Modern Arabic Dialects: The State of Research and New Prospects for Geo-sociological Classification

This is a bibliographic overview of the literature devoted to areal-geographic & socio-diastratic classifications of Modern Arabic dialects. The survey focuses on the validity & reliability of phonological criteria on which such typologies are constructed & concludes that many of the features posited as distinctive are not such in reality. An evolution of Arabic phonetism is traced, investigating vowel & consonant systems in Proto-Arabic, Classical Arabic, Medieval & Modern Arabic, as well as old & modern Arabic dialects. The geo-sociological classification proposed in the literature & resulting from juxtaposing K. Versteegh's (1997) differentiation between dialects of the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, Egypt, & Maghreb onto the triad of nomadic Bedouin, sedentary Bedouin, & urban is criticized as an artificial construct having nothing to do with the reality on the ground. It is argued that although perceptible to native listeners, the delimitations of individual dialectal & subdialectal groups in the Arabic world today cannot be adequately defined in terms of segmental properties, ie, vocalism or consonantism, alone but need to take into account such prosodic qualities & acoustic markers as timbre, accent, speech tempo & rhythm, syllabic harmony, coarticulation (eg, pharyngealization degree), & melody. Scholars are cautioned not to mix phonemic variation traits inherited from Old Arabic or diffused over an extended period of time across areal varieties from innovations taking place in geographically & diastratically delimited dialects. Z. Dubiel