The Arabic Vowels: Features and Possible Clinical Application in Communication Disorders

Abstract

Most scholars, old and modern, agree that the vowel system of the Arabic language is composed of 3 vowels only, namely /i/, /Ε/ and /u/. The spoken Cairo dialect suggests that there are 6 identifiable vowels, with a short and long variant for each. Objective: The aim of this study is to test the validity of the notion that there are 6 × 2 distinct vowels, with a more central one. Subjects and Methods: Spectral analysis was used to measure F₁ and F₂ for the vowels of 14 real words. Data was collected from 60 healthy adult informants, 30 males and 30 females. They were native Egyptians speaking the colloquial Cairene dialect. Results: The values of the 6 long and short vowels plus the central one are presented. A significant difference was found between each of them. The long and short vowels differed only in the duration but did not differ in their formant values. Conclusion: The study illustrates the distinctive features of the vowels of the Arabic language. Each of the 7 vowels represents a distinct entity. This will have important implications in assessment and management of language, speech and voice disorders in children and adults.

Development and standardization of new hearing in noise test in Arabic language

“…The phoneme distribution within the sentence set was determined according to the phonological transcriptions and classification into 28 consonants and 6 vowels (3 long and 3 short vowels). 17 Twenty-eight lists of 10 sentences, which matched the phonemic distribution of the entire sentence set, were formed using a trial-and-error process to exchange sentences between lists in an effort to match the distribution for each list to the overall distribution as closely as possible.…”

Formant-based analysis of vowels in Modern Standard Arabic—Preliminary results

“…Formant-based analysis was also utilized in the medical research fields. Diagnosing some voicing-related disorders in Arabic speaking patients was proposed in some research studies such as the ones published in [13], [14], [15] and [16]. In common, these studies included formant-based analysis for some vowels uttered by the patients in order to collect some diagnostic information from the formant analysis results.…”

Descriptive analysis of the development of the Arabic speech sounds among typically developing colloquial Egyptian Arabic-speaking children

“…Another dialect difference is that the CEA frequently replaced the emphatic sound /q/ and the fricative /θ/ [10] with the sound /ʔ/ and /t/, respectively. As regards the vowels, besides the basic 6 short and long vowels (/a, aː, i, iː, u, uː/) that present in Classical Arabic and MSA [18], the CEA dialect includes two allophones of the Classical Arabic vowels /a/ and /aː/, with fronted allophones /ae, ae:/ occurring in most circumstances, and backed allophones /ɑ, ɑ:/ occurring in the vicinity of emphatic consonants /tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ, q/ and some instances of /r/ [10,19]. Additionally, the CEA dialects include the vowels /e, e:/ and /o, o:/ which are perceived as separate phonemes rather than allophones of vowels /i, i:/ and /u, u:/, respectively [10,18,20].…”

“…*IQ assessed by the screening test of Stanford-Binet intelligence scale, 5th edition[19], and **Total language age by the Modified Preschool Language Scale-4th edition (The Arabic version)[20] …”