This article analyzes an unusual document in the Arabic dialect of the marshlands of southern Iraq. Written by a Jewish Iraqi poet, who arrived in Israel from the city of ʿAmāra in the late 1940s, this document consists of two monologues, each repeated twice: first in Hebrew letters and then again in Arabic script. While the writer evidently spoke a qǝltu dialect as his mother tongue, the monologues demonstrate the gilit dialect of the southern Iraqi marshes, and include several idiosyncrasies of that region. The document thus provides linguistic evidence from a dialect area so far documented only partially and insufficiently. We have been able to identify significant differences between the Arabic and Hebrew versions, which led us to view the former as a more reliable attestation of the linguistic reality of the Iraqi marshlands, and the latter as a version produced at a later stage. The writer’s intention was apparently to demonstrate the close inter-communal relations between the Jews of southern Iraq and the Marsh Arabs, yet his attempt to reproduce a text in the marshland’s dialect reveals a more complex picture: While the marshland gilit dialect was known to the qǝltu speakers of the area, the shift between the varieties remained challenging, as is often the case in co-territorial communal dialects.

The purposes of this paper are threefold. The first and the most general purpose is to provide an update of Ingham’s analysis of the southern lexical features that is based on data gathered more than forty years ago (Ingham 1973). On this basis, I will reconsider the lexical link postulated by Ingham (2009: 101, 2007: 577) between the southern gilit-dialects continuum, on the one hand, and the dialects of the Gulf Coast, on the other hand. The second purpose is to reconsider the hitherto maintained lexical frontiers of the southern continuum suggested by Ingham (1994), discussing a range of items that so far have always been treated as ‘southern’, though they are widely spread in other gilit- and, to a less extent, in qeltu-dialects in the western and northern parts of Iraq. The third purpose involves proposing the dichotomy Šrūgi/non-Šrūgi as a new and efficient way of classification of the gilit-dialects. At the end of this paper, a list of Šrūgi lexical features is given.

The Jewish dialect of ʿĀna exhibits three synchronic vowel qualities for the prefix vowel in the prefix-conjugation of the first stem: a, ǝ, and u. While the latter vowel is an allophone of ǝ, the former two are independent phonemes. The existence of two phonemic prefix vowels, especially the vowel a, is intriguing in regional context since the reconstructed prefix vowel in qǝltu dialects is assumed to be *i. Therefore, this paper aims to outline the historical developments that led to this synchronic reality. It will argue that the prefix vowel a was borrowed from surrounding Bedouin dialects. As for the vowel ǝ, two hypotheses will be suggested to explain its existence: it either developed from the prefix vowel a in analogy to other cases of vowel raising, or it is simply a reflection of the older qǝltu prefix vowel. Regardless of which hypothesis we choose to follow, the assumed historical development has clearly not been finalised, resulting in synchronic free variation.