VARIATION IN PHONETIC REALISATION OR IN PHONOLOGICAL CATEGORIES? INTONATIONAL PITCH ACCENTS IN EGYPTIAN COLLOQUIAL ARABIC AND EGYPTIAN FORMAL ARABIC

Abstract

This paper uses qualitative and quantitative methods to compare the intonation of formal and colloquial varieties of Egyptian Arabic in a corpus of elicited read speech, to explore the widely held assumption that spoken formal Arabic will have the intonational characteristics of the speaker’s colloquial variety. Speakers are found to use broadly parallel phonological systems in each register, reflected in parallel distribution and type of pitch accents. A quantitative analysis of the pitch target alignment to the segmental string reveals only minor differences in the phonetic realisation of pitch accents across registers.