Ẓāʾ

Arabic alphabet
ا    ب    ت    ث    ج    ح
خ    د    ذ    ر    ز    س
ش    ص    ض    ط    ظ    ع
غ    ف    ق    ك    ل
م    ن    ه    و    ي
History · Transliteration Diacritics · Hamza ء Numerals · Numeration v · d · e

Ẓāʾ (ظ, commonly known in Egypt as [zˤɑ]) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being thāʼ, khāʼ, dhāl, ḍād, ġayn). In Modern Standard Arabic it represents a pharyngealized voiced dental fricative or voiced alveolar fricative ([zˤ] or [ðˤ]). In name and shape, it is a variant of ṭāʼ. Its numerical value is 900 (see Abjad numerals).

The ẓāʼ sound is an emphatic [z] or [ð], pronounced with the center of the tongue depressed. Regional pronunciations vary; it may sound like an emphatic counterpart of either ز or ذ. In few dialects, such as the Lebanese Arabic, it is indistinguishable from the former in sound. Because the Persian pronunciation of this letter is influenced by the Levantine dialect, it too, is indistinguishable in sound.

Ẓāʼ 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.

In some reconstructions of Proto-Semitic phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, ṱ ([θˤ] or [ðˤ]), featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic ẓāʼ, while it merged with ṣ in most other Semitic languages, although the South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for ẓ. See also ḍād. Ẓāʼ is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Form of letter:	ظ‎	ـظ‎	ـظـ‎	ظـ‎

See also

• Arabic phonology
• Ẓ

References

• Hans Wehr, Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952)