Special Issue of the Journal of Connected Speech
Prosody in Languages of the Middle East

Special Issue Guest Editors:

Prosody, including word-level prosody and sentence-level prosody or even paralinguistic prosody, plays an essential role in speech communications. It marks contrasts in meaning, signals information structure, and distinguishes between various utterance types.

Although prosody has been extensively studied in many of the world’s languages, the languages of the Middle East, such as Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and Turkic languages, remain comparatively underrepresented in the literature. Yet research on the languages of the region has shown some interesting patterns relating to stress and prosodic focus (Egyptian Arabic (Hellmuth 2011), Jordanian Arabic (de Jong & Zawaydeh 1999)) and the interaction of tonal alignment with syllable structure (Persian (Sadeghi 2019), Lebanese Arabic (Kelly 2024)).

This special issue invites contributions that deepen our understanding of prosody in the languages of the Middle East. We welcome papers based on presentations at the workshop Prosody in Languages of the Middle East (PaPE 2025), as well as new submissions from researchers not involved in the event. Our aim is to bring together work that highlights the diversity of prosodic systems in the region and promotes cross-linguistic comparison, theoretical development, and methodological innovation.

We invite submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following areas:

We especially encourage submissions focusing on lesser-studied languages and dialects, as well as interdisciplinary or cross-methodological approaches.