The ‘tight approximant’ variant of the Arabic ‘ayn

Abstract

Previous studies of the Arabic pharyngeal ‘ayn have reported stop, fricative and approximant realisations within and across dialects. This paper presents an approximant variant that has not been specifically identified before. Described as a ‘tight approximant’, it is characterised acoustically by a pattern of filtering in which the lowest half dozen or so harmonics, including the fundamental, are markedly reduced in amplitude. Auditory responses to this kind of spectrum are characterised in terms of residue pitch. The variant can be thought of as compressed or ‘squeezed’ in the articulatory, acoustic and auditory domains in a chain of phonetic cause and effect. Laryngopharyngeal tension creates a low F0 and a compressed bandpass-filtered spectrum, which is processed auditorily by adjacent harmonics being squeezed through the same auditory filter. Acoustic and laryngographic data from selected tokens of a corpus of 436 realisations of ‘ayn, produced by 21 speakers from 11 different North African and Middle Eastern countries, are presented in support of the description of this variant. Its frequency of occurrence in the corpus suggests it is a common variant in Arabic speech. Some suggestions concerning the diachrony of ‘ayn are made in light of the reported observations.