On the status of derived affricates in Arabic dialects

Arabic dialects vary as to the presence of affricates in their phonemic inventory. Many dialects, such as San’ani Arabic, have only the voiced palato-alveolar affricate /d͡ʒ/; others, like Baghdadi have two (/d͡ʒ/ and /t͡ʃ/), and still other dialects, such as Cairene, lack affricate phonemes altogether. Although dialects differ on the presence of underlying affricates, many have derived affricates. These arise when the alveolar stop /t/ and the fricative /ʃ/ come together over a morpheme boundary or as a result of vowel deletion. In this paper we explore the phonological patterning of the derived sequence [t+ʃ] as a single affricated segment or as a bisegmental sequence. We examine the evidence from three dialects. San’ani, Cairene, and Iksal (a Palestinian variety) and show that its patterning differs among the dialects.