Kfarsghab - Arabic Accent

Arabic Accent

Kfarsghab's particular Arabic accent is unique in Lebanon with its unusual ‘a’/‘o’ transformation phenomenon, meaning that the vowel a in Arabic words is vocalized as o. Some saw there the influence of the Syriac language and many scholars studied the subject without a definite conclusion as to the origin of this evolution. Here's what says about it Henri Fleisch in his study Le Parler Arabe de Kfar-Sghab:

... an originality of the ((Arabic)) accent of Kfarsghab is not to be limited by a silence at the drop of the voice for the pause, as the Arab dialects commonly do, but to mark this stop by a special form: a pausal form (Kfarsghab shares this originality with other accents of Lebanon: Zahlé and Shhim). The generally established classical Arabic system used the iskan to mark the pause. Kfarsghab has recourse to diphthongizations or changes of timbre of vowels; in the same way it is in Shhim and also in Zahlé... ... A major originality of the accent of Kfarsghab is its vocalism evolution. The Lebanese are especially struck by the frequency of its vowel 'o'. The well-read men see there an influence of the Syriac, as they attribute the 'o' one hears in North-Lebanon to an influence of the Syriac. In fact, the Syriac has no relation to this. In Syriac, in the Jacobite pronunciation which was that of the Syriac in Lebanon, the passage from a to o is uncoditional: all a's are transformed, whatever their position, whatever the consonnatic context, the phenomenon is general. In North-Lebanon, it is not the case: the passage of a to o occurs only in determined cases, it is conditioned. A good example to make feel the difference between the Syriac and the usage of dialectal Arabic in North-Lebanon is the treatment of the Arabic word kitab (Arabic: كتاب‎ meaning book): in Syriac: ketob; in Kfarsghab: ktib; elsewhere in the North, ktéb. The major advantage of Kfarsghab, for the linguistic science, is to have pushed to the extreme the tendencies which govern the vowel a in North-Lebanon and in consequence to put in full light the transformation processes; it is thus in the center of this linguistic movement...

It is still more intriguing for the local population. The popular tradition in Kfarsghab attributes its particular accent to the special characteristics of the drinking water. From sociological point of view, a major difference in accent between neighboring settlements denotes usually either geographical isolation, or an unconscious collective will of identity conservation. It is true that the winter village, Morh Kfarsghab, is relatively isolated but for the original village, Kfarsghab, which was used for the major part of the year, geography is not an evident reason. The explanation for the difference has to be found somewhere else.

As to when this accent took its final shape, linguists do not have a model that estimates the period of time necessary to form an accent.

Since the mid-1950s, emigration and education are contributing to the standardization of the original Kfarsghabian accent.