Dhofari Arabic, also known as Dhofari or Zofari, is a variety of Arabic language spoken around Salalah in Oman's Dhofar Governorate.[ It has the ISO 639-3 language code "adf".]
Formerly nomadic and sedentary communities living in the area speak Dhofari Arabic as a first language, second language, or lingua franca, with varying degrees of fluency.
Phonology
Consonants
-
only rarely occurs among speakers
-
mostly occurs in formal speech.
-
/g/ occurs as a reflex of *q in inland and bedouin dialects; /q/ occurs in coastal dialects (Davey).
Vowels
-
A schwa sound may also occur as a lax realization of short vowels.
-
Historical short vowel *a is lengthened to /ā/ in a number of words, e.g. *katab(a) > ktāb 'he wrote', a process called by Richard Davey "iambic vowel lengthening". It does sometimes occur in other positions, perhaps as a result of stress shift.
-
Rarely, the historical *ā vowel has been raised and fronted to /ē/ or /ī/, or backed and rounded to /ō/. Raising and fronting of *ā is an important feature in Arabic linguistic history. Both features are unusual in the Arabian Peninsula and are today found in very few lexical items, but are documented in the primary sources of Rhodokanakis (1908,1911) and Davey (2016).
|
| /i/ | i, ɪ |
| /a/ | æ, ɑ |
| /u/ | u, ʊ |
| /aː/ | æː, ɑː |
See also
Bibliography
