Phonology is the analysis of the sound system of a language, including the study of the individual sounds themselves and how they are articulated (articulatory phonetics) and how they are perceived (acoustic phonetics). Phonology also includes the analysis of meaningful segments of sound (phonemes): their composition, distribution, and function (phonemics). This chapter will concern itself primarily with the phonemics of Arabic, that is, analysis of distinctive MSA sounds and their variants (allophones). This analysis involves detailed description of the phonemes themselves as well as description of processes that can be “phonemic,” (meaningful) such as vowel lengthening and consonant doubling (gemination).

Phonemics

The study of phonemics is concerned with the sounds of a language that make a difference in meaning; phonemes can be described as the semantically significant sounds of a language. In order to establish a sound’s status as a phoneme, linguists look for environments or contexts in which everything is identical except for one sound or a particular feature of a sound (such as voicing). If that sound or feature of a sound carries a difference in meaning and it contrasts with another sound in the same position, it is established as a phoneme. Phonemes are said for this reason to be in “contrastive” distribution. By contrasting sounds in paired contexts, the identity of a phoneme can be established. This kind of contrastive comparison is called minimal pair analysis. For example, in English the pair of words pet and bet, are exactly the same except for the initial sound, but they are completely different in meaning. This contrast in meaning establishes that the sounds /p/ and /b/ are separate phonemes. Note that phonemes are conventionally written between two forward slashes, e.g., /k/.