Ẓāʾ

Frequency

ar is the rarest phoneme of the Arabic language. Out of 2,967 triliteral roots listed by Hans Wehr in his 1952 dictionary, only 42 (1.4%) contain ظ. ar is the least mentioned letter in the Quran, only being mentioned 853 times in the Quran.

In relation to other Semitic languages

In some reconstructions of Proto-Semitic phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, sem/sem ( or ), featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic ar, while it merged with sem in most other Semitic languages, although the South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for sem.

Pronunciation

In Classical Arabic, it represents a velarized voiced dental fricative , and in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents an pharyngealized voiced dental but can also be a alveolar fricative for a number of speakers.

In most Arabic vernaculars ظ ar and ض ḍād merged quite early. The outcome depends on the dialect. In those varieties (such as Egyptian and Levantine), where the dental fricatives and are merged with the dental stops and , ẓādʾ is pronounced or depending on the word; e.g. ظِل is pronounced but ظاهِر is pronounced , In loanwords from Classical Arabic ar is often , e.g. Egyptian ʿaẓīm (

In the varieties (such as Bedouin, Tunisian, and Iraqi), where the dental fricatives are preserved, both ar and ar are pronounced . However, there are dialects in South Arabia and in Mauritania where both the letters are kept different but not consistently.

A "de-emphaticized" pronunciation of both letters in the form of the plain entered into other non-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Turkish. However, there do exist Arabic borrowings into Ibero-Romance languages as well as Hausa and Malay, where ar and ar are differentiated.

In English, the sound is sometimes represented by the digraph zh.

Notes:

1. In Mauritania (Hassaniya Arabic), ض is mostly pronounced as in ('to laugh'), from ضحك, but generally appears in the lexemes borrowed from Standard Arabic as in ('weak'), from * ضعيف.
2. In Egypt, Lebanon, etc, ظ is mostly pronounced in inherited words as in ('darkness'), from ظلمة; ('bone'), from عظم , but pronounced in borrowings from Literary Arabic as in ('injustice'); from ظلم.
3. In some accents in Egypt, the emphatic is pronounced as a plain .

Character encodings

|0638|name1=Arabic Letter Zad

References

References

1. Catherine Taine-Cheikh. 2020. Ḥassāniyya Arabic. In Christopher Lucas & Stefano Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced change, 245–263. Berlin: Language Sci- ence Press.
2. Schneider, Roey. (2024). "The Semitic Sibilants". The Semitic Sibilants.
3. (1959). "The Arabic koine". Language.
4. (1997). "Structuralist studies in Arabic linguistics: Charles A. Ferguson's papers, 1954–1994". Brill.
5. (1999). "Compilation and Creation in Adab and Luġa: Studies in Memory of Naphtali Kinberg (1948–1997)".
6. (2000). "Studies in the Linguistic Structure of Classical Arabic". Brill.
7. (1952}} {{page needed). "Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart".
8. Retsö, Jan. (2012). "The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook". Walter de Gruyter.