Out of all the books that have been published on Arabic linguistics in the last few decades, this is one of the few that focus on instrumental phonetics. Most of the work on Arabic phonetics is either in academic dissertations (Ghalib Reference Ghalib1984, Bin-Muqbil Reference Bin-Muqbil2006) or published papers (Watson Reference Watson1999, Hassan & Esling Reference Hassan and Esling2007). A search on the Amazon online bookstore for ‘Arabic experimental phonetics’ had no hits, while there are 80 books on ‘English experimental phonetics’. A new search, for ‘Arabic instrumental phonetics’, brings up only this book. It is an irony that Arabic sounds were investigated and described in detail more than twelve centuries ago (Al-Nassir Reference Al-Nassir1985) while only one published book in English can be traced.

The Arabic sound system deserves more instrumental work for several reasons. Arabic sounds cover almost all the places of articulation from the lips to the vocal folds, including the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, uvula, pharynx, and larynx. At the same time, the manner of articulation includes stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, trill, lateral, approximant, and emphatic, in addition to the voiced and voiceless features. These variations in place and manner of articulation are sufficient to merit more research and studies on the Arabic sound system that would help understand human vocal tract function during speech.

Instrumental Studies in Arabic Phonetics consists of 14 chapters in 365 pages. Twenty-two researchers from nine countries and 19 institutions contributed to the book. The chapters show the results of several experiments on Modern Arabic Standard (MAS) and its dialects, including Moroccan, Iraqi, Syrian, Jordanian, Palestinian, Yemeni, and Egyptian, in addition to the Mehri language, which is spoken in the triangle between Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and Swedish, which shares with Arabic the gemination feature, and finally English. Since the book is on instrumental phonetics, several instruments were used in the reported studies, including electromagnetic articulography, spectrography, electropalatography, nasoendoscopy, videofluoroscopy, laryngoscopy, pneumotachography, and endoscopy. These instruments were used to study certain Arabic sounds, such as the so-called ‘guttural’ consonants /ʔ ʕ ħ ʁ χ q/, emphaticness /t ^ʕ d ^ʕ s ^ʕ ð^ʕ/, consonant syllabification, gemination in Arabic and Swedish, assimilation of /l/ to /r/, glottalisation, labial-velarisation, fundamental frequency, and /l/ acquisition by Lebanese and English children. The studies cover the whole phonetic spectrum, that is, articulatory, acoustic and perceptual phonetics.

The book starts with a table of the Arabic graphemes and their representations in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The list includes the consonants and the vowels. However, representations of the short and long vowels are not well presented by the editors. The graphemes for the short vowels should be /a/, /i/, /u/, respectively, while the graphemes for the long vowels are supposed to be /aː/, /iː/, /u:/, in the same order.

The 25-page introduction highlights Arabic phonetic history and the contribution of the book. Early books on Arabic show conceptual sophistication and systematic terminology usage. The editors mention several issues that might rule out possible outside influence on the early Arab grammarians in the eighth century, including the fact that Indians had already identified the source of voicing while the Arab grammarians, according to their references, were not aware of it at that time. Not much was added to Arabic phonetics between the 8th century and the mid-19th century when European linguists (Brücke Reference Brücke1860, Vollers Reference Vollers and Morgan1892) became interested in Arabic descriptive phonetics. In the 20th century, instruments such as X-ray (Worrell Reference Worrell1914) and spectrograph (Potter, Kopp & Green Reference Potter, Kopp and Green1947) were used in experimental phonetics to study human languages including Arabic.

In the first chapter, Adamantios I. Gafos, Philip Hoole & Chakir Zeroual use electromagnetic articulography to investigate the temporal organisation of syllable structure in Moroccan Arabic. Although similar claims of using phonetic data to support Arabic syllabification have been made in previous studies (Flege Reference Flege1979, Alghamdi Reference Alghamdi2004), phonological support for such claims is still needed.Footnote ¹

Zeki Majeed Hassan finds that Iraqi phonological short vowels are phonetically shorter before geminate consonants than before their single counterparts. The temporal tradeoffs of consonants and their preceding vowels are well documented in the literature. One example is the tradeoff between the English syllable-final consonants and their preceding vowels due to voicing; a voiced consonant tends to be phonetically shorter and preceded by a longer vowel while a voiceless consonant tends to be phonetically longer and preceded by a shorter vowel in minimal words such as bad/bat (Raphael Reference Raphael1971). One way of interpreting this tradeoff is to enhance the perception of the voicing of the consonant (Flege Reference Flege1979). The same interpretation might be applied to the tradeoff between the Arabic single vs. geminate consonants on one hand and their preceding vowels on the other.

Three chapters, which constitute the second part of the book, are on the ‘guttural’ consonants: uvular, pharyngeal and laryngeal sounds, where instruments such as nasoendoscopy and spectrography are used. Barry Heselwood & Feda Al-Tamimi investigated the emphatic properties of the laryngeal and pharyngeal consonants. They found that the production and acoustic features of the laryngeal consonants are more similar to those of the plain consonants such as /t/ than to the pharyngeal consonants, which tend to be similar to the emphatic consonants. The second chapter, on guttural sounds, by Kimary N. Shahin, is based on airflow and acoustic modeling, which indicate that the uvular and pharyngeal consonants are more likely to be approximants than fricatives. Results collected from videofluoroscopy, in the last chapter on guttural sounds, by Mohamed Yeou & Shinji Maeda, show that the main secondary articulation of the emphatic consonants is pharyngealisation. This adds complexity to the studies of emphatic sounds where researchers differ in identifying the involved organs during the production: velarisation, uvularisation or pharyngealisation. It seems that the differences in the results of the published experiments are due to other factors, such as the dialects of the speakers and the applied methodologies.

The third part of the book, on emphasis and coronal consonants, consists of six chapters. The use of nasoendoscopy, videofluoroscopy and spectrography to investigate the production mechanism and acoustic features of the emphatic coronals, in the chapter by Feda Al-Tamimi & Barry Heselwood, shows reduction in the volume of the pharyngeal and oral cavities due to the retraction of the back and root of the tongue. This reduction is reflected in the acoustic signal by raising the first formant and lowering the second one. However, these features of the emphatic vary depending on the spoken accent. Mohamed Embarki et al. found that MSA tends to have more lingual retraction than other Arabic varieties. In another co-authored study, Hassan & Esling observed another feature for emphasis in Iraqi Arabic, which involves larynx raising. However, the role of the glottis in the production of emphatic sounds was not observed in Yemeni Arabic and Mehri (chapter by Janet C. E. Watson & Alex Bellem), which indicates that Arabic dialects are not consistent in the articulation of the emphatic sounds in terms of the organs that are involved in their production. The study by Chakir Zeroual, John H. Esling & Philip Hoole, of the emphatic sounds in Moroccan Arabic, shows that they are pharyngealised but not velarised. Although all these studies show different mechanisms in emphatic consonant production, they indicate that they are produced with a low volume pharyngeal cavity wither it is due to retraction of the back of the tongue or larynx raising.

The last part of the book is on intonation and acquisition, and consists of two chapters. The first chapter, by Sam Hellmuth, shows that the Egyptian Arabic f0 excursion and duration, but not intensity, act as acoustic cues to givenness. In the last chapter, Ghada Khattab found in her acoustic analysis that bilingual children produce the Arabic and English /l/ similarly. However, the monolingual speakers produce /l/ differently in terms of clearness and darkness.

The book is well worth reading and should be used for teaching in Arabic departments for several reasons – it includes traditional ideas and perspectives in addition to the results of studies on Arabic using the latest speech technologies. One missing element that would add to the value of the book is a glossary of the terminology used. Arabic traditionalists use terms that are sometimes hard to gloss in modern linguistics such as majhour ‘spoken with a loud voice’. Is it what is called ‘voiced’ in modern parlance? Such a list would help readers and young phoneticians link the past with the present and motivate them to study phonetics. Another advantage of the book – to students of phonetics in Arab universities – would be to have it translated into Arabic, and we hope that this happens in the near future.