Khuzestani Arabic


Khuzestani Arabic is a dialect of Gelet Mesopotamian Arabic spoken by the Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan Province of Iran. It is also considered by most contemporary scholars to be a mix of Southern Mesopotamian Arabic and Gulf Arabic spoken in places such as Kuwait and Eastern Arabia. It has had a long history of contact with Persian language, leading to several changes. The main changes are in word order, noun–noun and noun–adjective attribution constructions, definiteness marking, complement clauses, and discourse markers and connectors.
Khuzestani Arabic is only used in informal situations. It is not taught in school, not even as an optional course, although Modern Standard Arabic is taught.

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Even in the most formal of conventions, pronunciation depends upon a speaker's background. Nevertheless, the number and phonetic character of most of the 28 consonants has a broad degree of regularity among Arabic-speaking regions. Note that Arabic is particularly rich in uvular, pharyngeal, and pharyngealized sounds. The emphatic coronals cause assimilation of emphasis to adjacent non-emphatic coronal consonants. The phonemes ⟨پ⟩ and ⟨ڤ⟩ are only occasionally considered to be part of the phonemic inventory, as they exist only in foreign words and they can be pronounced as ⟨ب⟩ and ⟨ف⟩ respectively depending on the speaker.
Phonetic notes: