.: a b o u t .: C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S .: i s s u e s .: p a p e r s   b y   t o p i c .: p a p e r s   b y   a u t h o r

Sudanese Arabic dictionary and linguistic research resource

James Dickins




Contents


1. Introduction

This is a downloadable Arabic-English – and, by extension English-Arabic – Sudanese Arabic dictionary and linguistic research resource. I will, for brevity, subsequently simply refer to it as Sudanese Arabic dictionary (or just ‘dictionary’, where this is appropriate). The dictionary is in Excel format and covers principally what I have elsewhere referred to as Central Urban Sudanese (e.g. Dickins 2023), i.e. the dialect of Khartoum and other urban areas of central Sudan. The information given in the Sudanese Arabic dictionary goes beyond traditional dictionary material, including, for example, also searchable and sortable morphological and semantic-field analyses. The dictionary can accordingly be used as a resource for linguistic research.

I thank the following, in particular, for their work on this project: Elrayah Abdelgadir (dictionary consultant, 2005 and 2007), Ali Al-Rashid Al-Amin (dictionary consultant, 1985, 1986), Ashraf Abdelhay, Asjad Saeed Awad Alhassan, Mohammed El Shazali, Taj Kandoura, Tarig Rahma, Yousif Elhindi, and Abd El Matallab Fahal. Many other people, not named here, have also contributed, and I thank them also. This is a work in progress, and I intend to continue adding further to the dictionary.

If you have any comments on the dictionary or would like to contribute to it (by correcting errors, providing new words and phrases, etc.), or if you would like to discuss how to do linguistic research using the dictionary as a resource, please contact me on email: Send email. You are also welcome to use the dictionary as a linguistic resource without contacting me. If you use this dictionary in your research, please reference it as:

Dickins, James. 2025. Sudanese Arabic dictionary and linguistic research resource. https://www.muni.cz/linguistica/dickins.


2. Downloadable documents

  • 1. The Sudanese Arabic dictionary can be downloaded here.
  • 2. The details of the transliteration system and other symbols (the ‘coding’) used for the dictionary can be downloaded here.
  • 3. The semantic-field classification adapted from the McArthur Lexicon of Contemporary English, used for the dictionary can be downloaded here.
  • 4. Extended Version of Rank Frequency List: Spoken English. This list from Frequencies in Spoken and Written English (Leech, Rayson and Wilson 2001) with semantic-field categories added for all entries can be downloaded here.

All these documents are discussed in more detail in subsequent sections.


3. Sudanese Arabic dictionary

The dictionary attempts to cover the basic vocabulary of Sudanese Arabic by including Sudanese Arabic equivalents for almost all the vocabulary items found in Rank frequency list: spoken English from Word frequencies in written and spoken English (Leech, Rayson and Wilson 2001: 144-180). It also includes many other Sudanese Arabic words and phrases. As noted in Section 1, the dictionary can be downloaded here.

The dictionary is in Excel spreadsheet format, presented as an Arabic-English dictionary, ordered according to the traditional root system for Arabic dictionaries. For readers not familiar with the root system of Arabic, the following provides information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root

Reflecting the fact that this is a work in progress, there is some repetition of material in the dictionary. At various points, too, question marks have been added to reflect the fact that some of the information (e.g. some English equivalents of Arabic entries) needs to be checked further.

The Excel format of the dictionary allows the reader to order the material in various ways (alphabetically on English entries, alphabetically on Arabic entries, by root, etc.). It also makes it possible for the reader to extract information of significance for linguistic research into Sudanese Arabic, e.g. morphological information or semantic-field information, and to cross-classify different kinds of information.

The dictionary contains the following information fields (columns):

  • Column A:    Basic line number
  • Column B:    English entry
  • Column C:    Arabic entry 1 - basic
  • Column D:    Arabic entry 2 - secondary
  • Column E:    Word class (basic syntax, etc.)
  • Column F:    Verb morphology
  • Column G:    Non-verbal and deverbal morphology
  • Column H:    Plural noun/adjective morphology
  • Column I:    Style and regional usage
  • Column J:    Semantic field
  • Column K:    Root - 1: according to the traditional Arabic root system
  • Column L:    Root - 2: roots with root letters converted to numbers, for sorting

These categories are discussed further in the next section.


4. Dictionary ‘coding’: transliteration system and other symbols

As noted in Section 1, the details of the transliteration system for Sudanese Arabic and the other ‘coding’ used in the dictionary can be downloaded here. Note that spelling adopted for Sudanese Arabic forms is roughly a transliteration from Arabic rather than a transcription – i.e. the English forms correspond to Sudanese Arabic spellings (as normally found in dialect writing), rather than corresponding more directly to the phonology or phonetics of Sudanese Arabic.

On a historical note, I first started working on this project on a VAX mainframe computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX) in 1984, which had rather limited options in terms of line-length, column-length and available symbols. This explains some of the annotation decisions which I took.


5. Semantic-field categories

The semantic-field classification used for the dictionary (Column J) is adapted from the McArthur Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur 1991), and as noted in Section 1 can be downloaded here. The Excel format of the semantic-field categorisation allows for sorting and extraction of information according to the following categories:

  • Column A:    Primary category
  • Column B:    Secondary category
  • Column C:    Tertiary category
  • Column D:    Coding of category
  • Column E:    Word class

6. Extended Version of Rank Frequency List: Spoken English

This is a basic English vocabulary list taken from Frequencies in Spoken and Written English (Leech, Rayson and Wilson 2001), with the semantic-field categories in the McArthur Lexicon of contemporary English added for all list entries. It was used to try and cover the basic vocabulary of Sudanese Arabic in the dictionary. This list is based on the British National Corpus. Information about the corpus and electronic versions of frequency lists derived from it can be found at: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/bncfreq/. As noted in Section 1, the Extended version of the rank frequency list: spoken English can be downloaded here.

The Excel format of the Extended version of the rank frequency list: spoken English allows for sorting and extraction of information according to the following categories:

  • Column A:    Rank frequency order
  • Column B:    Non-lemmatized head [as given in Leech, Rayson and Wilson 2001]
  • Column C:    Lemmatized headword [i.e. standard dictionary-type headword]
  • Column D:    McArthur category
  • Column E:    Word-class
  • Column F:    Rounded word frequency (per million word tokens) in speech
  • Column G:    Log likelihood
  • Column H:    Rounded word frequency (per million word tokens in writing)
  • Column I:    Source of information (given throughout as WoFreSpoWriEng)

I thank Geoffrey Leech, Paul Rayson and Andrew Wilson, copyright holders of Word frequencies in spoken and written English, for permission to reproduce their material.


7. Using the Sudanese Arabic dictionary as an Arabic-English dictionary

The Sudanese Arabic dictionary can be used as an Arabic-English dictionary in two ways.

7.1. By using the Arabic root to find Arabic headwords

If you know the root of the Arabic word, you can search on Column K ROOT -1: according to the traditional Arabic root system using the ‘text filter’ function, to look up this root. (For details of how to search on Excel using ‘text filter’, see: https://www.exceldemy.com/text-filter-in-excel/.) For the root

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7.2. By using an individual Arabic word to find relevant Arabic entries

If you know the word simi9, for example, and want to find out its meanings, you can use Column C Arabic entry 1 to search for this word. This gives the following results:

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Searching for a specific word in Column C may, as in this case, give some results in which the root listed in Column K, (ROOT -1: according to the traditional Arabic root system) is not the same as the root of the word which is searched for.


8. Using the Sudanese Arabic dictionary as an English-Arabic dictionary

The simplest way to use the Sudanese Arabic dictionary as an English-Arabic dictionary is to search on Column B English entry. So, for example, searching on Column B for all entries which contain obey gives the following results:

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Sometimes, however, this approach yields many irrelevant results. Take the case of looking for Sudanese Arabic equivalents of English hear. Searching on Column B for all entries which contain ‘hear’ (i.e. this string of letters) yields numerous results, the first twelve of which are:

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None of these initial results are relevant; they all, in fact, involve heart, rather than hear (the string of letters ‘hear’ is, of course, found in heart as well as hear). There are various ways to get round this. One is to identify the major cause of the problem – in this case the word heart – and remove this from the search items by doing a search on Column B for all entries which contains hear but do not contain heart. This yields the following results:

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This list is not without its problems. For instance, it includes the irrelevant words shear and shears. However, in the main the words in the list involve hear, and the relevant information can be easily found.

Another way of getting round having too many irrelevant results from searching for words which contain a string of letters, e.g. ‘hear’, in Column B English entry is to do this search first and then within it, do a second search in Column I Semantic field. So, if we first do a search on Column B English entry for all the entries which contain ‘hear’ and we then do a further search on Column I Semantic field for the McArthur Lexicon of contemporary English category [F272] hearing and listening, we get the following results, all of which are relevant:

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9. Using the Sudanese Arabic dictionary as a thesaurus

To find words belonging to a particular semantic field, search in Column J Semantic field using the relevant McArthur Lexicon of contemporary English category. Thus, for example, the McArthur category [K055] amplifiers and microphones gives the following results:

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10. Using the Sudanese Arabic dictionary as a research resource

There are many ways in which the Sudanese Arabic dictionary can be used as a research resource. I will consider one example in relation to the morphological pattern fa9laan. This is encoded in Colum G, Non-verbal and deverbal morphology as [401 ]. A search on Column G for this gives numerous results, of which the following are examples:

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The standard plural for words on the fa9laan pattern in Sudanese Arabic is -iyn, notated as [f ] in Column H Plural noun/adjective morphology; talfaan ‘worthless’, plural talfaaniyn. There are some fa9laan words, however, which also have the plural fa9aala, notated as [061 ] in Column H. An example is ta9baan ‘tired, weary, exhausted’, plural ta9baaniyn or ta9aaba. Having searched for [401 ] in Column G Non-verbal and deverbal morphology, all the fa9laan form having the plural fa9aala can be found by then searching for [061 ] in Column H. This yields the following list:

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In fact fa9aala plurals of fa9laan forms all seem to have a generalised and relatively abstract meaning. Thus ta9aaaba people are not simply people who are tired, but those who have been worn down by life. sakaara (plural of sakraan ‘drunk’) are not simply drunk people but drunkards. kasaala (plural of kaslaan ‘lazy’) are people who are habitually lazy. (This information is not included in the current version of the dictionary, but I hope to include it in a later one.)

We can also look at fa9laan forms in terms of their semantic fields. The easiest way to do this is (having searched for all the fa9laan forms in Column G) to use Sort A-Z on Column J Semantic field. This shows that fa9laan forms have senses belonging to a number of semantic fields. For instance, the following fall under McArthur’s category [B096] Bodily states and associated activities - not showing energy:

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The following fa9laan forms fall under McArthur’s category [F104] angry and annoyed:

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The following fall under McArthur’s category [L173] ending things:

It would also be possible to investigate further aspects of fa9laan forms. For example, most of them have related fi9il verbs as can be seen by comparing them with verbs from the same roots (fi9il verbs are notated as [01i ] in Column G Verb morphology). It would also be possible to investigate the syntax of fa9laan forms by analysing the information for them in Column E Word class (basic syntax, etc.). I am happy to discuss possible research avenues with any researcher who would like to make use of this dictionary.


References

Dickins, J. 2023. ‘Definiteness, pronoun suffixes, genitives and two types of syntax in Sudanese Arabic’. In Journal of Semitic Studies. 68:2, pp. 679-712. https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgac035
Leech, G., Rayson, P., and Wilson, A. 2001. Frequencies in spoken and written English. (Longman, 2001)

McArthur, T. 1991. Longman lexicon of contemporary English. London: Longman.

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