Mesopotamian Arabic, also known as South Mesopotamian Arabic and Iraqi Arabic, is a continuum of mutually-intelligible varieties of Arabic native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into Syria, Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in Iraqi diaspora communities. Mesopotamian Arabic has an Aramaic Syriacsubstrate, and also shares significant influences from ancient Mesopotamian languages of Akkadian, Sumerian and Babylonian, as well as Persian, Turkish, Kurdish and Greek. Mesopotamian Arabic is said to be the most Aramaic-Syriac influenced dialect of Arabic, due to Aramaic-Syriac having originated in Mesopotamia, and spread throughout the Middle East during the Neo-Assyrian period, eventually becoming the lingua franca of the entire region before Islam. Iraqi Arabs and Assyrians are the largest Semitic peoples in Iraq, sharing significant similarities in language between Mesopotamian Arabic and Syriac.
History
was the lingua franca in Mesopotamia from the early 1st millennium BCE until the late 1st millennium CE, and as may be expected, Iraqi Arabic shows signs of an Aramaic substrate. The Gelet and the Judeo-Iraqi varieties have retained features of Babylonian Aramaic. Due to Iraq's inherent multiculturalism as well as history, Iraqi Arabic in turn bears extensive borrowings in its lexicon from Aramaic, Akkadian, Persian, Turkish, the Kurdish languages and Hindustani. The inclusion of Mongolian and other Turkic elements in the Iraqi Arabic dialect should also be mentioned, because of the political role a succession of Turco-Mongol dynasties played after Mesopotamia was invaded by Mongol-Turkic colonizers in 1258 that made Iraq became part of Ilkhanate, and also because of the prestige Iraqi Arabic dialect and literature enjoyed in the part of Arab world, which was often ruled by sultans and emirs with a Turkic background.
Phonology
Vowels
Consonants
Even in the most formal of conventions, pronunciation depends upon a speaker's background. Nevertheless, the number and phonetic character of most of the consonants has a broad degree of regularity among Arabic-speaking regions. Note that Arabic is particularly rich in uvular, pharyngeal, and pharyngealized sounds. The emphatic coronals cause assimilation of emphasis to adjacent non-emphatic coronal consonants. The phonemes ⟨پ⟩ and ⟨ڤ⟩ are not considered to be part of the phonemic inventory, as they exist only in foreign words and they can be pronounced as ⟨ب⟩ and ⟨ف⟩ respectively depending on the speaker. Phonetic notes:
and occur mostly in borrowings from Persian, and may be assimilated to or in some speakers.
Original splits lexically into and in most dialects, but is pronounced in southern Mesopotamian dialects, even in Modern Standard Arabic.
The gemination of the flap /ɾ/ results in a trill /r/.
Varieties
Mesopotamian Arabic has two major varieties. A distinction is recognised between Gelet Mesopotamian Arabic and Qeltu Mesopotamian Arabic, the names deriving from the form of the word for "I said". The southern group includes a Tigrisdialect cluster, of which the best-known form is Baghdadi Arabic, and a Euphrates dialect cluster, known as Furati. The Gelet variety is also spoken in the Khuzestan Province of Iran. The northern group includes the northTigris dialect cluster, also known as North Mesopotamian Arabic or Maslawi, as well as both Jewish and Christian sectarian dialects.
