The Tel-Aviv University audio database
of Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic

How to cite:
Berrebi, Si, Eyal Marco, Areej Khourieh, and Ezer Rasin. 2023. The Tel-Aviv University audio database of Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic, version 1.0. Online access at: https://pcomplab.github.io/JBAdatabase.html.

The database (version 1.0) (Excel spreadsheet)
User's guide for the database (PDF)

Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic (JBA) is an endangered dialect of Arabic, spoken primarily in Israel by Jews who emigrated from Baghdad, Iraq. The dialect is distinct from the Muslim and Christian Arabic varieties spoken in Baghdad. According to the 2023 yearly report of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, 99% of the 40,100 Iraqi-born Jews living in Israel today are over 65 years old. The vast majority of second-generation immigrants have not acquired the dialect, which is therefore unfortunately expected to disappear as a native language in the decades to come. Certain aspects of the dialect have previously been described by Blanc (1964), Mansour (1991), and Bar-Moshe (2019).

This database is the first public database of transcribed and annotated recordings from JBA. It consists of recordings of a speaker born in Israel in 1950 and exposed primarily to JBA in early childhood. Elicitation sessions were conducted in Hebrew between October 2021 and June 2022. Version 1.0 of the database contains approximately 2,350 JBA productions, pruned from sessions as single words in isolation or as phrases. Each production is given with an English gloss, an International Phonetic Alphabet transcription, and morphological annotation.

Please see the user's guide for more information.

The database will be updated and corrected periodically. For questions, comments, or to report any errors you come across, please contact us at phoncomplab@gmail.com.

This research was supported by the Azrieli Foundation and the Israel Science Foundation (grant 2872/21).

Other online resources for Judeo-Arabic:
1. The Mother Tongue project by Yehudit Henshke (link)
2. Heidelberg University's Semitic Sound Archive (link)
3. The Judeo-Arabic corpus of The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society (link)