Arab Educational Information Network

This article aims at verifying the validity of the viewpoint that diacritics in Arabic are one of the reasons that lead to the lack of interest in studying Arabic by non-Arabic speakers. It is a descriptive phonological study of the acoustic features of diacritics in Arabic: their length and shortness, magnification and thinning, and narrowness and width. It also studies their qualities, characteristics, and importance in Arabic speech and sentences. The most prominent result of the study shows that diacritics do not pose any obstacle to students of Arabic as a second language since Arabic is one of the languages that uses the least number of vowels, and that it is necessary to take into account the learner’s motivation, age, and learning environment. (Published abstract)