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

How to cite:
Marco, Eyal, Si berrebi, Samar Natour, Areej Khourieh, and Ezer Rasin. 2025. The Tel-Aviv University audio database of Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, version 1.0. Online access at: https://pcomplab.github.io/JTAdatabase.html.

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

Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (JTA) is an endangered dialect of Arabic, spoken primarily in Israel by Jews who emigrated from Tripoli, the capital city of Libya. The dialect is distinct from the Muslim variety spoken in the city, and from other Judeo-Arabic dialects spoken in Libya (e.g., Yefreni; D'Anna 2021). According to the 2023 yearly report of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, only a few hundreds of the 10,100 Libya-born Jewish citizens of Israel today are under the age of 65. 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.
Aspects of the phonology, morphology and syntax of JTA have previously been described in Yoda (2005), based on recordings from nine speakers born and raised in Tripoli city.

This is the first public database of transcribed and annotated recordings of JTA. It consists of recordings of a speaker who was born in the city of Tripoli in 1947 and emigrated with his family to Israel in 1949, continuing to speak the language at home and within the community. Elicitation sessions were conducted in Hebrew between March 2022 and March 2024. The database contains approximately 2,200 JTA 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).

For another rich online resource for Judeo-Arabic, see The Mother Tongue project by Yehudit Henshke (link)