Ẓāʾ

Template:Short description Template:Template other Template:Infobox grapheme , or (), is the seventeenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . Its numerical value is 900 (see Abjad numerals). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪜‎‎, and South Arabian .

does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	ظ‎	ـظ‎	ـظـ‎	ظـ‎

Frequency

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 . is the least mentioned letter in the Quran (not including the eight special letters in Arabic), and is only mentioned 853 times in the Quran.

In relation to other Semitic languages

In some reconstructions of Proto-Semitic phonology, there is an emphatic interdental fricative, / (Template:IPAblink or Template:IPAblink), featuring as the direct ancestor of Arabic , while it merged with in most other Semitic languages, although the South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for .

Pronunciation

File:Pronunciación de ظ.png

The main pronunciations of written Template:Angbr in Arabic dialects.

In Classical Arabic, it represents a velarized voiced dental fricative Template:IPAblink, and in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents an pharyngealized voiced dental Template:IPAblink but can also be a alveolar Template:IPAblink fricative for a number of speakers.

In most Arabic vernaculars and ḍād merged quite early. The outcome depends on the dialect. In those varieties (such as Egyptian and Levantine), where the dental fricatives and are merged with the dental stops and , ẓādʾ is pronounced or depending on the word; e.g. is pronounced but is pronounced , In loanwords from Classical Arabic is often , e.g. Egyptian ʿaẓīm (< Classical ʿaḏ̣īm) "great".

In the varieties (such as Bedouin, Tunisian, and Iraqi), where the dental fricatives are preserved, both and are pronounced . However, there are dialects in South Arabia and in Mauritania where both the letters are kept different but not consistently.

A "de-emphaticized" pronunciation of both letters in the form of the plain entered into other non-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Turkish. However, there do exist Arabic borrowings into Ibero-Romance languages as well as Hausa and Malay, where and are differentiated.

In English, the sound is sometimes represented by the digraph zh.

Languages / Countries	Pronunciation of the letters
	ض	ظ
Modern South Arabian languages (Mehri, Shehri, Harsusi)
Standard Arabic (full distinction)
Most of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Tunisia. Partial in: Libya, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine
Most of Algeria, and Morocco. Partial in: Libya, Tunisia and Yemen
Most of Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Partial in: Jordan, and Saudi Arabia		, *
Mauritania, Partial in: Morocco	, *

Notes:

1. In Mauritania (Hassaniya Arabic), is mostly pronounced as in ('to laugh'), from , but generally appears in the lexemes borrowed from Standard Arabic as in ('weak'), from * .
2. In Egypt, Lebanon, etc, is mostly pronounced in inherited words as in ('darkness'), from ; ('bone'), from , but pronounced in borrowings from Literary Arabic as in ('injustice'); from .
3. In some accents in Egypt, the emphatic is pronounced as a plain .

Semitic emphatic sibilant consonants
Proto-Semitic		Old South Arabian	Old North Arabian	Modern South Arabian 1	Standard Arabic		Aramaic		Modern Hebrew		Ge'ez		Phoenician		Akkadian
ṣ		Template:Script/Old South Arabian	𐪎	, rarely	ص‎		צ‎	ṣ	צ‎		Template:Script/Ethiopic	ṣ	𐤑‎	ṣ	ṣ
ṯ̣		Template:Script/Old South Arabian	𐪜		ظ‎		צ‎, later ט‎	*ṱ, ṣ, later ṭ
ṣ́		Template:Script/Old South Arabian	𐪓		ض‎		ק‎, later ע‎	*ṣ́, q/ḳ, later ʿ			Template:Script/Ethiopic	ṣ́
Notes ṯ , ḏ and ṯ̣ merge with , , and in Soqotri

See also

• Arabic phonology
• Ẓ
• Ḍād