The voiceless velar stop /k/ in Rijal Alma Arabic: Revisited

Abstract

An earlier documentation study showed that the voiceless velar stop /k/ is articulated in Rijal Alma Arabic (spoken in southwest Saudi Arabia) as a post-palatal fricative /x̟/, a phoneme absent from mos tother Arabic varieties. However, a recent sociolinguistic study in Rijal Alma revealed patterns of variation and change in use of post-palatal /x̟/ in favour of the supra-local voiceless velar stop /k/. To better understand variation and change in the speech patterns of speakers of Rijal Alma, this paper presents an auditory and acoustic analysis of the realisation of /k/ in three positions (word-initial, intervocalic, and word-final). The data are from wordlist fieldwork recordings of 33 target items produced by 43 Rijal Alma speakers (24M/19F aged 18-60). Results indicate that target /k/ displays more complex phonetic properties than previously reported, pointing to a range of different realisations, which appear to be both auditorily and acoustically distinct: [k x kx xk].