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Part of
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXX: Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic Linguistics, Stony Brook, New York, 2016 and Norman, Oklahoma, 2017
Edited by Amel Khalfaoui and Matthew A. Tucker
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 7] 2019
► pp. 53–76

Gemination in Rural Jordanian Arabic

| University of Manitoba
| University of Manitoba

This study provides a detailed acoustic description of gemination in Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA), measuring the duration of geminate and singleton consonants across the full range of consonants and positions in an understudied variety of Arabic: RJA, a Levantine dialect spoken by village dwellers in the northern part of Jordan. The results show that position plays a role in phonetic gemination, with medial geminates substantially longer than those in final position. Vowels adjacent to medial consonants were also measured, and when adjacent to a geminate consonant, short vowels are found to be shorter, and long vowels are found to be longer than when adjacent to a singleton consonant.

Keywords: phonetics, gemination, geminate consonants, Arabic, Jordanian Arabic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An overview of Jordanian Arabic dialects
  • 3.Acoustic correlates of gemination
    • Consonant duration
    • Vowel duration
  • 4.Methods
    • Participants
    • Data
    • Acoustic analysis
  • 5.Results
    • Word-medial consonants
    • Preceding short vowel duration
    • Following short vowel duration
    • Following long vowel duration
    • Word-final consonants
    • Preceding short vowel duration
    • Preceding long vowel duration
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 8 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.7.04ald
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