The Semitic languages are a group of related languages spoken across North and East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and one of the major language groups that descended from the larger family of Afroasiatic languages.
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The phonology and micro-typology of Arabic R
The R sound exhibits considerable variability both across and within Arabic dialects; one that covers place and manner of articulation, as well as the notorious emphatic-plain distinction. Some R phones are in contrastive distribution, while others are contextually conditioned or free variants. This article aims to establish the underlying R phonemes in the spoken varieties of Arabic, evidence of which is sought in R’s dialect-specific phonological behavior: in minimal pair contrasts, distributional phenomena, loanword phonology, and phonological processes that target or are triggered by R. Investigation of such evidence reveals four major patterns based on the nature and number of R phonemes, consequently classifying Arabic dialects into four types: the split-R dialects (primarily Maghrebi and Egyptian dialect groups), the emphatic-R dialects (the Levantine group), the plain-R dialects (the Gulf group together with most peripheral dialects), and the uvular-R dialects (the qeltu-dialects of Mesopotamia).