In a work focused on other matters, it is difficult to decide how much attention to devote to explicating peculiarities of the dialect spoken by Awlad ʿAli and their Cyrenaican cousins. Since the poems I deal with in this book are composed in the dialect rather than in classical Arabic, it seems useful to lay out a few basic rules of pronunciation to help orient the reader. I have chosen a system of transcription that is a compromise between a strictly phonetic one, which would be most helpful for reproducing the sounds of the poems, and one that gives enough clues to Arabists to enable them to recognize words, and hence meanings. It may be that in choosing this middle path I will frustrate both parties, but I hope that the guidelines presented below will clarify matters. Given my focus on the social use of poetry rather than on linguistics or even poetics, I consider this rough system adequate. For more technical linguistic material, the reader can consult an article in Arabic by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Maṭar (1966) and two articles by J. R. Smart (1966, 1967), all of which contain several references to work done by other linguists.
My transcriptions conform, by and large, to the standard system for the transliteration of Arabic followed by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I have made certain alterations to preserve peculiarities of the dialect. The system for vowels is close to that used by Smart (1967). What follows is a brief guide along with some general rules about the dialect.
I am grateful to the late Anne Royal for her help in developing the transcription system.
Key to the sound qualities
Short vowels:
| a | as in but or the “a” in abut |
| e | as in bait but shortened |
| i | as in bit |
| u | as in book |
Long vowels:
| ā | as in bat, sometimes bob |
| ē | similar to the sound in bait, but lengthened (This is the equivalent of the diphthong ay in classical Arabic.) |
| ī | as in beet |
| ō | as in boat (This is the equivalent of the diphthong aw in classical Arabic.) |
| ū | as in boot |
Notes on vowels
1. Unstressed short vowels tend to be centralized, especially when they occur in the middle of words. Thus a, i, and u often sound quite similar.
2. The morphemic h increases the length of long vowels, but it does not affect the pronunciation of short vowels at all. I thus transcribe it in the former case and not in the latter.
3. The a is pronounced either as the vowel in but or the first vowel in abut, depending on the surrounding consonants. For the sake of simplicity I have not marked the distinction in the transcribed texts, since it is phonetic rather than phonemic.
4. The long front vowel ā, when pronounced as in bat, is extremely nasalized. I have chosen not to mark it in the text, unlike Smart who sometimes transliterates this sound as ie. He quotes Mitchell’s description of the sound as “a falling diphthong moving from half close front to mid front and occurring only in prominent syllables” (Smart 1967, 256).
5. This dialect has no glottal stop (hamza) except as an initial sound, which, since English speakers automatically pronounce an initial vowel with a glottal stop, I have not indicated in the transcriptions.
y corresponds to the semivowel يw corresponds to the semivowel ٯ
I use the first consistently as the prefix of the third masculine singular imperfect of the verb, and the second for the conjunction and (ٯ), even though the actual pronunciation of both semivowels varies from word to word. I also use them to mark the two classical Arabic diphthongs ay and aw, when they are pronounced as such. As Smart (1967, 256) notes, Awlad ʿAli occasionally and inconsistently use diphthongs.
The simplest way to describe the transliteration system for consonants is to list the written Arabic equivalents, marking with an asterisk pronunciations peculiar to the dialect. In parentheses following some of these letters are their standard transliterations, which I use only when I have taken the word not from the spoken language of the Western Desert but from texts in modern standard Arabic.
In addition to w and y, treated above, the consonants are transliterated as follows:
| ب b | ص ṣ |
| ت t | ض dׅh* (ḍ) |
| ث th | ط ṭ |
| ج j* | ظ ẓ* |
| ح ḥ | ع ʿ |
| خ kh | غ gh |
| د d | ف f |
| ذ dh | ق g* (q) |
| ر r | ك k |
| ز z | ل l |
| س s | م m |
| ش sh | ن n |
| ه h |
Notes on sound quality
| j | soft like the French j |
| dׅh | the letter ض is usually pronounced as a velarized dh rather than a velarized d as in classical Arabic |
| ẓ | a velarized dh, almost identical to dׅh (ض) |
| g | hard as in good |
Notes on consonants
1. Especially in the poems, the three letters ذ, ض, and ظ (dh, ḍ, and ẓ in classical Arabic) are pronounced almost identically. To help readers who know classical Arabic, however, I transcribe them as distinct letters, but I use dׅh rather than ḍ for the letter ض to remain closer to Awlad ʿAli pronunciation.
2. The most prominent peculiarity of the dialect is in the pronunciation of initial syllables. Awlad ʿAli generally drop the first vowel in a word. For instance, they say bḥar rather than baḥr (sea). They compensate by preceding the initial consonant with what might be thought of as a glottal stop or with an i. Behnke (1980) indicates this by preceding the consonant with an i, as in the word imraabiT (for mrābiṭ). I worry that this will confuse the reader familiar with classical Arabic who might mistake the initial i for a phoneme, so I have chosen not to mark it in the transcriptions.
3. However, Awlad ʿAli tend to drop the phonemic initial a of classical and many other eastern Arabic dialects. Thus they pronounce the word abū (father) as bū. I have transcribed such words as I heard them.
In Arabic, when the definite article al is attached to consonants requiring the use of the front of the tongue, it is assimilated, doubling the consonantal sound. The consonants involved, among Awlad ʿAli, are: t, th, j, d, dh, r, z, s, sh, ṣ, dׅh, ṭ, ẓ, l, n. I have marked these as they are pronounced. In addition, the initial a is influenced by the final vowel of the word that precedes it, and there is elision. I only roughly indicate how the initial a is influenced. I join the definite article to its noun by a hyphen.
I have followed standard English spellings for common proper names like Mohammad ʿAli and well-known places like Alamein, as well as for common Arabic words found in English dictionaries, such as haj.
For transliterations from Arabic written sources, I have followed the system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.