Arabic Phonology - Local Variations

Local Variations

Spoken varieties differ from Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic not only in grammar but also in pronunciation. Outside of the Arabian peninsula, a major linguistic division is between sedentary varieties, largely urban varieties that grew out of the language of the army camps set up when areas were first conquered, and Bedouin varieties originally spoken by Bedouin nomads who filtered in decades or centuries later. Inside the Arabian peninsula and in Iraq, the two types are less distinct; but the language of the urbanized Hijaz, at least, strongly looks like a conservative sedentary variety.

Some examples of variation:

Consonants

• The phoneme /ɡ/: the word "golf" may be spelled جولف (mainly in Egypt), غولف and كولف (mainly in the Levant and Iraq), قولف (mainly in the Arabian Peninsula), ݣولف‎ (in Morocco) or گولف (in West Asia).
• Loss of the interdentals, especially in sedentary varieties, with e.g. /ð/ merged into /z/ or /d/.
• Split of original /r/ into two phonemes, distinguished primarily by how they affect neighboring vowels. This has progressed the farthest in North Africa.
• Development of new phonemes from loanwords. A number of dialects have the marginal phonemes /v/ and /p/ (for educated speakers), largely from loanwords as in ڤولڤو‎ (Volvo) and سڤن أپ‎ (seven-ap 'Seven-Up'). /t͡ʃ/ is another possible loanword phoneme, as in the word سندوتش‎ (sandawitsh 'sandwich'), though a number of varieties instead break up the and sounds with an epenthetic vowel. Egyptian Arabic treats /t͡ʃ/ as two consonants and inserts, as or, when it occurs before or after another consonant. /t͡ʃ/ is found as normal in Iraqi Arabic and Gulf Arabic.
• Highly varied realizations of the original velar stops (especially Classical /q/ < */kˤ/ and /d͡ʒ/ < */ɡʲ/; to a lesser extent, /k/). /q/ is frequently voiced to, debuccalized to or fronted to ; palatalized pronunciations are sometimes seen, as in the name of the city of Sharjah. /d͡ʒ/ is frequently softened to or palatalized to, but appears as in most of Egypt. /k/ is frequently palatalized to in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.
• Loss of the glottal stop in places where it is historically attested, as in /samaːʔ/ → /sama/.

Vowels

• Development of highly distinctive allophones of /a/ and /aː/, with highly fronted (or even ) in non-emphatic contexts, and highly retracted (or even ) in emphatic contexts. The more extreme distinctions are characteristic of sedentary varieties, while Bedouin and conservative Arabian-peninsula varieties have much closer allophones. In some of the sedentary varieties, the allophones are gradually splitting into new phonemes under the influence of loanwords, where the allophone closest in sound to the source-language vowel often appears regardless of the presence or absence of nearby emphatic consonants.
• Spread of "emphasis", visible in the backing of phonemic /a(ː)/. In conservative varieties of the Arabic peninsula, only /a/ adjacent to emphatic consonants is affected, while in Cairo, an emphatic consonant anywhere in a word tends to trigger emphatic allophones throughout the entire word. Dialects of the Levant are somewhere in between. Moroccan Arabic is unusual in that /i/ and /u/ have clear emphatic allophones as well (typically lowered, e.g. to and ).
• Monophthongization of diphthongs such as /aj/ and /aw/ to /eː/ and /oː/, respectively (/iː/ and /uː/ in parts of the Maghrib, such as in Moroccan Arabic). Mid vowels may also be present in loanwords such as ملبورن (Melbórn Melbourne), سكرتير (/sikriteːr/ or /sekerteːr/ '(male) secretary') and دكتور (/duktoːr/ or /doktoːr/, 'doctor').
• Raising of word final /a/ to (especially in some parts of Levant, most notably, Lebanon).
• Loss of final short vowels (with /i/ sometimes remaining), and shortening of final long vowels. This triggered the loss of most Classical Arabic case and mood distinctions.
• Collapse and deletion of short vowels. In many varieties, such as North Mesopotamian, many Levantine dialects, many Bedouin dialects of the Maghrib, and Mauritanian, short /i/ and /u/ have collapsed to schwa and exhibit very little distinction so that such dialects have two short vowels, /a/ and /ə/. Many Levantine dialects show partial collapse of /i/ and /u/, which appear as such only in the next-to-last phoneme of a word (i.e. followed by a single word-final consonant), and merge to /ə/ elsewhere. A number of dialects that still allow three short vowels /a/ /i/ /u/ in all positions, such as Egyptian Arabic, nevertheless show little functional contrast between /i/ and /u/ as a result of past sound changes converting one sound into the other. Arabic varieties everywhere have a tendency to delete short vowels (especially other than /a/) in many phonological contexts. When combined with the operation of inflectional morphology, disallowed consonant clusters often result, which are broken up by epenthetic short vowels, automatically inserted by phonological rules. In these respects (as in many others), Moroccan Arabic has the most extreme changes, with all three short vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ collapsing to a schwa /ə/, which is then deleted in nearly all contexts. This variety, in fact, has essentially lost the quantitative distinction between short and long vowels in favor of a new qualitative distinction between unstable "reduced" vowels (especially /ə/) and stable, half-long "full" vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ (the reflexes of original long vowels). Classical Arabic words borrowed into Moroccan Arabic are pronounced entirely with "full" vowels regardless of the length of the original vowel.