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Phonological Changes in Classical Arabic to Modern Arabic: A Historical Review

Summary

The authors note that there is little work tracing how Arabic pronunciation shifted between the classical and modern periods. They ask two questions. How did consonant and vowel realisation change? And which social, political and cultural forces drove those changes? The study is a qualitative literature review with a historical method. It has five stages: gathering primary and secondary sources, criticising those sources for authenticity and purpose, comparing periods, interpreting patterns, and drawing conclusions. No corpus, measurements or experiments are used. The paper first describes classical phonology as the tradition of 'ilm al-ashwat, which classifies sounds by articulation place and manner. It then turns to modern literary developments and finally to the external drivers of change. The authors conclude that several consonants and vowels shifted. They attribute this to urbanisation, contact with other languages, trade, labour migration, the spread of Islam, administrative change and diplomacy. The paper's value is mainly as an orientation overview for Arabic teaching, especially for Indonesian learners. It does not offer evidence-backed change rules.

Key points

  • Method: a five-step historical procedure (collection, source criticism, comparative analysis, interpretation, conclusion). It is purely a literature review with no quantitative data.
  • Classical Arabic is described as having 28 consonant phonemes and 3 basic vowels, each with short and long forms. Sounds are classified by makhraj (place) and sifat (manner).
  • The paper's minimal-pair example ض vs ظ is transcribed as /d/ vs /dˤ/. This does not match standard IPA, where ض is /dˤ/ and ظ is /ðˤ/, so the transcriptions should be treated with care.
  • Proposed drivers of change:
    • trade and worker exchange, which led to dialect mixing and simpler complex sounds;
    • urbanisation and foreign-language contact;
    • the spread of Islam and administrative change;
    • Arabic's role as a UN language.
  • The paper discusses the register split between fusha and amiyyah. It also covers modern writers moving toward everyday dialect, the Neo-Classical movement and a classical revival linked to Sami Al-Barumi.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Before analysis, each source is vetted for authorship, writing context and intent, so evidence is not treated as equally trustworthy. — For Mova (learn): Silver-data witnesses could carry provenance and purpose metadata, and the agreement vote could be weighted by an explicit, inspectable source-credibility score.
  • I2. Sounds are described along two independent axes, place and manner, instead of as atomic labels. — For Mova (tokens): Morphological tags could be stored as factored feature bundles, so a tagger error explains itself as a mismatch on one specific feature rather than an opaque wrong label.
  • I3. A unit counts as distinctive only if swapping it changes meaning, which is the minimal-pair test. — For Mova (learn): Evaluation could use minimal-pair negative controls, where one token is altered and the frame or answer must change, to check that the system reacts to meaning rather than surface overlap.
  • I4. The same language is treated as a formal register plus an everyday register that drifts under contact and simplification. — For Mova (tree): Input could carry a register or dialect label, with UD dialect-conversion rules keyed to it, so informal text is not parsed as if it were formal prose.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.31000/al-muyassar.v5i1.13922

@inproceedings{susiawati2026phonological,
  title = {{Phonological Changes in Classical Arabic to Modern Arabic: A Historical Review}},
  author = {Susiawati, Iis and Billah, Mustaien and AlFajr, Rizka and Mardani, Dadan and Alhaq, Muhammad Faiz},
  booktitle = {Al-Muyassar 5},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.31000/al-muyassar.v5i1.13922},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.31000/al-muyassar.v5i1.13922}
}

References

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