Syllabification and Some Phonological Operations in Hiti Iraqi Arabic

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating some phonological processes in Hiti Iraqi Arabic (HIA) a dialect spoken in Hit town located in the western region of Iraq. Due to the absence of MSA in everyday life, HIA had become the native language of people living in such a region. Some studies has been made to investigate some phonological phenomena existing among some varieties of Arabic. Rahim (1980) researched the phonology of Iraqi Arabic from a functional viewpoint. Dickins (2007) studied the Syllable structure and phonemics of Sudanese Arabic depending on a functionalist approach. Al Yaari (2012) investigated vowel deletion in Yemeni Arabic dialect, and concluded that short vowel deletion occurs in verbs and might extend to include pronouns, but there is no literature concerning this variety of Arabic