Arabic Phonology

علم الصوتيات في اللغة العربية

Phonology

Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages. Put more formally, phonology is the study of the categorical organization of speech sounds in languages; how speech sounds are organized in the mind and used to convey meaning.

Speech sounds are also called phonemes. A phoneme is defined as the smallest part of spoken language that makes a difference in meaning. Classical Arabic has 28 consonantal phonemes, including two semi-vowels, which constitute the Arabic alphabet.

It also has six vowel phonemes (three short vowels and three long vowels).  Short vowels are not usually represented in the written language, although they may be indicated with diacritics.

Here are the Contents of Arabic phonology

 1- Phonemes 

The existing phonemes in the Arabic language can be classified into vowels, consonants, and semivowels.

2 Phonotactics

In Arabic, the study of phonotactics and morphophonology are closely interrelated. Four phonological processes are essential to the Arabic sound system: assimilation (one sound-absorbing or affecting another), epenthesis (vowel insertion), deletion (of vowel or semivowel), and vowel shift.

3- syllables

Arabic syllables come in only 5 forms 3 types of syllables, which are “Light, heavy, and super-heavy” 

4 – prosody

Al-‘Arūd (Prosody) is the study of Arabic poetic meter, which helps to determine if the poetry is sound or broken.

5- Orthography

 is the system of writing conventions used to represent spoken Arabic in written form, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

The Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style, in which most of the letters are written in slightly different forms according to whether they stand alone or are joined to a following or preceding letter.

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