Not as you R: Adapting the French rhotic into Arabic and Berber

Mohamed Lahrouchi (1)

1 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage

This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Arabic and Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Arabic and Berber have phonemic /ʁ/ and /χ/. It is argued that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. It is shown that Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic speakers, including monolinguals, are able to identify the French r as a sonorant, based on their native phonology, where many co-occurrence restrictions are analyzed in terms of sonority-sensitive dependency relations between the most sonorous segment and its neighbouring segments.

Mots clés: Loanword phonology; rhotics; Tashlhiyt Berber; Moroccan Arabic

Domaines: Linguistique

Mohamed Lahrouchi. Not as you R: Adapting the French rhotic into Arabic and Berber. 2019. ⟨hal-02420958⟩