Ẓāʾ


Ẓāʾ, or ḏ̣āʾ, is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet.
In Classical Arabic, it represents a velarized voiced dental fricative, and in Modern Standard Arabic, it can also be a pharyngealized, voiced dental fricative or voiced alveolar fricative.
In name and shape, it is a variant of ṭāʾ. Its numerical value is 900.
Ẓāʾ does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:

Pronunciation

In Classical Arabic, it represents a velarized voiced dental fricative, and in Modern Standard Arabic, it can also be a pharyngealized, voiced dental fricative or voiced alveolar fricative.
In most Arabic vernaculars ظ ẓāʾ and ض ḍād have been merged quite early. The outcome depends on the dialect. In those varieties, where the dental fricatives, are merged with the dental stops,, ẓāʾ is pronounced or depending on the word; e.g. ظِل is pronounced but ظاهِر is pronounced, In loanwords from Classical Arabic ẓāʾ is often, e.g. Egyptian ʿaẓīm "great".
In the varieties, where the dental fricatives are preserved, both ḍād and ẓāʾ are pronounced. However, there are dialects in South Arabia and in Mauritania where both the letters are kept different but not consistently.
A "de-emphaticized" pronunciation of both letters in the form of the plain entered into other non-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Turkish. However, there do exist Arabic borrowings into Ibero-Romance languages as well as Hausa and Malay, where ḍād and ẓāʾ are differentiated.

Statistics

Ẓāʾ is the rarest phoneme of the Arabic language. Out of 2,967 triliteral roots listed by Hans Wehr in his 1952 dictionary, only 42 contain ظ.

In other Semitic languages

In some reconstructions of Proto-Semitic phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, ṱ, featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic ẓāʾ, while it merged with ṣ in most other Semitic languages, although the South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for ẓ.

Writing in the Hebrew alphabet

When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ט׳.

Character encodings