Rhotic variation in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic

Descriptions of rhotic sounds in Moroccan Arabic dialects often lack phonetic evidence and can be inconsistent, with some sources classifying the rhotic as a trill (e.g., Caubet 1993), and others identifying it as a tap (e.g., Heath 2002). Moroccan Arabic phonology includes a contrast between singleton and geminate rhotics and a quasi-phonemic contrast between plain and emphatic rhotics (Freeman 2016). This study presents the first acoustic analysis of rhotic production in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic, an endangered dialect spoken predominantly by elderly Moroccan Jews. It examines inter-speaker variation and potential effects of phoneme identity, word position, and vocalic environment. Ten native speakers from Marrakech were recorded completing tasks including retelling a culturally relevant story and reading a 36-item word list embedded in sentence frames, developed in collaboration with community members. Acoustic analysis included spectrogram labeling, comparisons of rhotic variant frequencies, and mixed-effects multinomial logistic regression. Three rhotic variants—tap, trill, and approximant—were identified, with substantial inter-speaker variation in distribution. Statistical modeling assesses the influence of linguistic context and phoneme identity on rhotic realization. Findings contribute to the phonetic documentation of under-described dialects and to broader discussions of mismatches between phonological descriptions of rhotics and phonetic reality (e.g., Anselme 2022).