Pre-pausal devoicing and glottalisation in varieties of the south-western Arabian peninsula

A wide range of modern Arabic dialects exhibit devoicing in pre-pausal (utterance-final) position. These include Cairene [20], Gulf Arabic, San’ani [8], [18], Manaxah [19], Central Highland Yemeni dialects [1], Rijal Alma‘ (Asiri p.c.), Central Sudanese (Dickins p.c.), Çukurova [15], Kinderib [9], E. Fayyum [2]. In some dialects, pausal devoicing is reported to be accompanied by aspiration (e.g. Cairene, [19]), in others by glottalisation (e.g. Fayyum, [2]; Manaxah, [18]; San’ani, [8], [18]). As preliminary work to a study of pausal phenomena in the south-western Arabian Peninsula, we examine data from two Arabic dialects – San’ani (SA), spoken in the Old City of San’a, Yemen, and the Asiri dialect of Rijal Alma‘ (RA) – and from Mehriyōt, an eastern dialect of the modern south Arabian language, Mehri, spoken in Yemen. We begin by presenting a summary of pausal phenomena in SA. We then consider the behaviour of final oral stops – velar, coronal and labial – final coronal fricatives, final nasals and liquids, and final vowels. Initial comparison with data from RA and Mehriyōt indicates that utterance-final devoicing is more advanced in SA than in the other varieties, and involves a greater range of segment types. The first set of pausal examples were extracted from Watson’s recordings of spontaneous SA monologues on the Semitic Spracharchiv. The main speaker is a young semi educated woman.1 Those forms which exist as lexemes in RA, plus lexemes involving similar pre-pausal segments in comparable syllable types, were recorded utterance-finally by Yahya Asiri, a native speaker of RA. Pausal forms for Mehriyōt were extracted from the late Alexander Sima’s recordings of spontaneous speech on the Semitic sound archive [16]. The Mehriyōt speaker is a low- to semi-educated early middle-aged man. Data were analysed using the phonetic analysis programme PRAAT (www.praat.org).