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.