A group for academics interested in vernacular Arabic varieties spoken in the Levant, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Turkey (historically in Adana, Mersin & Hatay), & in diaspora.
Files List
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The Arabic dialect of Ǧisir izZarga:
The village of Ǧisir izZarga is the last remaining Arab village on the Israeli coast line, located half way between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Its establishment is said to have taken place in the 19th century, when the clans of Šihāb and Naǧǧār arrived from Egypt and the clans of Ǧurbān and ʿAmmāš came from the Jordanian Ghor. This work aims to describe the main linguistic features of the type of Arabic spoken in Ǧisir izZarga and position it inside the greater group of Syro-Palestinian dialects. The primary data used for this work are recordings made in the village during fieldwork conducted in 2011-2012. Supplementary material was extracted from a CD containing television interviews conducted in the village some two or three decades ago.
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Contact-induced change in the Levantine: evidence from Lebanese and Palestinian Arabic
The present study aims to address existing lacunae in the research literature by investigating the outcomes of dialect contact in Beirut between Palestinian Arabic (PA), the minority variety, and Lebanese Arabic (LA), the majority variety. Drawing on the framework of comparative variationist sociolinguistics (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001) as well as research on dialect contact (Britain and Trudgill 2005), this study combines synchronic and diachronic data sources to compare three variables in LA and PA: a phonological variable, involving the word-medial raising of /a:/ to [e:] (e.g., [ka:n] alternating with [ke:n] ‘he/it was’); and two morpho-syntactic variables: verbal negation and future temporal reference.
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Modern Standard Arabic and Rural Palestinian Dialect: Patterns of the Active Participle
This paper was mainly concerned with analyzing the processes of active participle formation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It also aimed to examine the Rural Palestinian Dialect (RPD) in order to reveal the derivation of the active participle in this dialect and to describe any patterns that might vary from MSA. The study was based on the traditional notions of root and pattern which characterize Arabic morphology. The data for this study were collected from various sources. These sources are not researchers but they are people originated from Palestine. Then the data were analyzed in terms of morphology. Keywords: word-formation, active participle, root, pattern
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Phonological aspects of al-Issa Arabic, a Bedouin dialect in the north of Jordan.
This study offers an account of selected key phonological aspects of al-Issa Arabic, spoken in three villages in al Mafraq: Ad-Dafyana, Mansiyat al-Gublan and Um As-srab. Forty suitable participants plus four language consultants were recruited. The dialect has a number of distinguishing features that make it stand out from the rest of Bedouin Jordanian Arabic dialects, e.g. the Bani Saxar dialect (Palva 1980), Bani Ḥassan dialect (Irshied 1984), Abbadi dialect (Sakarna 1999), and Wadi Ramm Arabic (Mashaqba 2015). These features include the unlimited affrication of *k, the realization of the palato-alveolar/j/as[y] in all word positions (yaʔyaʔa phenomenon), and the unconditioned retention of Classical Arabic diphthongs *aw and *ay in all contexts. In terms of syllable structure, the core syllable types observed are: CV,
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Emphatic variation of the labio-velar /w/ in two Jordanian Arabic dialects. By Mutasim Al-DeaibesEkab Al-ShawashrehMarwan Jarrah
Much work on emphatic segments in Arabic dialects has focused on primary emphasis. However, secondary emphasis has been less of a target of study. Our research investigates the emphatic variation of the secondarily emphatic labio-velar /w/ between males and females in two Jordanian Arabic sub-dialects: Rural Jordanian Arabic and Urban Jordanian Arabic. Twenty-four native speakers from the two dialects (equally stratified according to their gender and dialect) were asked to read a carrier phrase that included fifteen tri-syllabic words having the sound /w/ in medial position. Our research confirmed that there is a variation in the degree of emphasis based on gender and dialect. More particularly, males produced stronger emphatic segments than females did, and Urban speakers produced weaker empathic segments than Rural speakers did. Results also revealed that the secondarily emphatic /w/ caused the neighboring vowels to have lowered F2 and raised F1 and F3.
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The Phonemic System of Damascus Arabic By Jean Cantineau
The following remarks concerning the phonemic system ot Damascus Arabic have been suggested by an extensive review by Charles A. Ferguson 1 of the Manuel etemenlaire d' arabe oriental ( parler de Damas) that I wrote in collaboration with Youssef Helbaoui. Although there is, in Ferguson's appraisal of that system and mine, a wide measure of agreement, several of his criticisms reveal differences of approach and theoretical divergences which I have deemed worth while presenting and discussing.
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A Preliminary Study on the Verbal System of the Syrian Dialect of Ṭarṭūs. By Emanuela De Blasio
The present study focuses on the analysis of the verbal system of Arabic spoken in Ṭarṭūs, a city located on the west coast of Syria. The research analyses the verb above all from the aspectual and modal point of view, with hints to some traits of the rural dialect imported into the city from the Alawite community. The variety of Ṭarṭūs and the surrounding areas falls within the subgroup of coastal dialects of Syria (Behnstedt 1997) and since, as Procházka (2013) points out, they are among the least studied yet, this research may constitute a starting point for further studies and insights into the variety of Ṭarṭūs and the dialects of this area. Keywords Arabic dialectology. Syrian varieties. Ṭarṭūs dialect. Verbal system.
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Verbal negation in the Lebanese dialect of Zeitoun, Keserwan. By Khairallah, Natalie Wilmsen, David
The dialect of Zeitoun village in the northern Keserwan district of Lebanon exhibits both the split-morpheme negators mā…š of the southern and highland Levant and the pre-verbal negator mā without the post-positive -š of the northern Levant, with the -š of negation optionally appearing in identical contexts. It also exhibits the form a…š of southern and highland Levantine Arabic dialects. Some researchers propose that the negator a- can only appear before labial consonants, such as the b- prefix marking habitual action or imminent futurity. Others note that it may also occur with the prohibitive, usually marked by the 2nd-person prefix t-. Neither of these observations holds for the Zeitouni dialect, in which prohibitives negated with sole -š may be formed without the prefix, the initial consonant being whatever the radical might be. Sole post-positive -š also occurs in negation of an unmarked imperfective verb, there, too, sometimes without an overt proclitic person marker. Another feature that is occasionally noted in the literature is the negation of perfective verbs with sole post-positive -š.
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The Intonational Phonology of Syrian Arabic: A Preliminary Analysis. By Malek Al Hasan, Shakuntala Mahanta
Syrian speakers of Arabic are distinguished from speakers of other Arabic dialects by using “singing intonation” in their utterances. This paper examines the intonational patterns occurring in Syrian Arabic using the autosegmental-metrical (AM) approach to intonation. The dialect used in this study is the one spoken in Damascus (Damascene). The analysis is based on two experiments wherein the second experiment utterances were investigated in three word orders of Syrian Arabic (VSO), (SVO), and (VOS). Declarative sentences showed an initial rise (due to stress on the first syllable) and a falling contour towards the end. Stress position and word order were found to change pitch accent type and alignment. Phrase-final drawl was found to be exaggerated in questions leading to vowel lengthening. Index Terms: intonation, syrian arabic, prosody, arabic intonation.