"But now it is gone," Youssef said, watching the girl carry his lantern away down the alley, its blue light bobbing among the crowd until it disappeared.

"Is the lane darker?" asked Grandfather.

Youssef looked. It was not.

"A lantern is for giving light," said Grandfather Sayed. "If you keep it in a box it is only tin and glass. Light it and give it away, and it is still shining somewhere, and you have lost nothing at all."

Very early, long before the sun, Youssef woke to a drum in the street below: the musaharati, walking the lanes to wake the neighbourhood for the dawn meal, calling the names of the families as he passed. He lay in the dark and thought of his lantern lit in some other window on the far side of the city, with the Nile running through it, and he fell back asleep smiling.

In the morning he went to the shop and asked Grandfather for a new sheet of tin.

Nour was nine years old and she did not like waiting for anything. She pressed the lift button three times. She finished her homework before the teacher had finished explaining it. When her mother said "five minutes", Nour counted them.

Her Uncle Hassan was the opposite. He sailed a felucca on the Nile, one of the old wooden boats with a single tall sail shaped like a bird's wing, and he moored it below the river wall on the Cairo side, where the water runs between the city and the island of Gezira. On Fridays, after lunch, Nour's family would walk down to the bank, and Uncle Hassan would wave from the deck and shout, "Ahlan! Come aboard!"

This Friday, Nour was going to steer.

"First," said Uncle Hassan, when she had jumped down onto the warm planks, "we wait."

"Wait for what?"

"For the wind." He sat down on the edge of the boat and dangled his feet. "The sail is big and the wind is lazy today. If I push off now, we will drift down the river like a leaf and have to row all the way back. So we wait."

Nour looked at the sail, hanging flat and still. She looked at the river. The brown water slid past as if it had nowhere special to be. Across it, the Cairo Tower stood up out of the trees of Gezira like a tall stone flower, and to the left the long bridge with the four bronze lions carried its endless line of cars.

"How long?" she asked.

"Until the lions tell us."

Nour did not think that was a real answer, but she sat down next to him. A ferry went past, full of people, and the felucca rocked. A fisherman in a little rowing boat pulled up his net, found nothing in it, and laughed anyway.

"Look at the flags on the bridge," said Uncle Hassan.

Nour looked. The little flags on the lamp posts hung straight down. Then one of them twitched. Then another. Then they all lifted together and pointed, very politely, downriver.

"Now?" said Nour.

"Now the lions are telling us. Untie the front rope."

Nour untied it, and Uncle Hassan pushed off from the wall with a long pole, and for a moment nothing happened at all. Then the sail filled with a soft whump, like a sheet being shaken out on a balcony, and the whole boat leaned, and the water began to talk against the side.

"Take the tiller," said her uncle, and he put the long wooden handle in her hands. "Small moves. The boat is listening to you, so do not shout at it."

Nour pushed the tiller. The boat turned too much. She pulled it back. The boat turned the other way. The sail shivered and went soft.

"Gently," said Uncle Hassan. "You are not fighting the wind. You are making friends with it. Feel where it wants to go, and go a little bit beside it."

She tried again, a tiny push, and this time the sail stayed full and the felucca ran along the island under the tower, and the city slid past her on both sides, hotels and palms and people leaning on the river wall taking photographs of her.

"The wind does not belong to anyone," said Uncle Hassan. "Not to me, not to the ferry captain, not to the governor. The only thing you can own is the patience to wait for it and the skill to use it when it comes."

They sailed as far as the big bridge and turned, and coming back the wind was weaker and Nour had to be even gentler, feeling for it, letting the boat find its own way. When they tied up again at the wall, the sun was low and orange over Giza and the whole river had turned to copper.

"Kwayyis," said Uncle Hassan. "Good. Shukran, captain."

Nour looked at the flags on the bridge, which had gone still again, and then at the lift button of her building when they got home. She pressed it once and waited.