Khuzestani Arabic

Khuzestani Arabic is a dialect of Gelet (Southern) Mesopotamian Arabic spoken by the Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan Province of Iran. It is also considered by most contemporary scholars to be a mix of Southern Mesopotamian Arabic and Gulf Arabic spoken in places such as Kuwait and Eastern Arabia. It has had a long history of contact with Persian language, leading to several changes.[1] The main changes are in word order, noun–noun and noun–adjective attribution constructions, definiteness marking, complement clauses, and discourse markers and connectors.[1][2]

Khuzestani Arabic
Native toIran
Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3–
GlottologNone

Khuzestani Arabic is only used in informal situations. It is not taught in school, not even as an optional course, although Modern Standard Arabic is taught.[1]

Phonology

Consonants

Even in the most formal of conventions, pronunciation depends upon a speaker's background.[3] Nevertheless, the number and phonetic character of most of the 28 consonants has a broad degree of regularity among Arabic-speaking regions. Note that Arabic is particularly rich in uvular, pharyngeal, and pharyngealized ("emphatic") sounds. The emphatic coronals (/sˤ/, /dˤ/, /tˤ/, and /ðˤ/) cause assimilation of emphasis to adjacent non-emphatic coronal consonants. The phonemes /p/ ⟨پ⟩ and /v/ ⟨ڤ⟩ (not used by all speakers) are only occasionally considered to be part of the phonemic inventory, as they exist only in foreign words and they can be pronounced as /b/ ⟨ب⟩ and /f/ ⟨ف⟩ respectively depending on the speaker.[4][5]

Khuzestani Arabic consonant phonemes
Labial Dental Denti-alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottal
plain emphatic1
Nasal m n
Stop voiceless (p) t tˤ k ʔ
voiced b d dˤ g
Fricative voiceless f θ s sˤ ʃ x ~ χ ħ h
voiced (v) ð z ðˤ ɣ ~ ʁ ʕ
Affricate voiceless tʃ
voiced d͡ʒ
Tap ɾ
Approximant l (ɫ) j w

Phonetic notes:

  • /p/ and /v/ occur mostly in borrowings from Persian, and may be assimilated to /b/ or /f/ in some speakers.
  • /ɡ/ is pronunciation of /q/ in Khuzestani Arabic and the rest of southern Mesopotamian dialects.
  • The gemination of the flap /ɾ/ results in a trill /r/.

See also

References
  1. Khuzestani Arabic: a case of convergence
  2. Shabibi, Maryam (2006). Contact-induced grammatical changes in Khuzestani arabic (PhD thesis). University of Manchester. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.529368.
  3. Holes (2004:58)
  4. Teach Yourself Arabic, by Jack Smart (Author), Frances Altorfer (Author)
  5. Hans Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (transl. of Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart, 1952)



This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.