Word Stress of Arabic as a Foreign Language Amongst Malay Speakers

Stress (al-nabr) is a type of suprasegmental or prosodic phonological feature. It is one of the characteristics or attributes of sound that overlaps certain phonemes. Studies investigating the acquisition of Arabic word stress among non-natives are scarce. Therefore, this study is aimed at observing the stressed pronunciation phenomenon of four-syllable words among non-native speakers of Arabic, and further compare this particular phenomenon with the rules proposed by Arabic linguistic scholars. The subjects were five final year undergraduate students of the Department of Arabic Studies and Islamic Civilisation, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). Six four-syllable word patterns \CVC\CV\CVV\CV\, \CVC\CV\CVC\CVC\, \CVC\CV\CV\CV\, \CVC\CV\CVV\CVC\, \CV\CVV\CV\KVK\ and \CVC\CV\CV\CVC\ were chosen as the stimuli. Three words were chosen to represent each word pattern; hence altogether a total of 18 words were tested. These audio recordings were analysed using the Praat software to obtain the readings of intensity value (dB), thus identifying the stress. The stress frequency data for each word pattern are reported in the form of percentages. The research outcome shows that the participants tended to give a primary stress on the antepenultimate syllable of each of the \CV\CVV\CV\CVC\, \CVC\CV\CV\CVC\ and \CVC\CV\CV\CV\ word patterns, and on the penultimate syllable of the word pattern \CVC\CV\CVC\CVC\. The tendency of the primary stress for the \CV\CVV\CV\CVC\ and \CVC\CV\CVV\CV\ word patterns is difficult to identify. Based on the analysis of the primary stress, the participants easily conformed to the rules of the main stress as suggested by Arabic linguists for the \CV\CVV\CV\CVC\, \CVC\CV\CV\CVC\, \CVC\CV\CV\CV\ and \CVC\CV\CVC\CVC\ word patterns, but the same cannot be said for the remaining two words patterns. Therefore, focusing on aspects of word stress in teaching and learning Arabic needs to be further emphasized. Future research could also include a larger population of participants in order to obtain better insights.