The phonology of the Arabic dialect of the Rašāyda in Sudan

Article in a scientific peer-reviewed journal Originally from Central Naǧd, the Rašāyda arrived to Sudan in the mid and late 19th century (Young 1997). Recent fieldwork (WIBARAB, University of Vienna, in Saudi-Arabia, Kuwait and Sudan) has shown that the Rašāyda migrated to Sudan together with other tribes and ethnic groups they shared lands with or that they encountered along the way. Thus, in the current Sudanese context, the designation Rašāyda has to be seen as an umbrella term for several peninsular tribes that migrated to Sudan at the same time. Despite the tribal heterogeneity, the state of the art (fieldworks conducted by Stefan Reichmuth in Eastern Sudan (1974) and by the author in Shendi (2023)) presents a strikingly homogeneous linguistic uniformity. The phoneme inventory of the Rašāyda in Sudan reveals phonemes and realizations that are unique to the region, notably the reflexes of *ǧ, *k and *q. Whilst some reflexes have Peninsular or Southern Arabian character, namely the palatal affrication of *k as in tɕalām (*kalām, ‘speech’) or the palatal affrication of *q as in jibīlə ~ ǧibīlə (*qabīla, ‘tribe’), other phonemes and phenomena remain rather atypical, notably the retroflex/palatal /ř/ as a reflex of *ǧ as in řīt (*ǧiʔtu, *ǧiʔta, ‘I/you (sg.m) came’).