Baghdadi Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. During the 20th century, Baghdadi Arabic has become the lingua franca of Iraq and the language of commerce and education. It is considered a subset of Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic.
Phonology
Vowels
The vowel phoneme (from standard Arabic ) is usually realised as an opening diphthong, for most speakers only slightly diphthongised , but for others a more noticeable , such that, for instance,
lēš ("why") will sound like
leeyesh, much like a
drawl in English. There is a vowel phoneme that evolved from the diphthong () to resemble more of a long () sound, as in words such as
kaun ("universe") shifting to
kōn. A schwa sound is mainly heard in unstressed and stressed open and closed syllables.
| +The Vowel Phonemes of Baghdadi Arabic
! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2"Short
! colspan="2" | Long |
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Consonants
Even in the most formal of conventions, pronunciation depends upon a speaker's background.
Nevertheless, the number and phonetic character of most of the 28 consonants has a broad degree of regularity among Arabic-speaking regions. Arabic is rich in
uvular consonant, pharyngeal, and pharyngealized ("emphatic") sounds. The emphatic coronals (, , and ) cause assimilation of emphasis to adjacent non-emphatic coronal consonants. The phonemes ⟨پ⟩ and ⟨ڤ⟩ (not used by all speakers) are not considered to be part of the phonemic inventory, as they exist only in foreign words and they can be pronounced as ⟨ب⟩ and ⟨ف⟩ respectively depending on the speaker.
[Teach Yourself Arabic, by Jack Smart (Author), Frances Altorfer (Author)][Hans Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (transl. of Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart, 1952)]
Phonetic notes:
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and occur mostly in borrowings from Persian, and may be assimilated to or in some speakers.
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is heard in borrowings of non-Arabic languages.
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is the pronunciation of // in Baghdad Arabic and the rest of southern Mesopotamian dialects.
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The gemination of the flap /ɾ/ results in a trill /r/.
See also
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Baghdad Jewish Arabic
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North Mesopotamian Arabic
Sources
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Kees Versteegh, et al. Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, BRILL, 2006.
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Further reading
