Sason Arabic Parker Brody Yale University 1 The language and language consultant Sason is one of a number of Anatolian dialects of Arabic, spoken by roughly 2-3000 people in Southeastern Turkey. Akkus¸ (to appear) notes that these estimates are based on popula- tion of villages where the dialect is spoken. More exact numbers are difficult to obtain due to the high degree of multilingualism in the area. While there is no officially documented endangerment status for the language, the language situation can likely be thought of as facing pressure due to a lack of transmission to the youngest generations. Adult speakers do not seem to assign any prestige to the language, nor do they show any effort to pass it on to the next generation (F. Akkus¸, p.c.). Scholarship on the sound system of Sason Arabic is somewhat lacking in the literature, although Isaakson (2005) and Jastrow (2006a;b) provide a basic sketch of various Anato- lian dialects of Arabic, including phoneme inventories, suprasegmental features, and a brief mention of phonological processes. Akkus¸ (to appear) outlines the basic phonology of Sa- son Arabic, including information about the phonemic inventory and historical phonological processes. My consultant for the project is Faruk Akkus¸, a 25 year old native speaker of Sason Arabic from the village of Ballık¨oy, in the Bitlis region of Southeastern Turkey. Faruk grew up speaking Turkish and Mutki Zazaki (Northwestern Iranian), in addition to Sason Arabic. He is also a second language learner of English, having moved to the United States in 2014. The goal of the current study is to provide a comprehensive treatment of the phonet- ics and phonology of the language, highlighting major differences between Sason and more central Arabic dialects where applicable.1 x2 outlines the vowel inventory, while x3 provides a description of the consonants of the language. Sason includes a small set of consonant phonemes that are uncommon in other Arabic dialects while lacking the characteristic series of emphatic consonants. Information on suprasegmental features such as stress assignment and contrastive vowel length is given in x4, while x5 sketches phonological processes of morphologically-conditioned compensatory vowel lengthening and word-final devoicing. 1Language examples are given phonemically and are accompanied by phonetic transcription in the In- ternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in square brackets for clarity where the production differs from the phonemic representation 2 Vowels Sason Arabic makes use of six distinct short vowels, shown in the table in (1), which compares the idealized IPA vowel quadrilateral with a plot of the speaker's actual production of the same vowels. Note that although the speaker's production of /o/ is a bit further back than the idealized /o/, we still see a relatively coherent mapping between the two figures. Waveforms and spectrograms illustrating the short vowel series are given in (2): (1) Sason Arabic short vowels F2 2400 2200 2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 200 300 u i u i 400 e o e o F1 @ ə 500 600 A ɑ Figure 1: IPA quadrilateral 700 800 Figure 2: Speaker's vowel space (2) Phonetic illustrations for Sason Arabic short vowel series Akkus¸ (to appear) notes that Sason differs from other nearby dialects in preserving the high short vowels /i/ and /u/, which have subsequently been reduced to /@/ across much of the Anatolian peninsula. This is in contrast to Modern Standard Arabic, which has maintained the high vowels and lost the mid vowels /e/ and /o/ (Thelwall 1990). Minimal pairs illustrating short vowel contrasts are given in (3): (3) Sason Arabic short vowel contrasts Phoneme Example Gloss /A/ xAsAl `he washed' /@/ xAs@l `washing' /e/ xA:le `aunt' /i/ xA:li `my uncle' /o/ xA:lo `uncle' /e/ hAme `mother in law' /o/ hAmo `father in law' /A/ bAS `good (health)' /o/ boS `a lot' /o/ dZom `barn' /u/ dZum `star' Note that the reduced vowel /@/ does seem to differentiate meaning in the formation of the gerund xAs@l `washing'. Vowel length is contrastive in Sason Arabic; all vowels in (1) (with the exception of /@/) have long counterparts (see x4). Sason Arabic also has two diphthongs, />eI/ and /AU> / (as in beyt [b>eIt] `house', dowz [dAUs> ] `walnut'). It should be noted (Akkus¸, to appear) that while these Old Arabic (OA) diphthongs have been preserved in some forms, they are reduced to a monophthong in others. This process is accompanied by what appears to be compensatory lengthening, as in Sason fo:G < OA fowq `above' and Sason e:n < OA ayn `eye': (4) IPA quadrilateral for Sason Arabic diphthongs 3 Consonants Sason Arabic distinguishes 25 consonant phonemes, which are outlined in (5): (5) Sason Arabic consonants Bilabial Labiodental Interdental Alveolar Postalveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal Plosive p b t d k g q Nasal m n Fricative f v (D) s z SZ x G h > > Affricate tS dZ Lateral l ë Approximant w ô Interestingly, the Sason consonant inventory differs quite a bit from the more central Arabic dialects. The pharyngealized `emphatic' consonants, a hallmark of common Arabic dialects, are not featured in the Sason Arabic phonemic inventory, nor is the glottal stop. Sason also includes several consonant phonemes that are not typical of Arabic dialects. These include the voiceless bilabial stop /p/, the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, the voiceless > postalveolar affricate /tS/, and the voiced velar stop /g/. Akkus¸ (to appear) notes that while some of these speech sounds, notably /p/, are approximated in many other Arabic dialects in the pronunciation of loanwords, they have all become stable phonemes in Sason due to extensive borrowing from nearby Kurdish, Turkish, Zazaki, Armenian, and Aramaic. Examples including these phonemes are given in (6): (6) Innovative Sason phonemes: Phoneme Example Gloss /p/ pArdA [phAôdA] `curtain' /v/ evlAd [evlAt] `son' > > > /tS/ tSA:x [tSA:x] `time, moment' /g/ gebS [gebS] `goat' In (7), phonetic illustrations of relevant phonemic contrasts are given for comparison: (7) Illustration of innovative Sason phonemes Figure 3: Phonetic illustration of initial /p/ and /b/ > > Figure 4: Phonetic illustration of initial /tS/ and /dZ/ Figure 5: Phonetic illustration of initial /g/ an /q/ Figure 6: Phonetic illustration of /v/ In Figure 3, note the voiceless closure and aspiration after the release burst of initial /p/, which contrasts with the voicing during closure of /b/. Figure 4 highlights the voiceless > palatoalveolar affricate /tS/, which is characterized by greater amplitude and more chaotic > high frequency noise than its voiced counterpart, /dZ/. In Figure 5, the voicing during closure and lack of positive VOT for /g/ is contrasted with the voiceless closure and aspiration of initial /q/. Figure 6 shows the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, which is characterized by a damping of higher frequencies and relatively robust maintenance of low frequency voicing information. This loss of high frequency resolution is mediated by the medial position of /v/ in the example, though it should be noted that this was the only token of /v/ that was encountered in consultations with the speaker. The full consonant inventory in (5) is outlined in (8), with the notable exception of /v/, which is rare in the language and thus it is difficult to find a minimal pair to illustrate the contrast: (8) Sason Arabic consonant contrasts Phoneme Example Gloss /x/ Axt `sister' /G/ AGb `beneath' > > > /tS/ tSotSo `grandmother' > /b/ tSobo `grandfather' /s/ sA:ôi `morning' /z/ zA:ôi `my back' /n/ nA:le `bee' /x,l/ xA:le `aunt' /ô/ xAôA: `excrement' > > /dZ/ dZ@n:e `heaven' /d/ d@nje `world/earth' /k/ ken:e `bride' /d/ do:le `state' /q/ qole `saying/remark' /m/ mAôA `wife' /q/ qAôA `he read' /w/ wAôA with /p/ nesep `lineage' /b/ Ane:b `grape' /S/ bAS `good (health)' /d/ bAd `yet' /Z/ AZin `dough' /m/ A:min `amen' /g/ gebS `goat' /ô/ ôApS `shovel' /h/ hAs `voice' /b/ bAS `good' /q/ qAs `he cut' > /f/ dZof `stomach > /m/ dZom barn It should be noted that /l/ has a velarized contextual variant in coda position following a back vowel, while the alveolar /l/ occurs elsewhere, including coda position following non-back > vowels. This alternation can be seen by comparing maqul [mAquë] `quiet' vs. recel [ôe"dZel] `man'. The voiced interdental fricative /D/ should be considered a marginal phoneme in the modern language, surviving only in the feminine plural marker -D. Our speaker commented that he is aware of this pronunciation, though he did not produce it during elicitation. He did however produce the form potA:d `clothes' as [bo"Tad], which may speculatively indicate some sort of awareness of the `underlying' fricative character of the suffix. 4 Prosody Stress assignment in Sason Arabic mirrors that of other Arabic dialects; stress is predictable rather than phonemic. Watson (2011) characterizes this with the following disjunctive rule:2 (9) a. Stress a final superheavy syllable: mazgu:n [mAz"gu:n] `sickle' { final stress on superheavy CV:C syllable; b. Otherwise stress the rightmost non-final heavy syllable: tefinge [t@"fiNge] ‘rifle’ { penultimate stress on heavy CVC syllable (in the absence of a final superheavy); 2Rules are illustrated with tokens from Sason Arabic in place of Watson's Palestinian Arabic examples c. Otherwise stress the first syllable (up to the antepenult): xasalo ["xasalo] `they washed' { initial (antepenult) stress in the absence of heavy syllables. As noted in x2, vowel length is contrastive in Sason Arabic, with each of the five cardinal short vowels having long counterparts: (10) IPA quadrilateral for Sason Arabic long vowels i: u: e: o: A: Illustrations of the long vowels /A:/, /o:/, and /e:/ are shown in (2) above (see x2), while the high vowels are given in (10) for the forms la:mu:n `lemon' and ni: `here': (11) Sason Arabic long /u:/ (170ms) and /i:/ (250ms)3 The contrastive nature of vowel length can be seen in the following minimal and near min- imal pairs in (11).