Levant or (Sham) as known in Arabic is consist of 4 countries 1- Syria 2-Jordan 3-Lebanon 4-Palestine all of people in these countries talking Levantine Arabic with small differences between them but Levantine Arabic so different from Egyptian dialect I cant say its near from the standard Arabic but its not too far I think its the best in the Arabic dialects : )

A picture is worth a thousand words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic#mediaviewer/File:Arabic_Dialects.svg Levantine Arabic is spoken in the Levant, which is the easternmost outpost of the Mediterranean. That includes Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and much of Jordan, which is more than 50% Palestinian, especially in its western part. Syrian and Jordanian are both subdialects of Levantine, but they have different names because there are certain differences between them. Levantine Arabic is more similar to Modern Standard Arabic than are, for example, the Maghrebi dialects. Some argue that they're not exactly dialects but that some of them should be treated as distinct languages in their own right. The best-known linguistic criterion for this is lack of so-called mutual intelligibility.