Arabic

Last Updated: 2019-12-05

COMPROMISED: some ambiguity in the transcription of alif; some conflation between /w/ and /uː/ and between /j/ and /iː/

Background

Language Family: Afro-Asiatic / Semitic / Central / South / Arabic

• Arabic is considered an overarching classification of all the dialectal varieties (Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson 2010, 482). Given this, I have chosen to address the Modern Standard variety, which is predominantly written or used in formal communication. Thus, Arabic exhibits diglossia, where written text (and formal communication) differs from what is actually spoken in everyday life. Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson (2010) explain that Modern Standard Arabic is considered the “high” variety, and all the regional dialects are considered the “low” varieties (p. 482). Because of this distinction, the phonemic inventory for Modern Standard Arabic differs somewhat from those of the regional dialects.
• Arabic is a widely spoken language with speakers primarily residing in either Asia, the Middle East, or North Africa.

Phonology

Consonants

• Arabic includes what are called emphatic consonants, which are produced when the back, or the root, of the tongue retracts towards the pharynx (Amayreh and Dyson 1998, 643).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
Stops (plain)	b		t tˤ d dˤ			k	q		ʔ
Affricates				dʒ
Fricatives	f	θ ð ðˤ	s sˤ z	ʃ		x ɣ		ħ ʕ	h
Nasals	m		n
Trills			r
Approximants	w		l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced. Phonemes that have the diacritic (ˤ) are emphatic.

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive in Arabic (Amayreh and Dyson 1998, 643).
• /e/ and /o/ exist in spoken varieties of Arabic, but not in Standard Modern Arabic (R. Ibrahim, Eviatar, and Aharon-Peretz 2002, 323).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Low		a

Diphthongs
/aj/, /aw/

Alphabet

• Arabic is written from right to left (R. Ibrahim, Eviatar, and Aharon-Peretz 2002, 323).
• The majority of the graphemes have different forms depending on where they appear in a word in relation to other graphemes (ibid.). Graphemes may have up to four different forms for the word initial, medial, and final position as well as for the isolated form. The isolated forms for all the graphemes are represented below.
  • Although the diacritics are often seen as orthographically separate from the isolated forms (i.e. the diacritic followed by the base grapheme), some grapheme and diacritic combinations are seen as individual units. For example, the alif ⟨ا⟩ with an overhead hamza ⟨ء⟩, is often represented as ⟨أ⟩ rather than ⟨ ٔا⟩. Other “permanent” grapheme diacritic combinations include: ⟨آ⟩ ,⟨ئ⟩ ,⟨ؤ⟩, and ⟨إ⟩.
• Long vowels are indicated by specific graphemes, however, short vowels are indicated by diacritics (Awde 2000, 18).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
ا	/aː/; /ʔ/	/ʔ/: word-initially (not always marked, which somewhat compromises the language)
ب	/b/
ت	/t/
ث	/θ/
ج	/dʒ/
ح	/ħ/
خ	/x/
د	/d/
ذ	/ð/
ر	/r/
ز	/z/
س	/s/
ش	/ʃ/
ص	/sˤ/
ض	/dˤ/
ط	/tˤ/
ظ	/ðˤ/
ع	/ʕ/
غ	/ɣ/
ف	/f/
ق	/q/
ك	/k/
ل	/l/
م	/m/
ن	/n/
ه	/h/
و	/w/; /uː/	/w/: word-initially (used as default in the rules); /uː/: preceded by a short /u/ diacritic
ي	/j/; /iː/	/j/: word -initially (used as default in the rules); /iː/ preceded by a short /i/ diacritic
ء	/ʔ/	called a hamza, this grapheme also exists as a diacritic (explained below)
ة	∅; /t/	called a ta-marbuta, this grapheme appears word-finally, corresponding to /t/ if followed by a diacritic or ∅ otherwise (Biadsy, Habash, and Hirschberg 2009, 3)
ى	/a/	called an alif-maqsura, this grapheme occurs word-finally (Habash 2010, 11; Biadsy, Habash, and Hirschberg 2009, 3)
Diacritic
ُ	/u/	this diacritic is called a dammah (Yurtbaşı 2016, 146)
َ	/a/	this diacritic is called a fatḥah (ibid.)
ِ	/i/	this diacritic is called a kasrah (ibid.)
ٰ	/aː/	this diacritic is called an alif khanjariyah (ibid.)
ٔ	/ʔ/	this diacritic is called a hamza, and only appears (as a diacritic) in combination with ⟨ا⟩ ,⟨ي⟩, and ⟨و⟩ (Habash 2010, 5–6)
ٕ	/ʔi/
ٓ	/ʔ/	this diacritic is called a madda (a variant of the hamza), appearing in combination with ⟨ا⟩ (Habash 2010, 6)
ّ		called a shadda, this diacritic indicates gemination of consonants (Habash 2010, 11)
ْ		called a sukun, this diacritic indicates that no vowel follows the consonant in which it’s attached to; it also typically marks syllable boundaries (Habash, Diab, and Rambow 2012, 712)
ٌ	/an/	indicates a word-final /an/ (nunnation) (Habash, Diab, and Rambow 2012, 713)
ٍ	/in/	indicates a word-final /in/ (nunnation) (ibid.)
ً	/un/	indicates a word-final /un/ (nunnation) (ibid.)

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Modern Standard Arabic tend to have CV or CVC structures; however, CVCC syllables exist word-finally (Habash, Diab, and Rambow 2012, 712).
• Word-initial vowels are written as an inflected alif, or a hamza watsl, produced with a glottal stop. This glottal stop vowel is considered an allophone of vowels, so word-initial vowels will be transcribed as just vowels (ibid.).
  • A plain alif may indicate an optional allophonic glottal stop word-initially, but it may also indicate an obligatory glottal stop (noted in the chart above), which results in a compromised language (A. Ibrahim 2019, 293).

Lenition Rules

• According to Amayreh and Dyson (1998) (p. 643):
  • Glottal stops delete word-medially.
  • Emphatic /s/ becomes voiced word-finally.
  • /j/ debuccalizes to a glottal stop word-initially.
  • /dʒ/ may fully spirantize to [ʒ].
  • /q/ may debuccalize to a glottal stop or become a voiced velar or uvular stop.

Misc. Rules

• Emphatic consonants tend to affect vowels and consonants around them, resulting in lower back vowels and velarization of consonants (Saiegh-Haddad and Henkin-Roitfarb 2014, 5).

References

Amayreh, Mousa M., and Alice T. Dyson. 1998. “The Acquisition of Arabic Consonants.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Reasearch.

Awde, N. 2000. The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read and Write It. LYLE STUART. https://www.ebook.de/de/product/3309537/n_awde_the_arabic_alphabet_how_to_read_and_write_it.html.

Biadsy, Fadi, Nizar Habash, and Julia Hirschberg. 2009. “Improving the Arabic Pronunciation Dictionary for Phone and Word Recognition with Linguistically-Based Pronunciation Rules.” In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 397–405. NAACL ’09. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1620754.1620812.

Boudelaa, Sami, and William D. Marslen-Wilson. 2010. “Aralex: A Lexical Database for Modern Standard Arabic.” Behavior Research Methods 42 (2). Springer Science; Business Media LLC: 481–87. doi:10.3758/brm.42.2.481.

Habash, Nizar. 2010. Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing. Morgan & Claypool.

Habash, Nizar, Mona Diab, and Owen Rambow. 2012. “Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic.” Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Istanbul, January.

Ibrahim, Abdulateef. 2019. “Glottal Stop in Arabic with Reference to English: Phonological and Orthographical Study” ( 2016 M- 1437 e) (April).

Ibrahim, Raphiq, Zohar Eviatar, and Judith Aharon-Peretz. 2002. “The Characteristics of Arabic Orthography Slow Its Processing.” Neuropsychology 16 (3). American Psychological Association (APA): 322–26. doi:10.1037/0894-4105.16.3.322.

Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor, and Roni Henkin-Roitfarb. 2014. “The Structure of Arabic Language and Orthography.” In Literacy Studies, 3–28. Springer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-8545-7_1.

Yurtbaşı, Metin. 2016. “Sura Yusuf in Full Ipa (Segmental-Suprasegmental) Transcription with English Translation.” International Journal of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences.