The Emergence of a Low Back Vowel in Qassimi Arabic

Abstract

This study investigates the phonemic vowel system of Qassimi Arabic (QA), a sub-variety of Najdi Arabic spoken in the Qassim region of Saudi Arabia. Previous descriptions of Najdi Arabic typically assume a vowel inventory of three short and five long vowels and treat certain vowel qualities—most notably the low back vowel [ɑ]—as contextually conditioned allophones rather than independent phonemes. These accounts are largely based on impressionistic description and have not been systematically evaluated for QA. Drawing on 157 elicited tokens produced by three native QA speakers, this study combines phonological diagnostics with acoustic measurements of vowel formants and duration, following established approaches to vowel analysis. The results support a vowel inventory of four short vowels (i, a, ɑ, u) and five long vowels (iː, eː, aː, uː, oː). Crucially, converging phonological and phonetic evidence shows that the low back vowel /ɑ/ functions as a phoneme distinct from /a/ in QA, challenging earlier analyses that treat [ɑ] as a conditioned allophone. Acoustic results further show that the low back vowel /ɑ/ is consistently separated from /a/ in the vowel space, supporting its phonemic status. More generally, short vowels occupy a relatively compact and partially overlapping vowel space, whereas long vowels exhibit clearer spectral separation and significantly longer duration. Together, these findings demonstrate that the vowel system of Qassimi Arabic cannot be fully captured by phonemic inventories proposed for Najdi Arabic as a whole . More broadly, the study underscores the importance of variety-specific, instrumentally grounded analysis in Arabic dialectology and contributes to ongoing discussions of phonemic contrast, allophony, and vowel system variation in Arabic.