Abstract

    The second article offers a very interesting study about an unsuspected feature of speech production in Arabic area. The article entitled “Pre-pausal devoicing and glottalisation in varieties of the South-Western Arabian Peninsula”, presented by Janet Watson and Yahya Asiri, is concerned with the phonetic aspect of devoicing, present in a wide range of modern Arabic dialects. The authors noticed, throughout a vast number of Arabic dialects, that devoicing and glottalisation occurr in a specific prosodic position, i.e., word or utterance-final positions. Therefore, these two aspects, devoicing and glottalisation, appear to be shaped by a bundle of constraints which is twofold, i.e.,. phonological/phonetic. Janet Watson and Yahya Asiri restricted their study to the phonetic cues of these aspects. The authors selected a very interesting area, from the dialectal point of view, i.e., Yemen, that should show many remarkable cases of pre-pausal devoicing and glottalisation. They compared data from San’ani Arabic with the southern Asiri Arabic dialect of Rijāl Alma‘ and Mehriyōt which is an eastern dialect of the modern south Arabian language, Mehri, spoken in Yemen. The findings indicate that devoicing occurs with obstruents and glottalisation with plosives in the three varieties under study. Nasal and lateral sonorants, completely glottalised in San’ani Arabic, are only partially devoiced in Rijāl Alma‘ and Mehriyōt. However, they are neither pre-glottalised nor released in Rijāl Alma‘. These findings are in accordance with Maddieson’s (1984) implicational relationship between glottalic or laryngealized stops and laryngealized sonorants.

    Like Semitic languages, Arabic and its varieties are among a few languages that can exhibit phonological durational contrast between both vowels and consonants. The article, proposed by Ghada Khattab and Jalal Al-Tamimi, entitled “Durational cues for gemination in Lebanese Arabic”, reports on phonetic and phonological patterns of gemination and on the temporal relationship between geminate consonants and vowel length in this Levantine Arabic variety. The authors presented a well-documented state of art about germination. Besides duration that seems to play the salient acoustic cue in distinguishing singleton and geminate consonants in world’s languages, other articulatory and acoustic cues are supposed to strengthen the perceptual effect of germination, particularly durational and spectral characteristics of the preceding and/or following vowels. The findings, based on acoustic and auditory analyses of medial consonants and the preceding and following vowels, in V1CV2, V1CCV2, VV1CV2, and VV1CCV2 structures, indicate distinct patterns of durational distributions for singleton and geminate consonants and for the neighbouring short and long vowels. Duration appears to be a robust cue for the distinction between singleton and geminate consonants, the latter is around twice as long as its singleton counterpart. But, unlike literature, there was no evidence for vowel or consonant temporal compensation as a function of phonological length. The sociolinguistic variable of gender integrated here did not show any significant difference. Males and females realized similar durational patterns in consonants and vowels length.

Abstract

    Arabic dialects are divided into five large dialectal areas: 1) Arabian Peninsula dialects, 2) Mesopotamian dialects, 3) Levantine dialects, 4) Egyptian dialects, and 5) Maghrebi dialects. The classification takes generally into account some linguistic criteria, from phonological, morphological, and lexical perspectives. In the fourth article, entitled “Locus equation as an index of Arabic dialectal variation”, Mohamed Embarki, Christian Guilleminot, Mohamed Yeou and Sallal Al Maqtari noticed that the presence or absence of some phonemes of Classical Arabic in the modern Arabic dialects (as interdentals, uvular voiceless stop), generally used by Arabic dialectology, could weakly discriminate the five geographic areas. They proposed a possible dialectal classification of four Arabic dialects based on coarticulatory effects in CV syllables. They hypothesized that the saliency of these effects would be easily captured through the locus equation parameters - linear regression functions - particularly through the contrast of pharyngealisation. The results showed that locus equations enabled a classification of Arabic dialects only into two large dialectal areas: Eastern vs. Western. Locus equations parameters for the pharyngealized consonants were significantly lower in the Eastern Arabic varieties than in the Western ones.

    If acoustic studies are lacking in Arabic dialectology, prosody remains the speech aspect the less studied. From the prosodic point of view, many Arabic dialects are still unexplored. One aspect which could provide dialectologists with comprehensive keys to understand similarity and dissimilarity between MSA and Arabic dialects is to investigate how the intonational properties of the speaker’s colloquial dialect are transferred to MSA. The article, proposed by Dina El Zarka  and Sam Hellmuth, deals with “Variation in the intonation of Egyptian Formal and Colloquial Arabic”. The article aims to show if the intonation of Egyptian Formal Arabic (EFA), which is a formal speech, would display the same intonational properties as those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), which is an informal casual speech, considering the main assumption that intonational properties are transferred from the latter to the former. The findings provide clear evidence to support the general hypothesis that the phonology of EFA reflects that of the speaker’s mother tongue dialect. The same broad phonological categories are used in both EFA and ECA. However, the authors underlined some differences at the stylistic and rhythmic levels.

    The last article of this special issue, “The full vowel/schwa alternation: An Optimality Theoretic approach to variation in Moroccan Arabic verbs”, proposed by Ahmed Charfi, tackles the vowel reduction, from a morpho-phonological point of view. The article explores the variation of the schwa and full vowels in Moroccan Arabic (MA) dialects. This aspect is investigated in the framework of Optimality Theory. The author claims that what is considered by researchers as vowel reduction in the perfective forms of hollow verbs is in fact vowel deletion triggered by the high-ranking of well-formedness constraints on foot structure.