Bedouin Arabic

Bedouin Arabic

The similarities between Bedouin dialects are due to their historical contact with one another, due to rapid population movements that quickly erase linguistic diversity.[2]

Features

• Voiced pronunciation of
  /d͡ʒ/ in Eastern Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Shawi dialects
  .
• Preserving interdental consonants
  /z/
  , and /zˤ/.
• Preserving nunation as suffix -in, for example: bintin zēnah.
• Distinguishing masculine and feminine plural pronouns -hum and -hun.
• Internal passive verb forms, such as kutib (passive voice of katab). In sedentary dialects, prefixes such as in- (inkatab) and it- (itkatab) are used.

Eastern Bedouin features

• Verbal suffix -ūn to mark plural subjects.
• qāf
  ) and /k/ occurring before front vowels, with two realizations:
  • /g/ →
    /tʃ/ in Gulf, Mesopotamian, and Shawi dialects
    .
  • /g/ →
    /ts/
    in the Najdi dialect group.

• Najdi Arabic, spoken in Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Desert, and Upper Mesopotamia.
• Shawi Arabic, spoken by sheep-rearing tribes living between the Tigris and the Euphrates, but also in northern Jordan, Palestine, western Syria, and Lebanon.^[4]
• Northwest Arabian Arabic, a variety of Arabic spoken by Bedouins mostly in northwestern Saudi Arabia, southern Jordan, southern Israel, and eastern Egypt.
• Omani bedouin dialects.^[5]
• Gulf Arabic, spoken by sedentary populations on the Persian Gulf coast, many of whom descend from Bedouin tribes.
• The Gelet dialects of Mesopotamian Arabic, spoken in the majority of Iraq.

Western dialects:

• Hilalian dialects, a group of Maghrebi dialects that include most bedouin dialects in the Maghreb.
• Hassaniya Arabic, the variety of Arabic originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes.
• Libyan Arabic or Sulaimitian Arabic, a variety of Arabic spoken in Libya and neighboring countries.
• Saharan Arabic
  , a variety of Arabic spoken in Algeria.
• Chadian Arabic,^[6] the variety of Arabic spoken in Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan.

See also

• Bedouin, a predominantly desert-dwelling Arabian ethnic group
• Varieties of Arabic, regional and other varieties of the Arabic language

References