Vowel-Epenthesis Patterns in Loanword Adaptation of Initial sC Clusters in Najdi Arabic

In this study, I investigate vowel epenthesis that arises in loanword adaptation in Najdi Arabic (NA), an Arabic dialect spoken in the middle region of Saudi Arabia. In addition, I present experimental data from NA, to advocate for the perception-based analysis of loanword adaptation, an approach early adopted by Fleishacker (2002). Based on acoustic and perceptual evidence, Fleishacker has found that in many languages sibilant + stop clusters are resolved by prothesis (i.e. epenthesis before the cluster), while obstruent + sonorant clusters are resolved by anaptyxis (i.e. epenthesis into the cluster). Accordingly, she developed a constraint-based analysis of vowel epenthesis with respect to word-initial consonant clusters in which she proposed a universally-ranked partial scale of contextsensitive DEP-V constraints as follows: DEP-V/S_T » DEP-V/S_N » DEP-V/S_L » DEP-V/T_R.