Lovin' the glottal stop

Miss Maya has surprised us in the past week by picking up a handful of Arabic words, phrases and sounds, much to our amusement and despite the fact that she has no caregivers who speak to her in Arabic!

Her exposure to Arabic is limited to hearing other parents and nannies talking to their kids at the park or at her music and art classes, even though the classes themselves are in English. She also hears me talking on the phone in Arabic constantly due to my job. I probably get phone calls roughly twice an evening in Arabic and a couple times a day on weekends. As a result, Maya thinks that Arabic is the language of the telephone. And in fact I rarely speak on the phone in any other language, unless relatives call.

So the other day Maya picked up her toy phone and had a conversation on it entirely in Arabic. It was a cross between ordering groceries on the telephone and barking instructions.

It was like this: "Allo, Allo! Fih eh? La'a. La'a. Ummmm. Malesh. Kull Kwayyis!"

That translates to: "Hello Hello. What do you have? No. No. Ummmm. Never mind. It's all good."

I knew she had some Arabic words. But this was practically a full conversation. It was really totally unexpected. Anyway, her most recent Arabic word is La'a, which means "no" and has a glottal stop in it (the apostrophe marks the glottal stop). In Egypt, people emphasize the glottal stop to make the word "no" sound more vehement. And Maya is loving it. In fact she has adopted it in English as well. So now instead of saying just "No" in English, Maya says: "No'o" with a great big glottal stop in the middle. It is hilarious!

Anyway, for those of you who have no idea what a glottal stop sounds like in Arabic, I will try to catch it on video so you can hear. But I can't do it now because she's going to sleep. So it'll have to wait!