Prolegomenon to Arabic pronunciation instruction

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  • アラビア語「発音」教育に寄せて
  • アラビアゴ　ハツオン　キョウイク　ニ　ヨセテ

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Abstract

The pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a less-discussed topic in the study of Arabic instruction. Although this is mainly because MSA has been traditionally taught as a written register, in the recent trend to teach MSA for oral communication, it is important to argue what and how to teach about its pronunciation. This study addresses three common problems commonly found in major Arabic primers popular in Japanese universities: (1) less scientific description of the phonetic aspects of Arabic sounds, (2) orthography-centric explanation of sounds (e.g., negligence of the Advanced vs. Retreated Tongue Root feature for vowels and borrowed phonemes which lack special letters), (3) uncritical preference of the pronunciation by native speakers of specific colloquial dialects (usually Cairene or Levantine), despite the fact that Arabic has an established orthoepy (tajwīd) originally developed for Qur’ānic recitation, and (4) that, although the oral register of MSA has a number of peculiar morphophonological rules for ‘pronouncing’ (i.e., morphophonologically decoding) the written text (e.g., the retention of certain word-initial glottal stops, the omission of word-final case and indefiniteness markers, and the morphological (‘state’) alternation for feminine nouns), these rules has not been described or manualized for instruction. After arguing what and how to teach about the articulations of Arabic sounds and describing the morphophonological features of the oral register of MSA, this study tentatively recommends (i) to teach the segmental phonetic articulation in accordance with the tajwīd rules on the one hand and (ii) to teach the oral morphophonology on the other, in order to achieve a scientific, region-neutral and oral communication-oriented ‘pronunciation’ of MSA at the cost of going slightly artificial.

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