Abstract

The study investigates the phonetic behavior of the glottal stop in different in-word-positions (initial, medial, final) and across word-boundary in Northern Jordanian Arabic (NJA), and attempts to examine its convergence to that behavior described for classical Arabic in standard references. The study provides detailed quantitative data about ?-variation in NJA, and concludes that NJA is essentially similar to the standard model in demonstrating the sound's different variants, viz., fully-articulated ?, weak glottal constriction, substitution and deletion under similar phonetic conditioning. The study also finds some slight deviations from the standard possibly attributed to differences in the linguistic practice in both varieties, and reveals some innovations, especially in the substitution process.