This paper describes the 1996 Byblos Callhome speech recognition system for Spanish and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. The system uses a combination of Phoneticly Tied-Mixture Gaussian HMMs and State- Clustered Tied-Mixture Gaussian HMMs in a multiple pass decoder. We focus here on the aspects of the system which are language specific and demonstrate the adaptability of the Byblos English system to new languages. Language related issues arising from both dialectal differences as well as differences between transcribed and spoken language are discussed. This system gave the lowest error rates in both Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and Spanish in the October 1996 NIST Callhome evaluation.