A dedicated Falcon for Emirati Arabic: 84.83% on questions from native speakers

In TII's Oct 6 evaluations, Falcon-Emirati-7B correctly answered 84.83% of the questions in Alyah, a benchmark compiled by native speakers of the dialect.

Falcon-Emirati-7B understands and generates the Emirati dialect of Arabic. You can try the model in Falcon Chat through the authors' direct link.

From formal to conversational. TII built the model on Falcon-H1-Arabic with 7 billion parameters and adapted it to UAE speech and culture. Training used Emirati websites and forums, cultural material in Modern Standard Arabic, and synthetic dialogues based on dialect dictionaries and rules.

Two different evaluations. Alyah contains 1,173 questions manually collected from native speakers of the dialect. Gemini 3.7 Flash evaluated open-ended answers, awarding partial credit for dialect alignment. The Alyah comparison included other models but not the base Falcon-H1-Arabic, so these results compare Falcon-Emirati with its competitors.

| Model | Dialect alignment in open-ended answers, score | UAE cultural scenarios, share of correct answers | | --- | --- | --- | | Falcon-Emirati-7B | 0.52 | 85.57% | | ALLaM | 0.05 | 83.39% for ALLaM-7B | | gemma-3-27b-it | 0.03 | — | | Jais-2-8B | — | 73.79% | | Fanar-2-27B | — | 71.50% |

TII's Oct 6 cultural evaluation covers 283 UAE scenarios from ArabCulture-Dialogue. Falcon-Emirati-7B outperformed ALLaM-7B by 2.18 percentage points.

To write an Eid greeting in the Emirati dialect, just open Falcon Chat with Falcon-Emirati-7B selected and describe the task in the chat. No separate installation is needed.

Original source: [TII's Hugging Face article from Oct 6, 2026](https://huggingface.co/blog/tiiuae/falcon-emirati).

Try it: [Falcon Chat with Falcon-Emirati-7B selected](https://chat.falconllm.tii.ae/?model=Falcon-Emirati-7B).

TII also compared responses from 3 models to 5 prompts about Eid greetings and local history, poetry and cultural heritage.