This whole chapter goes into rather painstaking, technical detail. If you just want to know how to pronounce my transcription of Lebanese, go no further than the table below. Click on the hyperlinked letters to hear them pronounced, alone and within a word. The files are .mp3 and very light. Don't forget to turn up your volume!

Symbol I use	How to pronounce it	Symbol I use	How to pronounce it
b	b	j	zh
d	d	'	vocal stop
f	f	kh	Spanish jota
g	g	gh	French r
h	h	r	rolled r
k	k	3	air rolled at the bottom of the throat
l	l	7	hard h
m	m	a	short a as in mañana
n	n	à	a as in father, sometimes man
p	p	e	short e as in dessert
s	s	é	ai as in air
t	t	i	short i as in pink
v	v	ee*	ee as in reed
w	w	o	short o as in mosquito
z	z	ó	o as in more
		u	short u as in look
		oo**	oo as in boom, you

* For consistency's sake I should have used the spelling í for this sound rather than ee, but I felt ee would be more instinctive for English speakers. Thoughts on the matter appreciated.
** Ditto, this should logically be spelled ú.

Now, if you'd like a more in-depth understanding, read on; if not, go straight to chapter 2.

A. Consonants

The following are read just like in English: B, D, F, H, K, L, M, N, T, W, Z.

G is always pronounced as in goose. G, P and V do not exist in Arabic but are sometimes encountered in Lebanese due to the importation of foreign words from Turkish, Egyptian, Persian and Western languages.

S is always pronounced as in sand.

J is the sound that is usually represented by ZH: it is to the English J what SH is to CH. Unlike the Arabs, we do not pronounce it DJ.

You will rarely see me use Q, because it is one of the heavy arabic sounds that we don’t bother with (we replace it with the vocal stop '), but in case you do, it is pronounced like a K uttered at the very back of the throat. The word Qur'án is one of the very few where the sound iss pronounced unaltered.

KH is like Spanish jota and German ch.

GH is like the French R.

R is a rolled r like in Spanish.

Three additional signs are used: 3, 7 and '.

3 is used for the sound of the latter 3ayn, which is best describe as a rolling of the air at the bottom of the throat.

7 is used for the hard version of the sound H.

' represents the vocal stop. It is softer than in Arabic, but much more used because all occurences of the sound Q, with few exceptions, are replaced by a vocal stop. For instance Qála ("he said") becomes 'ál.

B. Vowels

Here I must make a small digression into Arabic to explain the phonetic transformations undergone by vowels.
Arabic has no vowels per se. Instead it has three consonants that sometimes function as long vowels: Alef, Waw, Ya'.
• The Alef functions as the A in father or the A in man, depending on the word.
• The Waw, when it's not a W, is pronounced OO as in boom.
• The Ya', when it's not a Y, is pronounced EE as in reed or I as in machine.

These three consonants are supplemented by three short vowels that are actually not part of the word or its spelling. They are implicit (meaning "he wrote" is spelled ktb and not kataba), and only written in special cases. Their names are Fat7at, Dammat, Kasrat.
• The Fathat is the exact sound of the E in jet, even though we think of it as an "A".
• The Dammat is a short U sound as in super.
• The Kasrat is a short I sound as in pink.

What happens in Lebanese is that anytime you hear a long vowel, it is a reference to an Alef, Waw or Ya' in the Arabic equivalent. The rest of the vowel sounds all refer to unwritten and therefore flexible vowels. A rule of thumb to keep in mind is this: consonants and long vowels are fixed; if they change, the word changes. Short vowels are not fixed: they can change to slightly alter the meaning, simplify pronunciation, or depending on the area of the speaker.

I use an accent (´) to mark vowels that should be read elongated (1), and as mentioned above I reflect pronunciation rather than spelling. The transcription I use is the following:

á: long A (father, sometimes man), derived from the Alef.
a: short a (first a in mañana), derived from the Fat7at.
é: long E (air), derived from the Alef as well but with an alteration that is characteristic of Lebanese. Contrast for instance the Jordanian "yes" word: Ah, with the Lebanese equivalent: Eh.
e: short E (i in quick), derived from the Kasrat or the Ya'.
i: short I (pink), derived from the Kasrat.
ee: long EE, I (reed), derived from the Ya'.
ó: long O (more), derived from the Waw but with an alteration that is characteristic of Lebanese.
o: short O (first o in mosquito), derived from the Waw or Dammat.
u: short u (look), derived from the Dammat.
oo: long OO (you, boom), derived from the Waw.

It sounds horribly difficult to remember, doesn't it? No worries, I will strew the chapters with recordings of words to help you make sense of the above in a more intuitive way.

C. Stress

When I say stress here, it shouldn’t be understood as the phenomenon that one finds in the English language, in Italian, etc. In Arabic the stress is always due to the long vowels, and when a word doesn’t contain any such vowel, no part of it carries stress. In Lebanese stress usually reveals the presence of a long vowel in the original Arabic word, but often arises from the need to make things easier to pronounce.

D. Arabic-Lebanese comparison

Here's a comparative table for those who would like to compare the phonetic systems of Arabic and Lebanese.

Arabic letter/sound	Pronunciation in Lebanese	Transcription	Example of Arabic word and its Lebanese version
Alef (a as in father)	same	á
Alef (a as in man)	ai as in air	é	máshee/méshe ("walking")
Ba' (b)	same	b
Ta' (t)	same	t
Tha' (th as in thin)	T or S	t or s	thaman/taman ("price" in the sense of "we payed the price")
Jeem (dj as in jewel)	J	j	djinn/jenn
7a'	(hard h)	same	7
Kha' (spanish jota)	same	kh
Dal (d)	same	d
Dha' (th as in thee)	D or Z	d or z	dhe'eb/deeb or ze'eb ("wolf")
Ra' (rolled r)	same	r
Zeyn (z)	same	z
Seen (s)	same	s
Sheen (sh)	same	sh
Sad (throaty s that makes the following vowel "heavy")	S, but same effect on following vowel	s
Dad (throaty d that makes the following vowel "heavy")	D, but same effect on following vowel	d
Ta' (throaty t that makes the following vowel "heavy")	T, but same effect on following vowel	t
Za' (throaty z that makes the following vowel "heavy")	Z, but same effect on following vowel	z
3ayn	same	3
Gha' (French r)	same	gh
Fa' (f)	same	f
Qaf (throaty k that makes the following vowel "heavy")	vocal stop	'	Qála/'ál ("he said")
Kaf (k)	same	k
Lam (l)	same	l
Ha' (h)	same	h
Ta' marboota (t at the end of feminine words)	not pronounced		lateefat/lateefe ("gentle")
Waw (w)	same if w is followed by a vowel, or long O (more) if w is in the diphtong aw*	w or ó	walad/walad ("child") jawz/józ ("nut")
Waw (oo)	same within in a word or short O (mosquito) at the end of a word**	oo or ó	roo7/roo7 ("soul") akaloo/akalo ("they ate")
Ya' (y)	same	y
Ya' (ee)	same or i (quick)	ee or e	qalbee/'albe ("my heart")

* The ó shows up in Lebanese in 2-consonant imperative words as well. In Arabic such imperatives are properly written kl, ql, qm, with a Dammat between the consonants. In Lebanese it's as if we considered that such a short form as "kl!" is too meek and negates the concept of imperative, so we lengthen the word by stretching the short o sound into an imperious ó: Kól! Eat! or an oo: 'oom! Get up! 'ool! Tell!

** This only occurs in two cases: - when a verb is in the past, third person plural, with no suffix: akalo (they ate). - when a verb is in the past, third person male singular, with a pronominal suffix that refers to a masculine noun: akaloh (he ate it) (the suffix is implied but as it is a simple –h, is not pronounced).

(1) See the difference between katab and káteb.(back)

Chapter 2: Word order

Tutorials and articles © Joumana Medlej