TII unveils Falcon-Emirati, a language model focused on the Emirati dialect and culture

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the creator of the Falcon models, has introduced Falcon-Emirati-7B, a language model specialized in the Arabic spoken in the United Arab Emirates.

The Arabic of news and textbooks, Modern Standard Arabic, is not the one people use in everyday conversation. In the Emirates people speak a Gulf dialect with its own vocabulary, and its proverbs and poetry do not survive a word-for-word translation.

Falcon-Emirati-7B, with 7 billion parameters, is built on Falcon-H1-Arabic, the institute's own family of Arabic models. It was trained on text from websites and forums written in the Emirati dialect, on material about the country's culture and on synthetic data generated under glossaries and style rules for the dialect.

On Alyah, a test of 1,173 questions collected from native speakers, it scores 84.83%, ahead of every model it was compared against, some of them much larger. In a second test, with a Google model (Gemini 3.7 Flash) acting as judge, it was the only one of the five models compared that reliably answered in Emirati: the others often knew the answer but gave it in Modern Standard Arabic. These are TII's own results.

It can be tried now in Falcon Chat, the institute's chat website. TII warns that it can get rare expressions wrong and recommends testing it before using it for anything official or sensitive.

TII sums it up this way: model size alone is not enough to master a dialect, it has to be trained for on purpose.