Sudanese Spoken Arabic: A Sociolinguistic Study of Phonemic and Lexical Variation

Abstract

This study aims to record the commonalities of phonemic and lexical variation in Sudanese spoken Arabic. To accomplish this, the present research used a qualitative method aiming to describe the variation when words are frequently used in a natural conversation. Some selected words taken from Qaamuus Al-Lahja Al-‘Aamiiya fi S-Suudan by Gasim (1985), as well as other selected words observed in everyday speech, are used as sources for the data. The analysis of the data led to the conclusion that the Modern Standard Arabic phonemes /?/, /q/, /?/, /ð/, and /?/ are commonly substituted with their adjacent ones in SSA (/d/, /k/, /s/, /t/, /z/, and /?/), respectively. Another conclusion is that the Sudanese Spoken Arabic words are affected by the inversion of a phoneme, deletion of a phoneme, and addition of a phoneme, as these affect the form as well as pronunciation of Sudanese Spoken Arabic words that contribute to the variation between Sudanese Spoken Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. As spoken language is different from written language, it is suggested that instruction in the perplexing areas be widely welcomed to at least reduce orthographic errors when writing on social platforms.

Received: 24 September 2024 / Accepted: 30 December 2024 / Published: 11 January 2025