Is Salma really Levantine?
Six words that expose the ق, in the three voices that could be the default. Clips as the app ships them.
Salma is now the default, and this is the test that says whether that was right
Palestinian drops ق to a glottal stop. If Salma says qahwa, sooq and
waqit, the app is teaching Modern Standard pronunciation on every card by
default — the exact problem Nour was brought in to fix. Nour is the only voice
anyone has actually listened to.
| Word | Salma default | Nour · verified | Rami |
|---|---|---|---|
قَهْوَة want ’ahwe · ق initial |
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سُوق want soo’ · ق final |
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وَقِت want wa’it · ق medial |
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حَدِيقَة want hadii’a · between vowels |
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قَلْقَان want ’al’aan · ق twice |
|||
مَبْسُوط baseline · no ق |
What “Levantine” actually means for each of these.
Nour comes from Hakim, which does dialect-aware synthesis — the Levantine
phonology is produced by the model. Salma and Rami are ElevenLabs voice clones,
and ElevenLabs does not model Arabic dialect at all; their
Nothing was rendered to build this page. All 18 clips are the files the app already ships, so this costs no quota and shows exactly what a learner hears.
If Salma fails the test, the fix is one line —
levantine
tag describes the person who was recorded. That is the right thing to want, but
it is inherited rather than produced, and it is self-declared metadata rather
than anything ElevenLabs verified.
Nothing was rendered to build this page. All 18 clips are the files the app already ships, so this costs no quota and shows exactly what a learner hears.
If Salma fails the test, the fix is one line —
DEFAULT_VOICE in
tools/build-word-audio.py — and a rebuild that renders nothing.
She can stay in the picker either way.