Vowel systems of quantity languages compared: Arabic dialects and other languages

Abstract

The acoustic phonetic features of colloquial Arabic vowel systems are still not entirely researched. This paper studies phonetic structure of several Arabic dialects and other languages. A basic issue is the fact that Arabic is a quantity language; but from the published literature we see that vowel systems of Arabic dialects differ in many acoustic details. We researched two colloquial Arabic dialects which are spoken in Israel, and hitherto not acoustically studied. These dialects constitute the axis around which we conducted the literature-based comparison with vowel systems of a few other Arabic dialects and other languages which share similar quantity features (i.e., long and short vowels). The study reveals similarities and differences in pitch (F0), the first three formants and duration. These differences appear between the two Arabic dialects spoken in Israel, between them and other Arabic dialects, as well as between non-Arabic languages (English, German, Swedish, and Hungarian). The findings of our study are discussed in relation with the questions of (1) vowel spaces of short and long vowels and (2) speaker's sex-dependent differences.