Abstract
Moroccan Arabic is divergent from the other modern Arabic dialects in important phonological aspects, chiefly in the change of most occurrences of short vowels to ǝ, and of a · >æ ·, in the lessening of phonetic distinction between emphatic and corresponding non-emphatic consonants (e. g. between ṭ and t), and in the loss of distinction between dental spirants and stops (e. g. between θ and t) in some parts of Morocco. Moroccan Arabic is used as a trade language in many Atlantic seaports of Africa south of Morocco, and many of its phonological features are present also in the Arabic of Algeria and Tunisia. Dialects of various Moroccan cities differ from each other both in the phonetic ranges of phonemes and in their phonemic system. The material presented here is based mostly on the speech of Mr. and Mrs. Abdul Kader Larbi of Casablanca; Mrs. Larbi comes from Casablanca, and Mr. Larbi from the town of Bir Rshid, 40 km from that city. Wherever their dialects differed, the forms used here are those spoken by Mrs. Larbi.
A few months after this paper was read, Mr. Charles Ferguson took over the work in this language, and I am glad to thank him here for new examples and valuable suggestions which he has since given to me.
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Notes
For lack of a better name, the usual term ‘emphatic’ will be used here for these consonants. They are pronounced with the blade or back of the tongue further back in the mouth than it is for the corresponding non-emphatic consonants. q is velar and the others domal or pre-palatal. The emphatic stops are all unaspirated.
C represents any consonant, V any vowel, # word boundary; the dash — indicates the position in which the sound under discussion does or does not occur, according to the preceding statement. Specifically phonemic writing will be placed between slanting bars /.../; phonetic writing will usually be written with no special marker, but will sometimes be placed in square brackets [...]. A single slanting bar between two symbols means that either symbol can occur in the position of the first one:_VC/# means ‘_VC or_V#’.
Mr. Ferguson notes the possibility of a phonemic /u/ in words such as kŭßæ·r ‘taller ones’, tŭqæ·l ‘heavy ones’, ṣŭγa·r’ small ones’, compare ṣγiηr’ small’, kb^r ‘taller’.
This sound was rare with Mrs. Larbi, and never occurred in Mr. Larbi’s speech, but is common in other Moroccan dialects.
Morphemes which have both forms in Casablanca have g in some Moroccan dialects, q in others. Mrs. Larbi pronounced them with g more often than Mr. Larbi did.
Mr. Larbi, who studied in the Koran schools, also has γ and ð as free variants of t and ḍ respectively in words which have these spirants in the school language and in other Moroccan dialects. However, since he pronounces the spirants chiefly when he is trying to speak ‘correctly’, i. e. in the school pronunciation, it may be judged that these sounds are not distinguished from t, ḍ in his native dialect.
Mr. Larbi, who speaks some French, sometimes pronounces p in words which are borrowed from French; more often he says these words with b, as Mrs. Larbi always does.
Medium or heavy stressed vowels will be referred to as stressed vowels.
This condition applies to all the vowel phonemes, 2.1-8. In general, if sound type a occurs in the environment of c (but not of d) and sound type b occurs in the environment of d (but not of c), the grouping of a and b into one phoneme will hold only if sound types c and d are not grouped together into one phoneme, but enter distinct phonemes.
For the juncture /-/, see 3.4.
After ǝ is eliminated, 3.2.
In certain cases, which cannot as yet be exactly stated, a word is stressed on its last short vowel when a short unstressed word follows it; this depends on the position of the words in the sentence: tá giltí liya ‘you said to me’.
This is necessary only after ǝ is eliminated in 3.2, for until then long w is always dis-tinguished from long u by having ǝ or some other vowel next to it.
See 3.2, especially note 17.
These are forms in which the second consonant is lengthened: klǝm ‘word’, kǝllǝm ‘he spoke’. If we wrote kǝl·ǝm, we could say that the morpheme for ‘intensity’ consists of the phoneme /·/.
Before morphemes beginning with certain consonants, this prefix has the form of the first consonant of the morpheme: 1-bi · t ‘the room’, ḍ-ḍa·ṛ ‘the house’. If we marked long consonants with /·/, we would have to write ḍ-·a·r, so that these morphemes would begin with /·/ when the prefix ‘the’ preceded them.
Thus in /ntkllmu/ ‘we converse’ the ǝ which would precede two consonants before the final vowel would fall between two like consonants, but the two are counted as one (representing phonetically one long consonant): [ṇtkǝllmu]. The description of stress in 2.22 applies after the automatic ǝ is inserted; ǝ is stressed whenever it is in the position of a stressed short vowel.
See note 13.
Some partial limitations remain in this analysis. E. g. t occurs next to d in positions where an automatic ǝ would come between them, but not otherwise (1.18-25).
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© 1970 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Harris, Z.S. (1970). The Phonemes of Moroccan Arabic. In: Papers in Structural and Transformational Linguistics. Formal Linguistics Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6059-1_10
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