Кипрлік маронит араб тілінің жоғалуы

Moribund variety of Arabic spoken by the Maronite community of Cyprus

Cypriot Arabic (العربية القبرصية), also known as Cypriot Maronite Arabic or Sanna is a moribund variety of Arabic spoken by the Maronite community of Cyprus. Formerly speakers were mostly situated in Kormakitis, but following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the majority relocated to the south and dispersed, leading to the decline of the language. Traditionally bilingual in Cypriot Greek, as of some time prior to 2000, all remaining speakers of Cypriot Arabic were over 30 years of age. A 2011 census reported that, of the 3,656 Maronite Cypriots in Republic of Cyprus controlled areas, none declared Cypriot Arabic as their first language.

Cypriot Arabic was first introduced to Cyprus by Maronites who came mainly from Lebanon and Syria as early as the seventh century, with waves of immigration up to the thirteenth century. Since 2002, it is one of UNESCO designated severely endangered languages and, since 2008, it is recognised as a minority language of Cyprus, coinciding with an attempt to revitalise the language. Cypriot Arabic has in the past been assigned to a Syrian Lebanese or Levantine Arabic classification, likely owing to the contemporary presence of a large Lebanese speaking Maronite community on the mainland. However, more recently it has been shown to share a large number of common features with the qeltu or North Mesopotamian Arabic dialects of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and a pre Cypriot medieval antecedent has been deduced as belonging to this dialect area. Indications of an Aramaic substrate suggest it was close to the time of the language shift from Aramaic to Arabic; other features are common to those of Syro Lebanese and Palestinian, which go back to a period in which there was a dialect continuum between the Mesopotamian dialects and the Syrian dialect area. In the Cypriot stage, the language was extensively restructured through contact with Cypriot Greek, acquiring numerous features and constraints not typical of Arabic. Essentially unintelligible to mainland Arabic speakers, it is characterized as an isolated "peripheral Arabic" along with others such as Maltese. Its Arabic component is a hybrid of dialects from diverse areas and times of Southeastern Anatolia, northern Syria, and Mesopotamia, as well as the Levant, offering unique insights into the historical evolution of Eastern Arabic.

argues that the sound system of Cypriot Arabic has been heavily influenced by that of Cypriot Greek. Cypriot Arabic has lost all emphatic consonants and stop voicing opposition (though this is subject to debate in literature)—but retained gemination. Geminate voiceless stop consonants surface as aspirates. Furthermore, Old Arabic merged with , became , and merged with
The consonant phonemes of Cypriot Arabic, according to , are Affricates occur as allophones of clusters Voiced stops occur as allophones of voiceless stops intervocalically and next to a sonorant or There are five vowel phonemes, , and two diphthongs, Phonological rules observed in Cypriot Arabic include:
Historical stop + stop clusters are dissimilated to fricative + stop. are palatalized to before is fully assimilated. between an obstruent and a vowel surfaces as An epenthetic stop occurs between a nasal and a continuant or sonorant. The place of articulation is inherited from the nasal before it and the voicing from the continuant or sonorant that follows. Phenomena similar to the first three are also observed in Cypriot Greek.