Each dialect of Aramaic has its own distinctive pronunciation, and it would not be feasible here to go into all these properties. Aramaic has a phonological palette of 25 to 40 distinct phonemes. Some modern Aramaic pronunciations lack the series of "emphatic" consonants, and some have borrowed from the inventories of surrounding languages, particularly Arabic, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish.
Vowels[]
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u |
| Close-mid | e | o |
| Open-mid | ɛ | (ɔ) |
| Open | a | (ɑ) |
As with most Semitic languages, Aramaic can be thought of as having three basic sets of vowels:
- Open a-vowels
- Close front i-vowels
- Close back u-vowels
These vowel groups are relatively stable, but the exact articulation of any individual is most dependent on its consonantal setting.
The open vowel is an open near-front unrounded vowel ("short" a, somewhat like the first vowel in the English "batter", [a]). It usually has a back counterpart ("long" a, like the a in "father", [ɑ], or even tending to the vowel in "caught", [ɔ]), and a front counterpart ("short" e, like the vowel in "head", [ɛ]). There is much correspondence between these vowels between dialects. There is some evidence that Middle Babylonian dialects did not distinguish between the short a and short e. In West Syriac dialects, and possibly Middle Galilean, the long a became the o sound. The open e and back a are often indicated in writing by the use of the letters א "alaph" (a glottal stop) or ה "he" (like the English h).
The close front vowel is the "long" i (like the vowel in "need", [i]). It has a slightly more open counterpart, the "long" e, as in the final vowel of "café" ([e]). Both of these have shorter counterparts, which tend to be pronounced slightly more open. Thus, the short close e corresponds with the open e in some dialects. The close front vowels usually use the consonant י y as a mater lectionis.
The close back vowel is the "long" u (like the vowel in "school", [u]). It has a more open counterpart, the "long" o, like the vowel in "low" ([o]). There are shorter, and thus more open, counterparts to each of these, with the short close o sometimes corresponding with the long open a. The close back vowels often use the consonant ו w to indicate their quality.
Two basic diphthongs exist: an open vowel followed by י y (ay), and an open vowel followed by ו w (aw). These were originally full diphthongs, but many dialects have converted them to e and o respectively.
The so-called "emphatic" consonants (see the next section) cause all vowels to become mid-centralised.
Consonants[]
| Labial | Interdental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyngeal | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | emp. | |||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ||||||||
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | tˤ | k | q | ʔ | |||
| voiced | b | d | ɡ | |||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | θ | s | sˤ | ʃ | x | ħ | h | |
| voiced | v | ð | z | ɣ | ʕ | |||||
| Approximant | l | j | w | |||||||
| Trill | r | |||||||||
The various alphabets used for writing Aramaic languages have twenty-two letters (all of which are consonants). Some of these letters, though, can stand for two or three different sounds (usually a stop and a fricative at the same point of articulation). Aramaic classically uses a series of lightly contrasted plosives and fricatives:
- Labial set: פּ\פ p/f and בּ\ב b/v,
- Dental set: תּ\ת t/θ and דּ\ד d/ð,
- Velar set: כּ\כ k/x and גּ\ג g/ɣ.
Each member of a certain pair is written with the same letter of the alphabet in most writing systems (that is, p and f are written with the same letter), and are near allophones.
A distinguishing feature of Aramaic phonology (and that of Semitic languages in general) is the presence of "emphatic" consonants. These are consonants that are pronounced with the root of the tongue retracted, with varying degrees of pharyngealization and velarization. Using their alphabetic names, these emphatics are:
- ח Ḥêṯ, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, /ħ/,
- ט Ṭêṯ, a pharyngealized t, /tˤ/,
- ע ʽAyin (or ʽE in some dialects), a pharyngealized glottal stop (sometimes considered to be a voiced pharyngeal approximant), [ʕ] or [ʔˤ],
- צ Ṣāḏê, a pharyngealized s, /sˤ/,
- ק Qôp, a voiceless uvular stop, /q/.
Ancient Aramaic may have had a larger series of emphatics, and some Neo-Aramaic languages definitely do. Not all dialects of Aramaic give these consonants their historic values.
Overlapping with the set of emphatics are the "guttural" consonants. They include ח Ḥêṯ and ע ʽAyn from the emphatic set, and add א ʼĀlap̄ (a glottal stop) and ה Hê (as the English "h").
Aramaic classically has a set of four sibilants (ancient Aramaic may have had six):
- ס, שׂ /s/ (as in English "sea"),
- ז /z/ (as in English "zero"),
- שׁ /ʃ/ (as in English "ship"),
- צ /sˤ/ (the emphatic Ṣāḏê listed above).
In addition to these sets, Aramaic has the nasal consonants מ m and נ n, and the approximants ר r (usually an alveolar trill), ל l, י y and ו w.
Historical sound changes[]
Six broad features of sound change can be seen as dialect differentials:
- Vowel change occurs almost too frequently to document fully, but is a major distinctive feature of different dialects.
- Plosive/fricative pair reduction. Originally, Aramaic, like Tiberian Hebrew, had fricatives as conditioned allophones for each plosive. In the wake of vowel changes, the distinction eventually became phonemic; still later, it was often lost in certain dialects. For example, Turoyo has mostly lost /p/, using /f/ instead, like Arabic; other dialects (for instance, standard Assyrian Neo-Aramaic) have lost /θ/ and /ð/ and replaced them with /t/ and /d/, as with Modern Hebrew. In most dialects of Modern Syriac, /f/ and /v/ are realized as [w] after a vowel.
- Loss of emphatics. Some dialects have replaced emphatic consonants with non-emphatic counterparts, while those spoken in the Caucasus often have glottalized rather than pharyngealized emphatics.
- Guttural assimilation is the main distinctive feature of Samaritan pronunciation, also found in Samaritan Hebrew: all the gutturals are reduced to a simple glottal stop. Some Modern Aramaic dialects do not pronounce h in all words (the third person masculine pronoun hu becomes ow).
- Proto-Semitic */θ/ */ð/ are reflected in Aramaic as */t/, */d/, whereas they became sibilants in Hebrew (the number three is שלוש šālôš in Hebrew but תלת tlāṯ in Aramaic). Dental/sibilant shifts are still happening in the modern dialects.
- New phonetic inventory. Modern dialects have borrowed sounds from the dominant surrounding languages. The most frequent borrowings are [ʒ] (as the first consonant in "azure"), [d͡ʒ] (as in "jam") and [t͡ʃ] (as in "church"). The Syriac alphabet has been adapted for writing these new sounds.