The intonation patterns of Ibbi Yemeni Arabic: An acoustic phonetic study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53286/arts.v7i3.2700Keywords:
Acoustic Phonetics, Ibbi Yemeni Arabic, Intonation patterns, TonalityAbstract
This paper aimed at offering an acoustic linguistic phonetic description of the intonation patterns of Ibbi Yemeni Arabic (IYA) dialect in terms of tonal inventory, intonation systems and pitch movements associated with different grammatical patterns. Using a corpus of controlled spontaneous speech samples of four male speakers comprising 11 elicited grammatical patterns including declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, exclamatives and vocatives, the three systems of IYA intonation: tonality, tonicity, tone were examined and identified. Data analysis was done both perceptually through phonemic transcription and acoustically using Praat programme (Boersma & Weenink 2023). The key findings showed that IYA has six tones: fall, low rise, high rise, fall rise, rise fall, and level tones. IYA is characterized by post-lexical nuclear accent and tonicity, a level tone in declaratives, narrow pitch range and accentuation which is unattested in other Arabic dialects, and more varied intonation patterns than Taizi Yemeni Arabic )TYA( and Sanaani Yemeni Arabic )SYA(. The study outcomes situate the IYA dialect on equal footing with other colloquial Arabic dialects, highlighting differences in pitch contours for questions, statements, or emotional expressions, emphasizing cultural nuances of intonation to enrich communication competence.
Downloads
References
Alfaifi, A., & Qasem, F. (2024). Phonological substitution patterns in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic child speech: a markedness and natural phonology perspective. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 11(1), 2360795.
Al-Ghamdi, A. (2006). "A Preliminary Analysis of the Intonation of Riyadh Saudi Arabic". Rutgers University. Retrieved May,10,2009 from: http://www. roa.rutgers.edu/files/.
Alharbi, L. M. (1991): Formal analysis of intonation: the case of the Kuwaiti dialect of Arabic, Heriott-Watt University Dissertation (unpublished).
Ali, N. A. (2000) A contrastive study of segmental and suprasegmental features of Arabic and English spoken in Yemen. Ph.D Thesis, CIEFL, Hyderabad: India.
Al-Jurafi, S. (2005). The linguistic atlas of Yemen. Yemeni Center for Studies and Research
Al-Khulaidi, M. A. A. (2018). The intonation patterns of Yemeni English: An acoustic phonetic study [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. The English and Foreign Languages University.
Allen, W. S. (1954). Living English Speech: Stress and Intonation Practice for Foreign Students. London: Long Green Company Ltd.
Alnajjar, K., & Hämäläinen, M. (2024). Normalization of Arabic Dialects into Modern Standard Arabic using BERT and GPT-2. Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, NLP4DH. https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.13146
Alnosairee, A., & Sartini, N. W. (2021). A sociolinguistics study in Arabic dialects. PRASASTI: Journal of Linguistics, 6(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.20961/prasasti.v6i1.43127
Alshawsh & Shormani (2025). (Un)translatability of Yemeni (Ibbi) Zawaamil and Ballads into English: Ibb University Students as a Case Study. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 8(3), 188-205.
Althobaiti, M. J. (2021). Creation of annotated country-level dialectal Arabic resources: An unsupervised approach. Natural Language Engineering, 28(5), 607–648.
Alvarez, A. A., & Issa, E. S. A. (2020). Learning intonation pattern embeddings for Arabic dialect identification. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.00667.
Al-Wer, E. (2007). A grammar of the dialect of Sana'a (Yemen). Brill
Al-Wer, E., & de Jong, R. (Eds.). (2011). Arabic dialectology: In honour of Clive Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Brill.
Alzaidi, M. S. A., Xu, Y., Xu, A., & Szreder, M. (2023). Analysis and computational modelling of Emirati Arabic intonation–A preliminary study. Journal of Phonetics, 98, 101236.
Aso, M., Takamichi, S., Takamune, N., & Saruwatari, H. (2020). Acoustic model-based subword tokenization and prosodic-context extraction without language knowledge for text-to-speech synthesis. Speech Communication, 125, 53–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2020.09.003
Benkirane, T. (1998) Intonation in Western Arabic (Morocco). In D.Hirst & A. Di Cristo (Eds.), Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages. ( Pp.345-359). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Benkirane, T. (1999). Codage prosodique de l’énoncé en arabe marocain. Doctorat d’Etat, Aix=Marseille I, Univ. de Provence.
Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (2023). “Praat. Doing phonetics by computer”. (Version 6.4.01). URL: https://fon.hum.uva. nl/praat/.
Cangemi, F., El Zarka, D. Simon W., Stefan B. Martine G. (2016). “Speaker-specific intonational marking of narrow focus in Egyptian Arabic.” Pro ceedings of Speech Prosody, 335–339.
Caron, Bernard, Cécile Lux, Stefano Manfredi, Christophe Pereira. (2015). “The Intonation of Topic and Focus: Zaar (Nigeria), Tamasheq (Niger), Juba Arabic (South Sudan) and Tripoli Arabic (Libya). In Corpus-based
Chahal, D. (2001) Modeling the Intonation of Lebanese Arabic Using th Auto segmental-Metrical Framework: A Comparison with English, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Melbourne.
Chahal, D. and Hellmuth, S. (2014). “The Intonation of Lebanese and Egyptian Arabic.” In Prosodic Typology: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing, edited by Sun-Ah Jun, 365–404. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chuang, Y. Y., Fon, J., Papakyritsis, I., & Baayen, H. (2021). Analyzing phonetic data with generalized additive mixed models. In Manual of clinical phonetics (pp. 108-138). Routledge.
Collins, B. and Mess, I. M. (2003). Practical Phonetics and Phonology. London: Routledge.
de Jong, K. and Zawaydeh, B. (1999). “Stress, Duration, and Intonation in Arabic Word-Level Prosody.” Journal of Phonetics 27: 3–22.
El Zarka, D. (1997). Prosodische Phonologie des Arabischen. PhD diss., Karl- Franzens-Universität Graz.
El Zarka, D. (2011). “Leading, Linking, and Closing Tones and Tunes in Egyptian Arabic: What a Simple Intonation System Tells Us about the Nature of Intonation.” In Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, 22-23, edited by Ellen Broselow and Hamid Ouali, 57–73. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
El Zarka, D. (2013a). On the Interaction of Information Structure and Prosody: The Case of Egyptian Arabic. Habilitation thesis, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.
Erteschik-Shir, N. (1999). Focus Structure Theory and Intonation. Language and Speech, 42(2–3), 209–227. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309990420020401
Frota, S. (2016). Surface and Structure: Transcribing Intonation within and across Languages. Laboratory Phonology, 7(1), 7. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.10
Ghazali, S., Hamdi, R. and Knis, K. (2007). “Intonational and Rhythmic Patterns across the Dialect Continuum.” In Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, 19, edited by Elabbas Benmamoun, 97–122. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The Phonology of Tone and Intonation. Research Surveys in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Habash, N., Diab, M. T., & Rambow, O. (2012). Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic. In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Istanbul, 2012.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1967): Intonation and Grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1970): A Course in Spoken English: Intonation. London: Oxford University Press.
Hashem, R. A. (2021). The Quest for NLP Applications and Tools: The Case of Standard Arabic and the Dialects. 2021 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP), 222–228. https://doi.org/10.1109/ialp54817.2021.9675225
Hellmuth, S. (2020). Contact and variation in Arabic intonation. In Christopher Lucas & Stefano Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced change, 583–601. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3744553
Hellmuth, S. J. (2006). Intonational pitch accent distribution in Egyptian Arabic. Ph.D. University of London.
Hellmuth, S. J. (2016). “Exploring the Syntax–Phonology Interface in Arabic.” In Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, 27 (Studies in Arabic Linguistics 3), edited by Stuart Davis and Osama Soltan, 75–97. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hellmuth, S.J. (2014). “Investigating the Variation in Arabic Intonation: The Case for a Multi-Level Corpus Approach.” In Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, 24–25, edited by Samira Farwaneh and Hamid Ouali, 63–90. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Khalafallah, H. B., Fattah, M. A., & Abdulrahman, R. (2024). Speech corpus for Medina dialect. Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, 36(2), 101864.
Kulk, F. (2003): Intonatie in het Arabische dialect van Damascus, MA Thesis, University of Amsterdam (unpublished manuscript).
Liu, D., & Reed, M. (2021). Exploring the Complexity of the L2 Intonation System: An Acoustic and Eye-Tracking Study. Frontiers in Communication, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.627316
McCulloch, G. (2018). Dear Mubarak, Irhal means Imshi : Analyzing the Relationship Between Arabic Regional Dialects and Modern Standard Arabic. Inquiry@Queen’s Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.24908/iqurcp.8556
McLarty, J. (2018). African American Language and European American English Intonation Variation Over Time in The American South. American Speech, 93(1), 32–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-6904032
Mitchell, T. F. (1993). Pronouncing Arabic II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mukumbek, M. M. (2021). Importance of intonation in English pronunciation. Actual Problems of Applied Sciences Journal ISSN 2733-3817, (1(17), 59–62. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/9vwc6
Neel, A. T. (2010). Using acoustic phonetics in clinical practice. Perspectives on Speech Science and Orofacial Disorders, 20(1), 14-24.
O'Shaughnessy, D. (2024). Trends and developments in automatic speech recognition research. Computer Speech & Language, 83, 101538.
Pavlova, A. K., & Freydina, E. L. (2020). Intonation of Classroom Interaction in the Primary School of Scotland. Prepodavatel XXI vek, 3, 2020, 182–189. https://doi.org/10.31862/2073-9613-2020-3-182-189
Peng, X. (2015). Pragmatic presupposition in Chinese categorization: A figure–ground angle of radicals’ roles in Shuowen Jiezi. Journal of Pragmatics, 88, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.08.007
Rammuny, Raji M. (1989). “Instrumental and Auditory Analysis of Colloquial Jordanian Arabic: An Update.” Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik (ZAL) 20:23–42.
Rifaat, K. (2021). The Intonation of Arabic. In The Cambridge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (pp. 330–352). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108277327.015
Roach, P. (2000) English Phonetics and Phonology.3rd Edition, Cambridge University Press, UK.
Salem, N. M., & Pillai, S. (2020). An Acoustic Analysis of Intonation in the Taizzi variety of Yemeni Arabic. Linguistics Journal, 14(1).
Shormani, M. Q. (2019). Vocatives in Yemeni (ibbi) Arabic: Functions, types and approach. Journal of Semitic Studies, 64(1), 221-250. doi: 10.1093/jss/fg?000
Studies of Lesser-described Languages. The Cor pAfroAs corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages, (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 68), ed. by Amina Mettouchi, Martine Vanhove and Dominique Caubet,
Sypacheva, K. N., & Shamina, E. A. (2024). The High Rising Terminal in the Intonation System of the Modern English Language. Discourse, 10(4), 93–105. https://doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2024-10-4-Tavakoli, S., Matteo, B., Pigoli, D., Chodroff, E., Coleman, J., Gubian, M., Renwick, M. E. L., & Sonderegger, M. (2025). Statistics in Phonetics. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 12(1), 133–156. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-statistics-112723-034642
Tavakoli, S., Matteo, B., Pigoli, D., Chodroff, E., Coleman, J., Gubian, M.,... & Sonderegger, M. (2024). Statistics in phonetics. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 12.
Wells, J. C. (2006). English Intonation. Cambridge University Press
Xu, Y. (2019). Prosody, tone, and intonation. In The Routledge Handbook of Phonetics (pp. 314–356). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429056253-13
Zahir, J. (2022). IADD: An integrated Arabic dialect identification dataset. Data in Brief, 40, 107777. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2021.107777
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright and Licensing
copyright is retained by the authors. Articles are licensed under an open access Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, meaning that anyone may download and read the paper for free. In addition, the article may be reused and quoted provided that the original published version is cited. These conditions allow for maximum use and exposure of the work.
