Khuzestani Arabic

Khuzestani Arabic
Native to	Iran
Native speakers	570,000 (2021)
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Mesopotamian Gilit Khuzestani Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	acm
Glottolog	None
IETF	acm-IR

Khuzestani Arabic is a dialect of South Mesopotamian Arabic (SMA or "Gələt Arabic") spoken by the Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan Province of Iran. While it is a variety of SMA, it has many similarities with Gulf Arabic in neighbouring Kuwait. It has subsequently had a long history of contact with the Persian language, leading to several changes. The main changes are in word order, noun–noun and noun–adjective attribution constructions, definiteness marking, complement clauses, and discourse markers and connectors.

Khuzestani Arabic is only used in informal situations. It is not taught in school even as an optional course, although Modern Standard Arabic is taught at a basic level for religious purposes. Almost all Khuzestani Arabic speakers are bilingual in Iranian Persian, which is the official language of Iran. Khuzestani Arabic speakers are shifting to Persian; if the existing shift continues into the next generations, according to Bahrani & Gavami in Journal of the International Phonetic Association, the dialect will be nearly extinct shortly.

It is not clear how many speakers of Khuzestani Arabic there are.

The province of Khuzestan has about 4.5 million inhabitants. [...] Although no official numbers exist, it has been estimated that around 2 to 3 million people of the inhabitants of Khuzestan are Arabs (Matras and Shabibi 2007: 137; Gazsi 2011: 1020). Yet it is hard to determine what percentage of this population uses Arabic actively. Estimates in the 1960s of the Arabic-speaking population in Iran ranged from 200,000 to 650,000 (Oberling 1986: 216). Today, the usage and cross-generational transfer of Arabic have lowered in recent decades, especially among the wealthier social classes and in multilingual cities and neighbourhoods. In rural areas and neighborhoods (e.g. Shadegan and Hoveyzeh), where the majority of the residents are Arabs, this tendency is not felt.

Distribution

Khuzestani Arabic is spoken in Ahvaz, Hoveyzeh, Bostan, Susangerd, Shush, Abadan, Khorramshahr, Shadegan, Hamidiyeh, Karun, and Bawi.

Contact and lexis

Khuzestani Arabic is in contact with Bakhtiari Lurish, Persian, and other varieties of SMA. Although the lexis of the dialect is primarily composed of Arabic words, it also has Persian, English, French and Turkish loanwords. In the northern and eastern cities of Khuzestan, Luri is spoken in addition to Persian, and the Arabic of the Kamari Arabs of this region is "remarkably influenced" by Luri. In cities in Khuzestan such as Abadan, some of the new generations, especially women, often mainly speak Persian. Some Khuzestani Arabic speakers furthermore only converse in Persian at home with their children.

Phonology

Consonants

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 particularly rich in uvular, pharyngeal, and pharyngealized ("emphatic") sounds. The emphatic coronals (/sˤ/, /dˤ/, /tˤ/, and /ðˤ/) cause assimilation of emphasis to adjacent non-emphatic coronal consonants. The phonemes /p/ ⟨پ⟩ and /v/ ⟨ڤ⟩ (not used by all speakers) are only occasionally considered to be part of the phonemic inventory; they exist only in foreign words and they can be pronounced as /b/ ⟨ب⟩ and /f/ ⟨ف⟩, respectively, depending on the speaker.

Khuzestani Arabic consonant phonemes

		Labial	Dental	Denti-alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
				plain	emphatic1
Nasal		m		n
Stop	voiceless	(p)		t	tˤ		k			ʔ
	voiced	b		d	dˤ		g
Fricative	voiceless	f	θ	s	sˤ	ʃ	x ~ χ		ħ	h
	voiced	(v)	ð	z	ðˤ		ɣ ~ ʁ		ʕ
Affricate	voiceless					tʃ
	voiced					d͡ʒ
Tap				ɾ
Approximant				l	(ɫ)	j	w

Phonetic notes:

• /p/ and /v/ occur mostly in borrowings from Persian, and may be assimilated to /b/ or /f/ in some speakers.
• /ɡ/ is pronunciation of /q/ in Khuzestani Arabic and the rest of southern Mesopotamian dialects.
• The gemination of the flap /ɾ/ results in a trill [r].

References

Sources

• Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic : structures, functions, and varieties. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 978-1-58901-022-2.