Production notes for nine Arabic sounds that English phonetics training does not cover, with side-view animations where the evidence supports one. Built for clinicians assessing or supporting Arabic-speaking clients without an Arabic-speaking colleague to ask.
For most Arabic consonants there is a close English comparison. A smaller set does not, and those are the ones that get transcribed wrong, targeted wrong, or recorded as errors when they are correct productions. These pages cover that smaller set.
Four sounds have an animated side-view figure, because the evidence supports drawing one.
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All nine sounds are covered in the Arabic Speech Sounds clinical reference.
Five sounds are covered in the reference, but no animation is shown for them.
This is a decision about what can responsibly be drawn, not about how much the sound matters clinically. For each of these, the published evidence does not establish a configuration that a side-view figure could show honestly — either because the reported articulation varies too much between varieties, or because the structures involved cannot be shown in a side view at all.
A missing figure is a finding, not a gap. Where that is the case, the reference explains what is known instead: development, error patterns, dialect variation and what to weigh in assessment.
For these sounds, an English-like production is usually an appropriate starting point. Check dialect, vowel context and the wider speech system before targeting a difference.
س /s/ — s · ز /z/ — z · ف /f/ — f · م /m/ — m · ن /n/ — n · ل /l/ — l · ب /b/ — b · ش /ʃ/ — sh · ي /j/ — y · و /w/ — w
Scope: broad Arabic
This guide shows broad Arabic reference descriptions, not one speaker's or region's pronunciation. Realisations vary across Arabic varieties. Use a client's own dialect and speech community as the comparison when deciding whether a production is expected, variable or needs support.
No dialect-specific variant is the project default, and no page implies that a differing dialectal realisation is a disorder or a therapy target without dialect-specific assessment.
For how diglossia affects speech and language assessment more broadly, see Arabic diglossia and its impact on speech and language assessment.
The animations are simplified schematics informed by published articulatory imaging, not traced from a single speaker. The descriptions use a broad Arabic phonetic frame, and each page notes clinically relevant variation.
An animation appears only where the evidence supports one. Where it does not, the page says so and explains why. Sources are cited on each page.
For acquisition ages rather than articulation, see Arabic Speech Sound Development: Milestones by Age. For the wider clinician resources, see For Clinicians.
