An acoustic analysis of the Arabic ”ياء“ [ja : ʔ] : a comparative study of two Iraqi dialects

Abstract EN

The study is designed to test the acoustic characteristics of two realizations of the Arabic “[ ”ياءja:ʔ] as a vowel in two Iraqi dialects.

There were one hundred people (24-45 years old) participated in this study.

They divided into two groups based on their native dialects.

Fifty participants (male and female speaker) speak the Maysan City Center Colloquial Arabic (MCCCA) from Alamarah.

The other fifty participants speak the Maysan Country or Rural Colloquial Arabic (MCRCA) from the districts around Alamarah.

They were given twenty utterances (data collection) to read them off, and their voices were recorded in a private room.

The researcher used a software (Goldwave V.6.13) used to purify the the recordings from the noise which may affects the data analysis.

The recordings were the input (data analysis) into two software; they are Speech Analyzer V.3.1 and Praat V.

5.4.15.

The software extracted the formant frequencies for both MCCCA and MCRCA in spectrograms which showed that the Arabic “[ ”ياءja:ʔ] has different acoustic features in the two dialects.

Based on the International Phonetic Alphabet chart (IPA), it is pronounced as [i:] in MCRCA and [ia] in MCCCA.

Consequently, the vowels, in Iraqi dialects, show different spectrographic features in the pronunciation of vowels.