Ẓāʾ

Quality 0.50 · 1 view · Updated 2 months ago

Letter of the Arabic alphabet

title: "Ẓāʾ" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["arabic-letters", "urdu-letters"] description: "Letter of the Arabic alphabet" topic_path: "general/arabic-letters" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ẓāʾ" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Letter of the Arabic alphabet ::

| name = Ẓāʾ ظاء | letter = ظ | script = Arabic script | type = Abjad | language = Arabic language | phonemes = * (standard)

  • , (dialectal) | alphanumber = 17 | direction = Right-to-left | fam2 = 𐤈 | fam3 = 𐡈‎ | fam4 = 𐢋‎ | fam5 = ط ar, or ar (ظ), is the seventeenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet (the others being ar, ar, ar, ar, ar). In name and shape, it is a variant of ar. Its numerical value is 900 (see Abjad numerals). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪜‎‎, and South Arabian 𐩼.

ar ظَاءْ does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:

Frequency

ar is the rarest phoneme of the Arabic language. Out of 2,967 triliteral roots listed by Hans Wehr in his 1952 dictionary, only 42 (1.4%) contain ظ. ar is the least mentioned letter in the Quran, only being mentioned 853 times in the Quran.

In relation to other Semitic languages

In some reconstructions of Proto-Semitic phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, sem/sem ( or ), featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic ar, while it merged with sem in most other Semitic languages, although the South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for sem.

Pronunciation

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Pronunciación_de_ظ.png" caption="ظ}}}} in Arabic dialects."] ::

In Classical Arabic, it represents a velarized voiced dental fricative , and in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents an pharyngealized voiced dental but can also be a alveolar fricative for a number of speakers.

In most Arabic vernaculars ظ ar and ض ḍād merged quite early. The outcome depends on the dialect. In those varieties (such as Egyptian and Levantine), where the dental fricatives and are merged with the dental stops and , ẓādʾ is pronounced or depending on the word; e.g. ظِل is pronounced but ظاهِر is pronounced , In loanwords from Classical Arabic ar is often , e.g. Egyptian ʿaẓīm (

In the varieties (such as Bedouin, Tunisian, and Iraqi), where the dental fricatives are preserved, both ar and ar are pronounced . However, there are dialects in South Arabia and in Mauritania where both the letters are kept different but not consistently.

A "de-emphaticized" pronunciation of both letters in the form of the plain entered into other non-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Turkish. However, there do exist Arabic borrowings into Ibero-Romance languages as well as Hausa and Malay, where ar and ar are differentiated.

In English, the sound is sometimes represented by the digraph zh. ::data[format=table]

Languages / CountriesPronunciation of the lettersضظ
Modern South Arabian languages (Mehri, Shehri, Harsusi)
Standard Arabic (full distinction)
Most of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Tunisia. Partial in: Libya, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine
Most of Algeria, and Morocco. Partial in: Libya, Tunisia and Yemen
Most of Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Partial in: Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, *
Mauritania, Partial in: Morocco, *
::

Notes:

  1. In Mauritania (Hassaniya Arabic), ض is mostly pronounced as in ('to laugh'), from ضحك, but generally appears in the lexemes borrowed from Standard Arabic as in ('weak'), from * ضعيف.
  2. In Egypt, Lebanon, etc, ظ is mostly pronounced in inherited words as in ('darkness'), from ظلمة; ('bone'), from عظم , but pronounced in borrowings from Literary Arabic as in ('injustice'); from ظلم.
  3. In some accents in Egypt, the emphatic is pronounced as a plain . ::data[format=table] | Semitic emphatic sibilant consonants | Proto-Semitic | Old South Arabian | Old North Arabian | Modern South Arabian 1 | Standard Arabic | Aramaic | Modern Hebrew | Ge'ez | Phoenician | Akkadian | ṣ | ṯ̣ | ṣ́ | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | | 𐪎 | , rarely | | | | ṣ | | | | ṣ | | ṣ | ṣ | | | 𐪜 | | | | , later | *ṱ, ṣ, later ṭ | | | | | | | | | | 𐪓 | | | | , later | *ṣ́, q/ḳ, later ʿ | | ṣ́ | | | | | | | Notes | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ::

Character encodings

|0638|name1=Arabic Letter Zad

References

References

  1. Catherine Taine-Cheikh. 2020. Ḥassāniyya Arabic. In Christopher Lucas & Stefano Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced change, 245–263. Berlin: Language Sci- ence Press.
  2. Schneider, Roey. (2024). "The Semitic Sibilants". The Semitic Sibilants.
  3. (1959). "The Arabic koine". Language.
  4. (1997). "Structuralist studies in Arabic linguistics: Charles A. Ferguson's papers, 1954–1994". Brill.
  5. (1999). "Compilation and Creation in Adab and Luġa: Studies in Memory of Naphtali Kinberg (1948–1997)".
  6. (2000). "Studies in the Linguistic Structure of Classical Arabic". Brill.
  7. (1952}} {{page needed). "Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart".
  8. Retsö, Jan. (2012). "The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook". Walter de Gruyter.

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

arabic-lettersurdu-letters