Introduction

Levantine Arabic is spoken along the western Mediterranean coast from Anatolia to the Sinai Peninsula and encompasses the local dialects of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. There are two distinct varieties: Northern, centered around Syria and Lebanon; and Southern, spoken in Jordan and Palestine. Northern Levantine Arabic speakers include approximately 8.8 million speakers in Syria and 6 million speakers in Lebanon. Southern Levantine Arabic speakers include approximately 3.5 million speakers in Jordan, 1.6 million speakers in Palestine and nearly one million speakers in Israel.

Fisher Levantine Arabic Conversational Telephone Speech, Transcripts contains transcripts for 279 telephone conversations. The majority of the speakers are from Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine. The corresponding telephone speech is contained in Fisher Levantine Arabic Conversational Telephone Speech.

Data

The transcripts were created with "green" and "yellow" layers using LDC's Multi-Dialectal Transcription Tool (AMADAT). The green layer seeks to anchor dialectal forms to similar or related Modern Standard Arabic orothgraphy-based forms. The yellow layer is a more careful and detailed transcription that adds functionally necessary vowels and marks important sociolinguistic variations and morphophonemic features.

The green-layer transcripts in this corpus are a subset of the transcripts contained in Levantine Arabic QT Training Data Set 5, Transcripts, LDC2006T07. The yellow-layer transcription was added in this release.

Samples

For an example of the text contained in this corpus, please view this image of the transcriptions (jpeg format).

Content Copyright

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