Arabic and Libyan Arabic Loss of the glottal stop in places where it is historically attested, as in → . Vowels Development of highly distinctive allophones of and , with highly fronted , or in non-emphatic contexts, and retracted in emphatic contexts. The more extreme distinctions are characteristic of sedentary varieties, while Bedouin and conservative Arabian-peninsula varieties have much closer allophones. In some of the sedentary varieties, the allophones are gradually splitting into new phonemes under the influence of loanwords, where the allophone closest in sound to the source-language vowel often appears regardless of the presence or absence of nearby emphatic consonants. Spread of "emphasis", visible in the backing of phonemic . In conservative varieties of the Arabic peninsula, only adjacent to emphatic consonants is affected, while in Cairo, an emphatic consonant anywhere in a word tends to trigger emphatic allophones throughout the entire word. Dialects of the Levant are somewhere in between. Moroccan Arabic is unusual in that and have clear emphatic allophones as well (typically lowered, e.g. to and ). Monophthongization of diphthongs such as and to and , respectively ( and in parts of the Maghrib, such as in Moroccan Arabic). Mid vowels may also be present in loanwords such as ( Melbourne), ( '(male) secretary') and ( 'doctor'). Raising of word final to . In some parts of Levant, also word-medial to . See Lebanese Arabic. Loss of final short vowels (with sometimes remaining), and shortening of final long vowels. This triggered the loss of most Classical Arabic case and mood distinctions. Collapse and deletion of short vowels. In many varieties, such as North Mesopotamian, many Levantine dialects, many Bedouin dialects of the Maghrib, and Mauritanian, short and have collapsed to schwa and exhibit very little distinction so that such dialects have two short vowels, and . Many Levantine dialects show partial collapse of and , which appear as such only in the next-to-last phoneme of a word (i.e. followed by a single word-final consonant), and merge to elsewhere. A number of dialects that still allow three short vowels in all positions, such as Egyptian Arabic, nevertheless show little functional contrast between and as a result of past sound changes converting one sound into the other. Arabic varieties everywhere have a tendency to delete short vowels (especially other than ) in many phonological contexts. When combined with the operation of inflectional morphology, disallowed consonant clusters often