Egyptian Colloquial Arabic is a spoken dialect with no official status or rules of orthography. Egyptians tend to borrow spelling conventions from MSA with some accommodations to account for ECA pronunciation. Arabic script, however, is ill suited to show the actual pronunciation of ECA and the sound changes that occur when words are inflected. Even if you are comfortable with Arabic script, it is advised that you pay close attention to the phonemic transcription to determine the exact pronunciation of words and phrases.

CONSONANTS

VOWELS

SOUND CHANGES

A lot of the changes which occur in conjugated ECA verbs are due to the rules of syllable structure and stress. The rules are summarized here using phonemic transcription only, as the Arabic script does not reflect these changes.

Vowel Shortening

When a suffix beginning in a consonant is added immediately after a syllable containing a long vowel, or when a suffix causes the stressed syllable to move, the long vowel is shortened. This is because a long vowel can only exist in a stressed syllable and cannot be followed by two consonants.

A long ē is shortened to i.

Vowel Lengthening

A final vowel is lengthened when certain suffixes are added to a word ending in a short vowel.

 Vowel Elision

A short, unstressed i (or u) is elided (that is, omitted) from a word when its omission would not result in a series of three adjacent consonants, in other words, when the vowel is both preceded and followed by a single consonant only. This does not happen in a final syllable, and it only happens in the first syllable if the preceding word ends in a vowel.

Vowel omission occurs when -it (the third person feminine singular (híyya) suffix of the perfect tense) or -u (the third person plural (húmma) suffix of the perfect tense) is added to a sound measure I verb containing i:

Notice that the elision may create two adjacent consonants following a long vowel, in which case the long vowel must be shortened. In the second example, it is the feminine form of an active participle in which elision occurs.

Elision can also take place with the addition of a prefix. That is, the i of the imperfect prefixes ni-, ti-, and yi- is elided when the imperfect prefix bi-, the negative prefix ma-, or the future prefix ha– is added, as long as the elision would not result in three adjacent consonants.

An originally long vowel is normally not elided, even after it has become short because of a shift in stress. An exception occurs in the following verb:

 Elision can occur in the first syllable of a word if the preceding word ends in a vowel, as long as this would not result in three adjacent consonants (as in the second example below).

Vowel Insertion (Epenthesis)

A short vowel is inserted when a suffix or a following word would create a situation with three adjacent consonants.  i is inserted between two consonants and the negative suffix -š or indirect object pronouns. Direct object pronouns may take a, i, or u.

Vowel insertion can also occur between word boundaries. When a word ends in two consonants and the next word begins with a consonant, ə is inserted to avoid three adjacent consonants.

Once ə is inserted, the vowel of the first syllable of the following word may be a candidate for elision.

 Consonant Assimilation

A voiced consonant immediately preceding an unvoiced consonant tends to become unvoiced. The table below shows such consonants in pairs—voiced consonants in the left column and their voiceless counterparts on the right. The change is not reflected in writing, either in Arabic script or the phonemic transcription used in this book.

The reverse is also true, so that a voiceless consonant followed by a voiced consonant may become voiced. Listen for such sound changes in the accompanying MP3s.

The prefix it- of many verbs is not only affected by the following consonant’s voicing, but, in relaxed speech, it may be totally assimilated by a following d, ɖ, g, k, s, ʂ, š, ʈ, z, or ʐ.

Assimilation in the Definite Article

In addition to natural assimilation through the influence of adjacent consonants, Arabic also has special rules that govern whether the l (laam) of the definite article (الـ il-) is pronounced or assimilated.

The default is to pronounce the l before consonants, including ʔ, and vowels. These consonants are collectively known as ‘moon letters,’ as the word moon قمر ʔámar begins with a letter from this group:

In the examples above, the definite article is simply added to a noun without any special sound change. However, when the definite article is added to a ‘sun letter,’ the l is not pronounced; instead, the initial consonant of that word is doubled (pronounced long/twice):

The sun letters are: ن ل ظ ط ض ص ش س ز ر ذ د ث ت. Additionally, in Egypt Arabic, the definite article optionally assimilates before ج g, چ ž, ك k, and ق q (when pronounced q and not ʔ). This happens in casual, natural speech, but is often avoided in more careful, enunciated pronunciation:

Vowel Assimilation

Two vowels cannot occur together. When the addition of a prefix or preceding word would result in such a case, one vowel is assimilated into the other. As seen in the last example below, this also applies across word boundaries in some cases.

Vowel assimilation also occurs with the final vowel a verb ends in a or u. Thi vowel is dropped when a suffix beginning with a vowel is added.

When -it and -u are added to a verb ending in i, the i changes into a y.