One Piece of the Puzzle: Notes on the Historic Interdental Fricatives /θ, ð, ðˁ/ in the Arabic Dialect of Gaza City

Although a great deal has been written about the Gaza Strip within the fields of political science, history, and international relations, very little linguistic research has been conducted in the coastal territory. This study aims at filling one gap in the linguistic record of Gaza through an examination of one set of phonemes, the Arabic interdentals /θ, ð, ðˁ/, in the dialect of Gaza City. The results of this study suggest that the present day dialect of Gaza City is largely in line with the earliest report on the realization of the interdentals as reported by Bergsträßer (1915), contrasting data presented in later published work by Salonen (1979, 1980).Keywords: Arabic dialectology, Levantine Arabic, Palestine, Gaza, classification, urban