Affricate variation in Emirati Arabic

Abstract

Using a corpus analysis and an elicitation study, we provide evidence regarding the effects of lexical, phonological and socio-phonetic factors on the distribution of affricate variants in Emirati Arabic (EA). The corpus results indicate that the processes are only partially attributable to lexical factors; results reveal previously unreported patterns of vowel effects, and suggest a role of coronal consonants in determining affrication. The experimental results highlight significant within- and across-speaker variability that is not only lexically-determined, but also contradicts traditional hypotheses regarding the geographic distribution of the variants. This exploratory study presents a detailed descriptive analysis of the process in EA, providing suggestions for future investigations.

Phonological conditioning of affricate variability in Emirati Arabic

“…Overall, our findings support a presence of an active OCP as a conditioning factor for /j/ lenition, compatible with that proposed by Mustafawi (2011) for QA, but only active in immediate neighbourhood. In contrast, the proposed OCP does not appear to be active for /k/-affrication in EA, and it potentially has an inhibitory effect (since /k/ is more likely to be affricated if the phonetically similar segment is farther away), providing an experimental confirmation of the effect found in the previous corpus analysis of EA (Szreder et al 2021).…”

“…Traditional accounts of the [k∼tʃ] and [dʒ∼j] alternation in EA attribute most of their variability to sociolinguistic, lexical, and vowel quality-related factors. However, a potential conditioning role of consonants has previously been proposed for equivalent processes in Qatari Arabic (Mustafawi 2006, 2001) and Ha’ili Arabic (Al Rasheedi 2015), and recently speculated for EA (Szreder et al 2021). This study investigated the realisation of the variants in young, female, educated speakers, to examine the relevance of those accounts for modern EA.…”

“…While the behaviour of affricates and their allophones is conditioned by a variety of historical, geographical, social, lexical, and phonological factors, detailed analyses of the specifics of that conditioning in different dialects are still needed. Recently, Szreder, Derrick & Ben-Ammar (2021) offered an exploratory analysis of some of the factors in intra- and inter-speaker variability in affricate realisation in Emirati Arabic (EA). The current study presents the results of a follow-up experiment, designed to illuminate one of the phonological factors identified as relevant in the original study, which is the potential role of neighbouring coronal consonants in facilitating the realisation of the affricates.…”

“…However, this generalisation appears to have little predictive power in modern day EA, and at least one study did not find any stable influence of non-back vowels on the probability of affrication in the dialect (Hassan 2017). Recently, Szreder et al (2021) examined the variability of affrication and lenition in EA based on corpus data and an elicitation experiment. Contrary to Hassan (2017), the corpus analysis did suggest a modest effect of vowel quality, such that the presence of the back vowels /oː uː/ decreased the probability of both k-affrication and dʒ-lenition, although the presence of the front vowels /iː eː/ did not have a strong predictive power (i.e.…”

“…increased odds of affricate variant in the presence of these segments). Since the EA corpus data (see Szreder et al 2021) did not have enough relevant tokens (and the ones available were from a different point in time), it remains to be shown whether these differences were due to sampling, or whether the process in EA is sensitive to different phonological properties (or, perhaps, not active at all. )…”