Acoustic Characterization of Najdi Arabic Vowel System

This study provides an acoustic description of thevowel system of Najdi Arabic, a major dialect spokenin Saudi Arabia. It aims to go beyond thephonological description provided by Ingham (1994)and offer an acoustic description of Najdi Arabicvowels. Fifteen native speakers of Najdi Arabic wererecorded reading CVC words containing all the NajdiArabic vowels described by Ingham (1994). Asexpected, Najdi Arabic vowels were found to occupya narrow acoustic space. Temporally, the long vowels/i:/, /u:/ and /a:/ were almost double the length of theirshort counterparts /i/, /u/ and /a/. The long and shortvowels also differed spectrally, with short vowelsbeing significantly more centralized than their longcounterparts. The classical Arabic diphthongs /ay/and /aw/, as in many Arabic dialects, were realized aslong monophthongs, /e:/ and /o:/, respectively. Theresults substantiate the impressionistic analysis ofNajdi Arabic vowels system by Ingham (1994).