The Sound System of Baghdadi Arabic in the Light of Distinctive Feature Theory

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to look at the sound system of Baghdadi Arabic in view of the Distinctive  Feature Theory, in order to see how far such a theory would be applicable to the language variety being dealt with in this paper. The main purpose ,here, is to see how far is it  possible to group the sounds of Baghdadi Arabic into classes according to their phonetic (distinctive) properties. Thus, on one hand, the paper is meant to deal with the sounds of Baghdadi Arabic in terms of Trubetzkoy's distinctive oppositions, using the method of contrasting the classes of sounds according to such oppositions.