Intonational Variation in Arabic Dialects
Twenty five countries have Arabic as an official language, but the dialects spoken vary greatly, and even within one country different accents are heard.
Many features create the impression of ‘a different accent’, including how particular sounds (consonants and vowels) are pronounced, where stress falls in a word, and what intonation pattern is used. The ESRC-funded Intonational Variation in Arabic project has been hosted by the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, a leading centre for sociophonetic research. Adapting methodology from earlier work on intonational variation in English the IVAr project has generated a public-access corpus of Arabic speech, using a parallel set of sentences, stories and conversations, recorded with 18-30 year olds in eight locations across the Arab world.
Researcher: Sam Hellmuth