POLYSEMY IN ARABIC DIALECTS

2004 ◽  
pp. 51-64
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Dialects

The Arabic dialects of the Gulf

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Holes
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Gulf Arabic

The vocabulary of the modern Gulf Arabic dialects contains many items of ancient Mesopotamian origin; there is also evidence of early south Arabian influences. Historically, three dialect types existed in the region: Najdi, coastal (these two are ‘A dialects’), and Baḥārna (‘B’ dialects). There must long have been contact between these three, but the main interface was between the Najdi and the coastal type. The (Shīˁī) Baḥārna lived in separate settlements, pursued livelihoods specific to them, and did not marry with the other two groups. All of this preserved their dialect. This sociolinguistic division was most evident in the state of Bahrain. In recent decades, changes in employment and increased urbanization have brought about increased interdialectal contact, resulting in the loss of B dialect features and a homogenization of the A dialects to the point that one can now speak of the emergence of a Gulf koine.

scholarly journals An Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI in 17 Arabic Dialects for Children Aged 8 to 30 Months

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Alshaimaa Gaber Salah Abdelwahab ◽  
Samuel Forbes ◽  
Allegra Cattani ◽  
Jeremy Goslin ◽  
Caroline Floccia
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Dialects

A Melkite Arabic literary lingua franca from the second half of the first millennium

1994 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Blau
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
The Ideal

After the Islamic conquest, the Greek Orthodox, so-called Melkite ( = Royalist), church fairly early adopted Arabic as its literary language. Their intellectual centres in Syria/Palestine were Jerusalem, along with the monaster ies of Mar Sabas and Mar Chariton in Judea, Edessa and Damascus. A great many Arabic manuscripts stemming from the first millennium, some of them dated, copied at the monastery of Mar Chariton and especially at that of Mar Saba, have been discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, the only monastery that has not been pillaged and set on fire by the bedouin. These manuscripts are of great importance for the history of the Arabic language. Because Christians were less devoted to the ideal of the ‘arabiyya than their Muslim contemporaries, their writings contain a great many devi ations from classical Arabic, thus enabling us to reconstruct early Neo-Arabic, the predecessor of the modern Arabic dialects, and bridge a gap of over one thousand years in the history of the Arabic language.

scholarly journals Definiteness Systems and Dialect Classification

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Mike Turner
Keyword(s):  
Binary System ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Classification Schemes ◽  
Modeling Process ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Dialect Classification ◽  
Semantic Typology

In this article I explore how typological approaches can be used to construct novel classification schemes for Arabic dialects, taking the example of definiteness as a case study. Definiteness in Arabic has traditionally been envisioned as an essentially binary system, wherein definite substantives are marked with a reflex of the article al- and indefinite ones are not. Recent work has complicated this model, framing definiteness instead as a continuum along which speakers can locate referents using a broader range of morphological and syntactic strategies, including not only the article al-, but also reflexes of the demonstrative series and a diverse set of ‘indefinite-specific’ articles found throughout the spoken dialects. I argue that it is possible to describe these strategies with even more precision by modeling them within cross-linguistic frameworks for semantic typology, among them a model known as the ‘Reference Hierarchy,’ which I adopt here. This modeling process allows for classification of dialects not by the presence of shared forms, but rather by parallel typological configurations, even if the forms within them are disparate.

scholarly journals The Palatalisation of /ʤ/ into /j/ in Emirati Arabic (EA): A Rule-Governed or Random Alternation?

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Hodan Mohamoud Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Random Alternation

This study aims to investigate a phonological phenomenon that occurs in Emirati Arabic (EA), whereby the voiced palato-alveolar affricate /ʤ/ changes into the voiced palatal approximate (glide) /j/. In particular, this study attempts to determine whether this phonological alternation is triggered by a certain phonological environment, or whether it occurs randomly without any rule. It also endeavours to examine the hypothesis that this phonological phenomenon was borrowed from other Arabic dialects spoken in the Gulf through language contact.

scholarly journals Similarities between Arabic dialects: Investigating geographical proximity

2022 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 102770
Author(s):  
Abdulkareem Alsudais ◽  
Wafa Alotaibi ◽  
Faye Alomary
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
Arabic Dialects

scholarly journals Exceptional Arabic Diminutive Forms of Nouns with [aa]: An Optimality-Theoretic Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Albatool Mohammed Abalkheel
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Theoretic Analysis ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Morphological Processes ◽  
Arabic Dialects

Most diminutive forms in Arabic adhere in their derivation to certain simple phonological and morphological processes without any complications. However, there are exceptions to be found, including diminutive forms of nouns with [aa] in which the segment [w] surfaces. Using Optimality Theory (OT) as a framework and using syllable weight as a base of analysis, this study aims to provide an accurate explanation of such phenomena. This work will show that the root of words with [w] is not simply biconsonantal with an emphatic segment (i.e., [w]) inserted to fill the empty onset. Instead, the root is triconsonantal in which [w] is an essential segment. It also reveals that syllable-weight constraint is inviolable in Arabic dialects.

Creation of annotated country-level dialectal Arabic resources: An unsupervised approach

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Maha J. Althobaiti
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Agreement Score ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Dialectal Arabic

Abstract The wide usage of multiple spoken Arabic dialects on social networking sites stimulates increasing interest in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for dialectal Arabic (DA). Arabic dialects represent true linguistic diversity and differ from modern standard Arabic (MSA). In fact, the complexity and variety of these dialects make it insufficient to build one NLP system that is suitable for all of them. In comparison with MSA, the available datasets for various dialects are generally limited in terms of size, genre and scope. In this article, we present a novel approach that automatically develops an annotated country-level dialectal Arabic corpus and builds lists of words that encompass 15 Arabic dialects. The algorithm uses an iterative procedure consisting of two main components: automatic creation of lists for dialectal words and automatic creation of annotated Arabic dialect identification corpus. To our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind to examine and analyse the poor performance of the MSA part-of-speech tagger on dialectal Arabic contents and to exploit that in order to extract the dialectal words. The pointwise mutual information association measure and the geographical frequency of word occurrence online are used to classify dialectal words. The annotated dialectal Arabic corpus (Twt15DA), built using our algorithm, is collected from Twitter and consists of 311,785 tweets containing 3,858,459 words in total. We randomly selected a sample of 75 tweets per country, 1125 tweets in total, and conducted a manual dialect identification task by native speakers. The results show an average inter-annotator agreement score equal to 64%, which reflects satisfactory agreement considering the overlapping features of the 15 Arabic dialects.

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