Writing system } instead of Standard Arabic ), while , and appear as a native phoneme or allophone in many dialects.|name=p and v}}'''
Morphology and syntax ;All varieties, sedentary and nomadic, differ in the following ways from
Classical Arabic (CA): • The order
subject–verb–object may be more common than
verb–subject–object. • Verbal agreement between subject and object is always complete. • In CA, there was no number agreement between subject and verb when the subject was third-person and the subject followed the verb. • Loss of case distinctions (
ʾIʿrab). • Loss of original mood distinctions other than the indicative and imperative (i.e.,
subjunctive, jussive, energetic I, energetic II). • The dialects differ in how exactly the new indicative was developed from the old forms. The sedentary dialects adopted the old subjunctive forms (feminine , masculine plural ), while many of the Bedouin dialects adopted the old indicative forms (feminine , masculine plural ). • The sedentary dialects subsequently developed new mood distinctions; see below. • Loss of dual marking everywhere except on nouns. • A frozen dual persists as the regular plural marking of a small number of words that normally come in pairs (e.g., eyes, hands, parents). • In addition, a productive dual marking on nouns exists in most dialects (
Tunisian and
Moroccan Arabic are exceptions). This dual marking differs syntactically from the frozen dual in that it cannot take possessive suffixes. In addition, it differs morphologically from the frozen dual in various dialects, such as
Levantine Arabic. • The productive dual differs from CA in that its use is optional, whereas the use of the CA dual was mandatory even in cases of implicitly dual reference. • The CA dual was marked not only on nouns, but also on verbs, adjectives, pronouns and demonstratives; the dual in those varieties that have them is analyzed as plural for agreement with verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and demonstratives. • Development of an analytic genitive construction with the usage of
حق ḥagg,
بتاع bitāʕ,
تاع tāʕ,
ديال diyāl etc. to rival the
constructed genitive. • The Bedouin dialects make the least use of the analytic genitive.
Moroccan Arabic makes the most use of it, to the extent that the constructed genitive is no longer productive, and used only in certain relatively frozen constructions. • The relative pronoun is no longer inflected. • In CA, it took gender, number and case endings. • Pronominal clitics ending in a short vowel moved the vowel before the consonant. • Hence, second singular and rather than and ; third singular masculine rather than . • Similarly, the feminine plural verbal marker became . • Because of the absolute prohibition in all Arabic dialects against having two vowels in hiatus, the above changes occurred only when a consonant preceded the ending. When a vowel preceded, the forms either remained as-is or lost the final vowel, becoming , , and , respectively. Combined with other phonetic changes, this resulted in multiple forms for each clitic (up to three), depending on the phonetic environment. • The verbal markers (first singular) and (second singular masculine) both became , while second singular feminine remained. Mesopotamian dialects in southeastern Turkey are an exception for they retain the ending for first person singular. • In the dialect of southern
Nejd (including
Riyadh), the second singular masculine has been retained, but takes the form of a long vowel rather than a short one as in CA. • The forms given here were the original forms, and have often suffered various changes in the modern dialects. • All of these changes were triggered by the loss of final short vowels (see below). • Various simplifications have occurred in the range of variation in verbal paradigms. • Third-weak verbs with radical and radical (traditionally transliterated
y) have merged in the form I perfect tense. They had already merged in CA, except in form I. • Form I perfect '
verbs have disappeared, often merging with '. • Doubled verbs now have the same endings as third-weak verbs. • Some endings of third-weak verbs have been replaced by those of the strong verbs (or vice versa, in some dialects). ;All dialects except some Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula share the following innovations from CA: • Loss of the inflected passive (i.e., marked through internal vowel change) in finite verb forms. • New passives have often been developed by co-opting the original reflexive formations in CA, particularly verb forms V, VI and VII (In CA these were derivational, not inflectional, as neither their existence nor exact meaning could be depended upon; however, they have often been incorporated into the inflectional system, especially in more innovative sedentary dialects). •
Hassaniya Arabic contains a newly developed inflected passive that looks somewhat like the old CA passive. •
Najdi Arabic has retained the inflected passive up to the modern era, though this feature is on its way to extinction as a result of the influence of other dialects. • Loss of the indefinite suffix (
tanwiin) on nouns. • When this marker still appears, it is variously , , or . • In some Bedouin dialects it still marks indefiniteness on any noun, although this is optional and often used only in oral poetry. • In other dialects it marks indefiniteness on post-modified nouns (by adjectives or relative clauses). • All Arabic dialects preserve a form of the CA adverbial accusative suffix, which was originally a tanwiin marker. • Loss of verb form IV, the causative. • Verb form II sometimes gives causatives, but is not productive. • Uniform use of in imperfect verbal prefixes. • CA had before form II, III and IV active, and before all passives, and elsewhere. • Some Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula have uniform . •
Najdi Arabic has when the following vowel is , and when the following vowel is . ;All sedentary dialects share the following additional innovations: • Loss of a separately distinguished feminine plural in verbs, pronouns and demonstratives. This is usually lost in adjectives as well. • Development of a new indicative-subjunctive distinction. • The indicative is marked by a prefix, while the subjunctive lacks this. • The prefix is or in
Egyptian Arabic and
Levantine Arabic, but or in
Moroccan Arabic. It is not infrequent to encounter as an indicative prefix in some Persian Gulf states; and, in South Arabian Arabic (viz. Yemen), is used in the north around the San'aa region, and is used in the southwest region of Ta'iz. •
Tunisian Arabic,
Maltese and at least some varieties of
Algerian and
Libyan Arabic lack an indicative prefix. Rural dialects in Tunisia however, may use /ta/. • Loss of in the third-person masculine enclitic pronoun, when attached to a word ending in a consonant. • The form is usually or in sedentary dialects, but or in Bedouin dialects. • After a vowel, the bare form is used, but in many sedentary dialects the is lost here as well. In Egyptian Arabic, for example, this pronoun is marked in this case only by lengthening of the final vowel and concomitant stress shift onto it, but the "h" reappears when followed by another suffix. •
ramā "he threw it" •
maramahūʃ "he didn't throw it" ;The following innovations are characteristic of many or most sedentary dialects: • Agreement (verbal, adjectival) with inanimate plurals is plural, rather than feminine singular or feminine plural, as in CA. • Development of a
circumfix negative marker on the verb, involving a prefix and a suffix . • In combination with the fusion of the indirect object and the development of new mood markers, this results in morpheme-rich verbal complexes that can approach
polysynthetic languages in their complexity. • An example from
Egyptian Arabic: • • [negation]-[indicative]-[2nd.person.subject]-bring-[feminine.object]-to.us-[negation] • "You (plural) aren't bringing her (them) to us." • (NOTE: Versteegh glosses as
continuous.) • In
Egyptian,
Tunisian and
Moroccan Arabic, the distinction between active and passive participles has disappeared except in form I and in some Classical borrowings. • These dialects tend to use form V and VI active participles as the passive participles of forms II and III. ;The following innovations are characteristic of
Maghrebi Arabic (in
North Africa, west of Egypt): • In the imperfect,
Maghrebi Arabic has replaced first person singular with , and the first person plural, originally marked by alone, is also marked by the suffix of the other plural forms. •
Moroccan Arabic has greatly rearranged the system of verbal derivation, so that the traditional system of forms I through X is not applicable without some stretching. It would be more accurate to describe its verbal system as consisting of two major types,
triliteral and
quadriliteral, each with a mediopassive variant marked by a prefixal or . • The triliteral type encompasses traditional form I verbs (strong: "write"; geminate: "smell"; hollow: "sell", "say", "fear"; weak "buy", "crawl", "begin"; irregular: - "eat", "take away", "come"). • The quadriliteral type encompasses strong [CA form II, quadriliteral form I]: "slap", "break", "speak nasally"; hollow-2 [CA form III, non-CA]: "wait", "inflate", "eat" (slang); hollow-3 [CA form VIII, IX]: "choose", "redden"; weak [CA form II weak, quadriliteral form I weak]: "show", "inquire"; hollow-2-weak [CA form III weak, non-CA weak]: "end", "roll", "shoot"; irregular: - "send". • There are also a certain number of quinquiliteral or longer verbs, of various sorts, e.g. weak: "pedal", "scheme, plan", "dodge, fake"; remnant CA form X: "use", "deserve"; diminutive: "act bourgeois", "deal in drugs". • Those types corresponding to CA forms VIII and X are rare and completely unproductive, while some of the non-CA types are productive. At one point, form IX significantly increased in productivity over CA, and there are perhaps 50–100 of these verbs currently, mostly stative but not necessarily referring to colors or bodily defects. However, this type is no longer very productive. • Due to the merging of short and , most of these types show no stem difference between perfect and imperfect, which is probably why the languages has incorporated new types so easily. ;The following innovations are characteristic of
Egyptian Arabic: •
Egyptian Arabic, probably under the influence of
Coptic, puts the demonstrative pronoun after the noun ( "this X" instead of CA ) and leaves
interrogative pronouns
in situ rather than fronting them, as in other dialects.
Phonetics When it comes to phonetics the Arabic dialects differ in the pronunciation of the short vowels (, and ) and a number of selected consonants, mainly , and the
interdentals , and , in addition to the dental . The is sometimes
palatalized depending on its position in a number of dialects: •
Emphasis spreading Emphasis spreading is a phenomenon where is backed to in the vicinity of emphatic consonants. The domain of emphasis spreading is potentially unbounded; in
Egyptian Arabic, the entire word is usually affected, although in
Levantine Arabic and some other varieties, it is blocked by or (and sometimes ). It is associated with a concomitant decrease in the amount of pharyngealization of emphatic consonants, so that in some dialects emphasis spreading is the only way to distinguish emphatic consonants from their plain counterparts. It also pharyngealizes consonants between the source consonant and affected vowels, although the effects are much less noticeable than for vowels. Emphasis spreading does
not affect the affrication of non-emphatic in
Moroccan Arabic, with the result that these two phonemes are always distinguishable regardless of the nearby presence of other emphatic phonemes.
Consonants Notes: • The pronunciation of standard depends on the region or the country, but is the predominant pronunciation outside the Arab world and the only accepted pronunciation for
Quranic recitation, the other common pronunciations are , or . • The usage of the sounds for and or for are more common in the traditional Najdi dialects. • Moroccan is sometimes pronounced in some words as in "He sat". Most dialects of Arabic will use for in learned words that are borrowed from Standard Arabic into the respective dialect or when Arabs speak Modern Standard Arabic. The main dialectal variations in Arabic consonants revolve around the consonants , , , , , and partially . Classical Arabic varies widely from a dialect to another with , and being the most common: • in most of the
Arabian Peninsula,
Northern and
Eastern Yemen and parts of Oman, Southern
Iraq, some parts of the Levant,
Upper Egypt,
Sudan,
Libya,
Mauritania,
Chad and to lesser extent in some parts (mostly rural) of
Tunisia,
Algeria, and
Morocco, but it is also used partially across those countries in some words. • in most of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco,
Southern and
Western Yemen and parts of Oman, Northern Iraq, parts of the Levant, especially
Druze dialects. However, most other dialects of Arabic will use this pronunciation in learned words that are borrowed from Standard Arabic into the respective dialect. • in most of the Levant and
Lower Egypt, as well as some North African towns such as
Tlemcen and
Fez. • other variations include in
Sudanese and some forms of
Yemeni, In rural
Palestinian, in some positions in
Iraqi and
Gulf Arabic, or in some positions in
Sudanese and consonantally in the Yemeni dialect of
Yafi', in some positions in
Najdi, though this pronunciation is fading in favor of . Classical Arabic (Modern Standard ) varies widely from a dialect to another with , and being the most common: • in most of the Arabian peninsula, Algeria, Iraq, Upper Egypt, Sudan, parts of the Levant and Yemen. • in most of the
Levant and
North Africa. • in
Lower Egypt, parts of
Yemen and
Oman. • other variations include in the Persian Gulf and southern Iraq and coastal
Hadhramaut. in some
Arabian
Bedouin dialects, and parts of
Sudan, as the 8th-century
Persian linguist
Sibawayh described it. Classical
interdental consonants and become or in some words in
Egypt, Sudan, most of the Levant, parts of the Arabian peninsula (urban
Hejaz and parts of Yemen). In
Morocco,
Algeria and other parts of
North Africa they are consistently . They remain and in most of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Tunisia, parts of Yemen, rural Palestinian, Eastern Libyan, and some rural
Algerian dialects. In Arabic-speaking towns of Eastern
Turkey (Urfa, Siirt and Mardin), they respectively become . • CA is lost. • When adjacent to vowels, the following simplifications take place, in order: • V1ʔV2 → V̄ when V1 = V2 • aʔi aʔw → aj aw • iʔV uʔV → ijV uwV • VʔC → V̄C • Elsewhere, is simply lost. • In CA and
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is still pronounced. • Because this change had already happened in Meccan Arabic at the time the
Qur'an was written, it is reflected in the orthography of written Arabic, where a diacritic known as
hamzah is inserted either above an
ʾalif,
wāw or
yāʾ, or "on the line" (between characters); or in certain cases, a diacritic ʾalif maddah (" ʾalif") is inserted over an
ʾalif. (As a result, proper spelling of words involving is probably one of the most difficult issues in Arabic orthography • Modern dialects have smoothed out the morphophonemic variations, typically by losing the associated verbs or moving them into another paradigm (for example, "read" becomes or , a third-weak verb). • has reappeared medially in various words due to borrowing from CA. (In addition, has become in many dialects, although the two are marginally distinguishable in
Egyptian Arabic, since words beginning with original can elide this sound, whereas words beginning with original cannot.) • CA often becomes in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, some Rural Palestinian dialects and in some
Bedouin dialects when adjacent to an original , particularly in the second singular feminine enclitic pronoun, where replaces Classical or ). In a very few Moroccan varieties, it affricates to . Elsewhere, it remains . • CA is pronounced in a few areas:
Mosul, for instance, and the Jewish variety in
Algiers. In all of northern Africa, a phonemic distinction has emerged between plain and emphatic , thanks to the merging of short vowels. • CA (but not emphatic CA ) is affricated to in
Moroccan Arabic; this is still distinguishable from the sequence . • CA ) is pronounced in
Iraqi Arabic and
Kuwaiti Arabic with glottal closure: . In some varieties is devoiced to before , for some speakers of Cairene Arabic → (or ) "hers". The residue of this rule applies also in the Maltese language, where neither etymological nor are pronounced as such, but give in this context:
tagħha "hers". • The nature of "emphasis" differs somewhat from variety to variety. It is usually described as a concomitant
pharyngealization, but in most sedentary varieties is actually
velarization, or a combination of the two. (The phonetic effects of the two are only minimally different from each other.) Usually there is some associated lip rounding; in addition, the stop consonants and are dental and lightly aspirated when non-emphatic, but alveolar and completely unaspirated when emphatic. • CA is also in the process of splitting into emphatic and non-emphatic varieties, with the former causing emphasis spreading, just like other emphatic consonants. Originally, non-emphatic occurred before or between and a following consonant, while emphatic occurred mostly near . • To a large extent, Western Arabic dialects reflect this, while the situation is rather more complicated in
Egyptian Arabic. (The allophonic distribution still exists to a large extent, although not in any predictable fashion; nor is one or the other variety used consistently in different words derived from the same root. Furthermore, although derivational suffixes (in particular, relational and ) affect a preceding in the expected fashion, inflectional suffixes do not). • Certain other consonants, depending on the dialect, also cause pharyngealization of adjacent sounds, although the effect is typically weaker than full emphasis spreading and usually has no effect on more distant vowels. • The velar fricative and the uvular consonant often cause partial backing of adjacent (and of and in
Moroccan Arabic). For
Moroccan Arabic, the effect is sometimes described as half as powerful as an emphatic consonant, as a vowel with uvular consonants on both sides is affected similarly to having an emphatic consonant on one side. • The pharyngeal consonants and cause no emphasis spreading and may have little or no effect on adjacent vowels. In
Egyptian Arabic, for example, adjacent to either sound is a fully front . In other dialects, is more likely to have an effect than . • In some
Gulf Arabic dialects, and/or causes backing. • In some dialects, words such as '''' has backed 's and in some dialects also velarized .
Vowels • Classical Arabic short vowels , and undergo various changes. • Original final short vowels are mostly deleted. • Many
Levantine Arabic dialects merge and into a phonemic except when directly followed by a single consonant; this sound may appear allophonically as or in certain phonetic environments. •
Maghreb dialects merge and into , which is deleted when unstressed. Tunisian maintains this distinction, but deletes these vowels in non-final open syllables. •
Moroccan Arabic, under the strong influence of
Berber, goes even further. Short is converted to labialization of an adjacent velar, or is merged with . This schwa then deletes everywhere except in certain words ending . • The result is that there is no distinction between short and long vowels; borrowings from CA have "long" vowels (now pronounced half-long) uniformly substituted for original short and long vowels. • This also results in consonant clusters of great length, which are (more or less) syllabified according to a sonority hierarchy. For some subdialects, in practice, it is very difficult to tell where, if anywhere, there are syllabic peaks in long consonant clusters in a phrase such as "you (fem.) must write". Other dialects, in the North, make a clear distinction; they say /xəssək təktəb/ "you want to write", and not */xəssk ətkətb/. • In
Moroccan Arabic, short and have merged, obscuring the original distribution. In this dialect, the two varieties have completely split into separate phonemes, with one or the other used consistently across all words derived from a particular root except in a few situations. • In
Moroccan Arabic, the allophonic effect of emphatic consonants is more pronounced than elsewhere. • Full is affected as above, but and are also affected, and are to and , respectively. • In some varieties, such as in
Marrakesh, the effects are even more extreme (and complex), where both high-mid and low-mid allophones exist ( and , and ), in addition to front-rounded allophones of original (, , ), all depending on adjacent phonemes. • On the other hand, emphasis spreading in
Moroccan Arabic is less pronounced than elsewhere; usually it only spreads to the nearest full vowel on either side, although with some additional complications. • and in CA completely become and respectively in some other particular dialects. • In
Egyptian Arabic and
Levantine Arabic, short and are elided in various circumstances in unstressed syllables (typically, in open syllables; for example, in Egyptian Arabic, this occurs only in the middle vowel of a VCVCV sequence, ignoring word boundaries). In Levantine, however, clusters of three consonants are almost never permitted. If such a cluster would occur, it is broken up through the insertion of between the second and third consonants in Egyptian Arabic, and between the first and second in
Levantine Arabic. • CA long vowels are shortened in some circumstances. • Original final long vowels are shortened in all dialects. • In
Egyptian Arabic and
Levantine Arabic, unstressed long vowels are shortened. •
Egyptian Arabic also cannot tolerate long vowels followed by two consonants, and shortens them. (Such an occurrence was rare in CA, but often occurs in modern dialects as a result of elision of a short vowel.) • In most dialects, particularly sedentary ones, CA and have two strongly divergent allophones, depending on the phonetic context. • Adjacent to an emphatic consonant and to (but not usually to other sounds derived from this, such as or ), a back variant occurs; elsewhere, a strongly fronted variant ~ is used. • The two allophones are in the process of splitting phonemically in some dialects, as occurs in some words (particularly foreign borrowings) even in the absence of any emphatic consonants anywhere in the word. (Some linguists have postulated additional emphatic phonemes in an attempt to handle these circumstances; in the extreme case, this requires assuming that
every phoneme occurs doubled, in emphatic and non-emphatic varieties. Some have attempted to make the vowel allophones autonomous and eliminate the emphatic consonants as phonemes. Others have asserted that emphasis is actually a property of syllables or whole words rather than of individual vowels or consonants. None of these proposals seems particularly tenable, however, given the variable and unpredictable nature of emphasis spreading.) • Unlike other Arabic varieties,
Hejazi Arabic did not develop allophones of the vowels /a/ and /aː/, and both are pronounced as or . • CA diphthongs and have become or and or (but merge with original and in
Maghreb dialects, which is probably a secondary development). The diphthongs are maintained in
the Maltese language and some urban Tunisian dialects, particularly that of
Sfax, while and also occur in some other Tunisian dialects, such as
Monastir. • The placement of the stress accent is extremely variable between varieties; nowhere is it phonemic. • Most commonly, it falls on the last syllable containing a long vowel, or a short vowel followed by two consonants; but never farther from the end than the third-to-last syllable. This maintains the presumed stress pattern in CA (although there is some disagreement over whether stress could move farther back than the third-to-last syllable), and is also used in
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). • In CA and MSA, stress cannot occur on a final long vowel; however, this does not result in different stress patterns on any words, because CA final long vowels are shortened in all modern dialects, and any current final long vowels are secondary developments from words containing a long vowel followed by a consonant. • In
Egyptian Arabic, the rule is similar, but stress falls on the second-to-last syllable in words of the form ...VCCVCV, as in . • In
Maghrebi Arabic, stress is final in words of the (original) form CaCaC, after which the first is elided. Hence '''' "mountain" becomes . • In
Moroccan Arabic, phonetic stress is often not recognizable. ==See also==