Gaza City, with a population of over half a million residents, is the largest urban center and de-facto capital of the Gaza Strip, which itself has a total population of over 1.8 million. As of 2018, it is estimated that at least 1.3 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees from other areas in historic Palestine, having fled to Gaza after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These refugee communities originally come from the many historic rural areas that surrounded the Gaza Strip, smaller towns and cities along the Mediterranean coast, as well as areas further afield such as Jaffa, 69 km north of Gaza on the coast, and Bir il-Sab‘, the largest city in the Nagab desert region (see Figure 1). Linguistically, many of these refugee communities are of Palestinian Arabic dialect backgrounds, although varieties of Arabic spoken in the Nagab are classified as originating in the Hijaz area of what is today Saudi Arabia (see Shahin 2007 on Palestinian Arabic and Henkin 2010 on Nagab Arabic).