Abstract
Although the importance of analyzing vowel phonemes in Arabic languages is important for speech processing, this issue has not yet been paid considerable attention in the published literature. Consequently, a formant-based analysis for the Arabic vowels of Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) was carried out in this work. In addition, American English vowels were also compared in this regard. The values of the first and second formant frequencies were obtained from recorded Arabic speech taken from well-known corpora and recordings. The outcomes were compared with previously published results conducted on other Arabic dialects and American English. The comparisons were focused on vowel triangles. The resulting vowel triangles were found to be consistent with our visual inspection of the vowel data. These work outcomes indicate that the MSA and CA vowels are close to each other, which is not the case if the comparison is with respect to English.