Glottal Stop Deletion in Farasani Arabic: An Acoustic-Phonetic Investigation

Abstract

This study provides the first acoustic-phonetic analysis of glottal stop ([ʔ]) deletion in Farasani Arabic (FA), an under-described dialect of the Farasan Islands (Saudi Arabia). Speech from three native speakers producing ten [ʔ]-initial words in careful and fast speech was analyzed in Praat for glottal presence, closure duration, and aperiodicity. Three [ʔ] realization types emerged: full realization, gradient reduction, and complete deletion. Across 120 tokens, 42.5% were fully realized, 31.7% reduced, and 25.8% deleted; deletion occurred almost exclusively in fast speech. Acoustic measures showed a clear weakening continuum, with closure durations averaging ≈100 ms (realized), ≈50 ms (reduced), and 0 ms (deleted). These patterns parallel rate-dependent glottal variability described in Lindblom’s [8] H&H model and Kasim’s [7] findings for Arabic. Overall, FA exhibits a gradient pathway of [ʔ] reduction shaped primarily by speech rate and lexical frequency, offering new empirical evidence for Arabic phonetics and the dynamics of glottal weakening.