Phonological Fragment of Arabic Language

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Arabic Dialects
Phonemes
Phonological Process and Syntax
Allophones
Phonotactics and Sound Structure
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Arabic language has three different forms, namely, classical, or Quranic Arabic, modern, or standard Arabic, and colloquial, or daily Arabic. With 420 million people speaking the language globally, Arabic is one of the most commonly spoken languages globally. In addition, about 28 countries use Arabic as an official language, which has led to the evolution and development of different dialects. Modern Arabic is the most spoken version due to the fact that it is universally used in the world, taught at universities, communication, trade and business. Moreover, it is the language of literature, technology, medicine and education. Like many other languages in the world, Arabic has many dialects, which differ in phonology, but only one of its versions is used learning institutions in the Arab world. Although learning Arabic may necessitate getting used to entirely new alphabet, after mastering the language, one will realize that its phonetic structure is intuitively understandable and easy to learn, namely, that every word is spelled exactly as it sounds and there are no rules as per intonation and annunciation Arabic (Watson, 2002).

Arabic Dialects

Egyptian non-standard speech is among the most commonly spoken Arabic dialects along with the Maghrebi non-standard speech. Furthermore, being the foremost understood non-standard speech in Arabic culture, as well as a plethora of resources for learning it, Egyptian non-standard speech has recently become quite popular among second language learners. Likewise, Egyptian non-standard speech is widespread in TV shows, movies, and is frequently studied by non-Arab speakers. On the other hand, Maghrebi non-standard speech has over seventy million speakers within the world, being the second most popular dialect compared to the Egyptian one. Gulf non-standard speech has over thirty-six million speakers in Arab world and is employed principally in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, some of the Asian nations, and the Sultanate of Oman. However, there are significant variations in pronunciations, synchronic linguistics and vocabulary in different dialects of the Gulf non-standard speech since it is a product of multiple dialects being merged into a single entity. Additionally, there is Levantine non-standard dialect spoken by around twenty-one million individuals over the world; however, its speakers still prefer using a more popular Arabic version. Levantine is generally widespread in Syrian Arab Republic, Jordan, Palestine and Asian nation. The Levantine dialect is the second most-spoken one compared to the Egyptian non-standard speech, including both personal communication and popular media. Furthermore, Levantine has a history that dates back to seventh century, when Arabic non-standard speech shifted from Aramaic language. In addition, one should mention the existence of numerous minor dialects, which are significantly less popular and used by an infinitely smaller number of people compared to the Levantine and Maghrebi non-standard speech (Watson, 2002).

Mesopotamian non-standard speech is also referred to as Iraqi non-standard speech. It is spoken by over fifteen million individuals and has been built on the Arabic cultures, the representatives of which inhabited the area currently known as the Mesopotamian basin. This includes Asian countries, several territories belonging to the Syrian Arab Republic, Iran, and Southeastern Turkey. Similarly to Levantine Arabic, Mesopotamian non-standard speech shifted from Aramaic to Arabic. Because of the gaps between several speakers of this non-standard speech, its synchronic linguistics is usually laborious to understand and analyze. However, it follows the twenty-eight consonants of the Arabic alphabet closely, even though there are some wide variations within the emphatic sounds.

There is also the Sudanese Arabic dialect that is spoken throughout Sudan and has over seventeen million speakers. Sudanese Arabic is quite similar to Egyptian Arabic because of closeness of the 2 countries, yet it has distinct traits that make it easily distinguishable from the Egyptian dialect. Sudanese non-standard speech is additionally named as a pure and archaic interpretation of Arabic. The described phenomenon can be explained by the fact that Sudanese Arabic has maintained several archaic pronunciations and writing sequences that different dialects have abandoned. Moreover, there is Sudanese Arabic that is spoken across Sudan and has over seventeen million speakers. Sudanese Arabic is also often likened to Egyptian Arabic owing to the proximity of the 2 countries. However, it has distinct traits that make it a unique language. Sudanese idioms are additionally observed as a pure and archaic interpretation of the Arabic ones, which can be explained as a result of Sudanese Arabic maintaining several archaic pronunciations and writing sequences that alternative dialects have abandoned. Yemeni idioms are amongst the few Arabic dialects that have maintained a plethora of classical practices and tones. Over fifteen million individuals in Republic of Yemen speak Yemeni, as well as citizens of southwestern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Djibouti. Due to its giant variety of speakers, the Yemeni dialect is divided into several sub-dialect teams. The Yemeni dialect maintains several classical options that are not employed in alternative components of the Arabic-speaking world.

The Hijazi dialect (West Arabian Arabic) is the native dialect of concerning fourteen million individuals within the geographic region of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The language is spoken differently in the city and among the residents of the country, with a distinctive urban and rural version. The urban version is spoken largely within the cities of urban center, Mecca, and Medina.

The Hijazi dialect represents some of the most ancient legacy of the Arabic language. It incorporates classical forms that have been largely forgotten and abandoned, while also coexisting with some of the newer versions of Arabic, therefore, combining the ancient tradition and the new language trends. However, the Hijazi dialect still consists primarily of the older versions of the Arabic language, which is why it has been slowly ousted by newer and more popular versions of Arabic.

In turn, Maltese is a remarkable dialect since it his distinctively different from any other Arabic dialect. In some cases, it is related to entirely different Arabic dialects since it has a lot of variations, which allow it to overlap in some areas, including its grammar and vocabulary, with other Arabic dialects. It takes its origin from Siculo-Arabic, an extinct type of Arabic that was developed in Sicily before being introduced in Malta. The dialect started to become prevalent around the end of the ninth century and continued to develop throughout the twelfth century. Maltese contains a broad range of various vocabulary elements from many other linguistic backgrounds. A substantial part of the language is comprised if the original Semitic basis, whereas around 0.05 of its vocabulary comes from Italian or Sicilian. Maltese is written with the help of Latin characters, which represents a striking contrast to the traditional Arabic writing. The earliest living example of Maltese is from the late Middle Ages, which makes Maltese the sole living Semitic language written in Latin script.

The Hassaniya dialect is spoken by three million people in the Arab world. It is principally used in Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and the related geographic region. Originally, it had the status of a regional dialect that was spoken solely by the Beni Hassan Arabian tribes. As WHO extended their authority to areas between Mauritania, Morocco, and geographic region between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the organization influenced language adoption in those regions.

Phonetically, the Hassaniya dialect is often referred to as both implausibly innovative and implausibly conservative. It incorporates all of the phonemes in Classical Arabic, also introducing several new phonemes. As a result, a significant number of new second-language learners find the specified dialect particularly difficult to master. Several educated Hassaniya Arabic speakers additionally follow code-switching, displaying their linguistic talent. Code-switching occurs particularly often between Hassaniya Arabic, trendy commonplace Arabic, Spanish, and French.

Phonemes

The standard/modern Arabic has twenty-eight consonant phonemes along with six vowel phonemes, although most of the commonly used dialects incorporate eight vowel phonemes. All phonemes have a distinction between non-emphatic consonants and uvularized, or emphatic, consonants. Though Arabic has evolved significantly from what it used to be several centuries ago, some of the more archaic phonemes are still in use; moreover, the mode in which they are used nowadays is virtually indistinguishable from the one practiced centuries ago. Arabic countries still view the classical language as their formal language (Watson, 2002).

Phonological Process and Syntax

The phonological system of a language is like a sieve since everything that passes through it, allowing the native language system to update continuously and enriching the vocabulary and the range of expression methods for the people speaking it. Hearing another language being spoken encourages one to use the familiar phonological sieve of the mother tongue intuitively to analyze what has been said (Watson, 2002). The Arabic language system is marked by a constrained vocalistic system and a wealth of consonantal system. Three vowels are used in both their short and long forms, namely, a, t, and u. However, Arabic is rich in guttural consonants, which include laryngeals (h) and a pharyngeal fricative (h), the pharyngeal (c), and (l), and the uvula fricative (x).

Arabic features a triad of voiceless, voiced, and emphatic elements in some subsets of the set. Additionally, Arabic features a root and pattern morphology, where the root may be a linguistics abstraction with two, three, or less consonants derived through templatic patterns.

Allophones

Allophones are phonemes whose sound changes depending on the letters that surround them. They are similar sounds which are in mutually exclusive or complementary distributed. For example, voiceless labial consonant passive /p/ has no correlation within the Semitic languages, and, due to its soundlessness, it is often replaced by its voiced associate /b/ when native Arab speakers pronounce it. The described occurrence features a curious phenomenon within the Arabic language system. Besides, the labial dental affricates /v/ do not have any correlates within the Arabian consonantal system and do not seem to be ordinarily used by Arabic speaking individuals, typically being replaced by the sound /f/. The emphasis is uncommon in Arabic; moreover, it is traditional for Arabs to have difficulties with the random nature of English stress patterns. The elision (swallowing) of sounds that are common in spoken English is also problematic for Arabs.

The word order for Arabic syntax is VSO (verb, subject, and object); however, over the past several decades, a tendency for the VSO to be changing towards the SVO model has been noticed. Arabic is regarded as a non-configurational language because it has high word order freedom. Specifically, it has great freedom of word order, frequent use of discontinuous constituents, and sophisticated verb-word system. In Arabic, dynamic verbs occur before a noun subject as opposed to stative verbs. At intervals phrases, a word that is used because the qualifier follows the qualified terms. Likewise, the adjective follows the noun that it qualifies (Watson, 202).

Phonotactics and Sound Structure

Phonotactics is the study of sound distribution patterns and distribution restrictions at intervals words, and in some cases across word boundaries. Phonotactic syntax has a tangible influence on Arabic morphology, as well as the derivation of words, namely, on word-building, and on the lexical root structure. There are two aspects about Arabic phonotactics that should be kept in mind. These are the phonotactics of root morphology and phonotactics of word-building and morphology. Four phonologic processes area unit key for Arabic sound; these include assimilation (one sound fascinating the other), articulation (vowel insertion), deletion (semivowel), and vowel shift.

Assimilation is amendment of phonetic feature values that build similar or even identical segments. In Arabic, the described occurrence happens because of phonologic rules applied at the intersection of morphological processes. Assimilation is non-phonemic; to be more precise, it does not have an effect on the meaning of a word; however, it implies that the word will be either progressive or regressive.

Syllables are typically recovered from the speech signal; however, segments sorted into syllables are usually helpful in explaining several phonologic patterns languages. The language unit henceforward seen as an abstract is a part of the content of the syllable structure. The sound structure has been influenced by the study of Arabic for two reasons. First and foremost, several dialects of Arabic offer samples of regular and productive processes contributing to the creation of the sound structure. The latter incorporates vowels into clusters of consonants that otherwise cannot be accommodated within the list of available language units and stress systems supported syllable weight. Secondly, many forms of spoken Arabic represent different classes of language unit varieties, and these completely different clusters are related to a constellation of various properties across the existing dialects. Every language unit in each word represents a peak in prominence. The most distinguished portion of a language unit is its nucleus, which is usually a vowel (V). Each language unit should have a nucleus; however, syllables may have one or a lot of consonants (C) organized around that nucleus. Consonants preceding the nucleus structure the language create an onset and consonants following the nucleus structure the language create the finale. Onsets and codas are known as language unit margins, and margins with one consonant are known as straightforward onsets or codas, whereas those with over one consonant are complicated onsets or complicated codas. Syllables that end in vowels are known as open syllables. Although a language unit with only a nucleus could seem to be the foremost basic structure, it is typical that the universally most popular language unit consists of a single-consonant onset and a nucleus (Watson, 2002).

Almost all varieties of Arabic share two features, namely, the presence of syllables with simple codas and the absence of onset syllables. Therefore, syllables of the CV and CVC format are found in all varieties of Arabic, while V or VC syllables are rare. The requirement that syllables should have onsets means that in a VCV sequence, the syllable boundary will always fall before the consonant (V.CV). Evidence for the onset requirement originates from the fact that vowel-initial words borrowed into Arabic are typically produced by Arabic speakers with an added glottal stop in onset position, as in [”otobiis] autobus (Watson, 2002).

Conclusion

Arabic language has evolved over the years, having produced multiple dialects, but the modern or standard form of Arabic is the one used most commonly as formal means of communication by many Arab-speaking nations. Modern Arabic is the one adopted by most Arabic schools and learning institutions. The Arabic language has 28 consonant phonemes along with six vowel phonemes, although most of the modern dialects typically incorporate eight vowel phonemes. Due to its past history, the Arabic language has a broad range of dialects, which differ in phonology, yet the Egyptian dialect is the one used most broadly because it is easily understood by many Arabic speaking people in the entire Arab world. Likewise, the Egyptian dialect has been adopted by various media and communications channels because people learn it with ease.

References

Watson, C.E. (2002). The phonology and morphology of Arabic. Oxford University Press.

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