The sounds of Emirati Arabic

خصائص اللهجة الكويتية المكتوبة واستخدامها في إنشاء موارد للتحليل الصرفي الآلي.

“…In other closely related Gulf dialects, the same verb is used with slight phonological changes that help listeners to differentiate one dialect from another, for example; in the Emirates, it is pronounced as jiba: < ‫ِبا‬ ‫ي‬ > (18) , in Bahraini Arabic jabbi < ‫ي‬ ّ ‫يب‬ > with geminated /b/, in Hijazi Arabic, it may be jiba < ‫ِبا‬ ‫ي‬ > or jabɣa < ‫يبغى‬ >. In Omani Arabic, they use the participle form of jabɣi:, which is ba:ɣi: < ‫باغي‬ > or its alternative ba:ja (19) 'wanting'.…”

Phonological conditioning of affricate variability in Emirati Arabic

“…Studies investigating the correlation between affrication and extra-linguistic factors, including age, educational level, gender of the speaker and area, report that k-affrication appears more frequently in the speech of older, less educated speakers, and within this group, males are more likely to affricate than females (Al Rojaie 2013, Dashti, Akbar & Taqi 2015, El Salman 2016, Dashti 2018). In contrast, while dʒ-lenition also used to be considered an ‘incorrect’ pronunciation and as such associated with lower socioeconomic status and rural populations (As-Sammer 2010, Hassan 2017, Leung, Ntelitheos & Al Kaabi 2020), more recent reports suggest that the [j] variant has been adopted by young urban speakers in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the rest of the Gulf (Al Qouz 2009, Hassan 2009, Holes 2011). Nonetheless, both processes exhibit variability in application within speakers, and the probability of their occurrence has also been linked to phonological factors.…”

“…In contrast, a phonological factor which has often been associated with the likelihood of a surface [tʃ] is the vowel context, as the process is traditionally assumed to have originated from palatalization in front vowel contexts – a phenomenon widely attested cross-linguistically (Bhat 1978; Bateman 2007, 2011; Kochetov, 2011). Grammars of GA report that the effect of non-back vowels on the process is still active (Feghali 2008, Leung et al 2020), and therefore [tʃ] is more likely to surface in words with a non-back vowel than with back vowel.…”

“…Nonetheless, it is virtually impossible to find clear instances of non-application of affrication due to any consistent phonological influence, and Johnstone (1963) and Holes (1995) are careful to note that the identified regularities do not categorically determine the presence or absence of the affricate. Overall, k-affrication and dʒ-lenition thus appear to be unrelated processes which escape rigid phonological descriptions, and their variants are sometimes simply characterised as occurring in free variation (Leung et al 2020).…”

“…Both the voiced and the voiceless postalveolar affricates are used in EA. Although grammars attest that the voiced plosive variant is still a possible realisation of OA [ɡ] in the dialect (Leung et al 2020), it is virtually absent from the speech of modern Emirati natives. For example, a cursory search of the EA corpus EMAC (Halefom et al 2012) reveals that out of all 1,935 tokens with a target /ɡ/, only 39 (0.2 ) surfaced with the plosive.…”