| Baghdadi Arabic | |
| Nativename: | اللهجة البغدادية |
| States: | Mesopotamia |
| Region: | Baghdad |
| Familycolor: | Afroasiatic |
| Fam2: | Semitic |
| Fam3: | West Semitic |
| Fam4: | Central Semitic |
| Fam5: | Arabic |
| Fam6: | Mesopotamian |
| Fam7: | Gilit |
| Script: | Arabic alphabet |
| Ld1: | Mesopotamian Arabic |
| Lc1: | acm |
| Notice: | IPA |
| Glotto: | none |
Baghdadi Arabic is the Arabic dialect spoken in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. During the 20th century, Baghdadi Arabic has become the lingua franca of Iraq, and the language of commerce and education. It is considered a subset of Iraqi Arabic.[1]
The vowel phoneme pronounced as //eː// (from standard Arabic pronounced as //aj//) is usually realised as an opening diphthong, for most speakers only slightly diphthongised pronounced as /[ɪe̯]/, but for others a more noticeable pronounced as /[iɛ̯]/, such that, for instance, lēš ("why") will sound like leeyesh, much like a drawl in English. There is a vowel phoneme that evolved from the diphthong (pronounced as //aw//) to resemble more of a long (pronounced as //o://) sound, as in words such as kaun ("universe") shifting to kōn. A schwa sound pronounced as /[ə]/ is mainly heard in unstressed and stressed open and closed syllables.
| Short | Long | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front | Back | Front | Back | ||
| Close | pronounced as //ɪ// | pronounced as //u// | pronounced as //iː// | pronounced as //uː// | |
| Mid | pronounced as //ə// | pronounced as //eː// | pronounced as //oː// | ||
| Open | pronounced as //æ// | pronounced as //aː// | |||
Even in the most formal of conventions, pronunciation depends upon a speaker's background. Nevertheless, the number and phonetic character of most of the 28 consonants has a broad degree of regularity among Arabic-speaking regions. Arabic is rich in uvular, pharyngeal, and pharyngealized ("emphatic") sounds. The emphatic coronals (pronounced as //sˤ//, pronounced as //tˤ//, and pronounced as //ðˤ//) cause assimilation of emphasis to adjacent non-emphatic coronal consonants. The phonemes pronounced as //p// ⟨پ⟩ and pronounced as //v// ⟨ڤ⟩ (not used by all speakers) are not considered to be part of the phonemic inventory, as they exist only in foreign words and they can be pronounced as pronounced as //b// ⟨ب⟩ and pronounced as //f// ⟨ف⟩ respectively depending on the speaker.[2] [3]
| Labial | Dental | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyngeal | Glottal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | emphatic | ||||||||||
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| Stop/Affricate | voiceless | (pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | (pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| voiced | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ ~ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ ~ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ ~ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| voiced | (pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ ~ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ ~ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ ~ pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Tap | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
Phonetic notes: