imala.
a sound change in Arabic by which the vowels /a/, /aː/ are fronted in certain phonetic environments (possibly creating new phonemes, notably in Maltese and to a lesser degree in some dialects)
Meaning & usage
a sound change in Arabic by which the vowels /a/, /aː/ are fronted in certain phonetic environments (possibly creating new phonemes, notably in Maltese and to a lesser degree in some dialects)
Where this word comes from
From Arabic إمالة (ʔimāla, literally “inclination”). The earliest form of the process, described by the Arab grammarians, was conditioned on the existence of an /i/ before or after the /a/ (somewhat similarly to Germanic umlaut). Hence the /a/ was said to “incline” towards the /i/. In many modern dialects, however, imala is only conditioned by surrounding consonants, and it is typically hindered by certain adjacent consonants (especially emphatics).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.