اللوحة عالقماش.

In Arabic, the present-tense verb to be is usually omitted. So a sentence like اللوحة عالقماش is understood as The painting is on the canvas/fabric even though there is no separate word for is.

This is very normal in both Levantine and Standard Arabic-style sentence structure.

عالقماش is a colloquial Levantine contraction of على القماش.

So:

• على = on
• القماش = the fabric / the canvas
• على القماش becomes عالقماش in everyday speech

This kind of contraction is very common in Levantine.

Yes. اللوحة على القماش is perfectly understandable and closer to the full form.

In everyday Levantine speech, though, people often shorten على الـ to عالـ. So عالقماش sounds more natural in casual spoken language.

A good way to think of it is:

• على القماش = fuller, less colloquial
• عالقماش = everyday spoken Levantine

The letter ع is ʿayn, a sound made deep in the throat. It does not exist in English, so learners often find it difficult at first.

For this phrase, عال is roughly ʿal.

If you cannot produce it perfectly yet, that is normal. A decent beginner goal is:

• do not turn it into a plain English a
• try to make a slight throat constriction before the vowel

Many learners write it as 3al in informal transliteration.

That depends on the speaker and region.

The main point is the letter ق:

• in many urban Levantine accents, ق is pronounced as a glottal stop ʔ
• in some other accents, it stays q

So القماش may sound like:

• il-ʔmaash
• or il-qmaash

After عال, you may hear something like ʿal-ʔmaash or ʿal-qmaash.

Both are possible depending on dialect.

Because both nouns are definite:

• اللوحة = the painting / the panel / the picture
• القماش = the fabric / the canvas

Arabic often uses definiteness a little differently from English, but here it simply means that both are understood as specific things in the context.

This is a very common Arabic pattern:

• اللوحة = the main noun, the thing being talked about
• عالقماش = a prepositional phrase telling where it is

So the structure is basically:

• noun + location phrase

In English terms, you can think of it as:

• The painting + is on the canvas

but Arabic leaves out the present-tense is.

Yes, لوحة is grammatically feminine. You can see that from the ending ـة.

In this sentence, that does not cause any visible change, because the second part is a prepositional phrase, not an adjective.

But if you added an adjective or a past-tense verb, the feminine would matter. For example:

• اللوحة كبيرة = the painting is big
• اللوحة كانت عالقماش = the painting was on the canvas

That ending is called tāʾ marbūṭa. In pause, or when the word stands on its own, it is usually pronounced -a in speech.

So لوحة is pronounced something like lawḥa.

The t sound can appear in other grammatical contexts, especially in more formal Arabic, but in this sentence you normally just hear -a.

It is basically Levantine in the way it is written, because عالقماش reflects spoken pronunciation.

A more Standard Arabic-style version would be:

• اللوحة على القماش

So:

• the vocabulary itself is not especially dialect-only
• the contraction عالـ is what makes it clearly colloquial Levantine-style

That is very common in informal writing that tries to match speech.