What syllable types does Arabic have?

Arabic syllables always begin with one consonant and a vowel. The core types are CV and CVV (open) and CVC, CVVC and CVCC (closed). CV is light, CVC and CVV are heavy, and CVVC or CVCC are superheavy and usually appear word-finally.

Why must the text be vocalised?

Syllable structure depends on the short vowels, which Arabic normally leaves unwritten. Without harakat the analyzer cannot tell where vowels fall, so add fatha, damma, kasra and sukun for accurate results. Unvocalised letters are shown but cannot be fully syllabified.

How are long vowels detected?

A long vowel is a short vowel immediately followed by its matching madd letter: fatha plus alef, damma plus waw, or kasra plus ya. The analyzer collapses that pair into a single VV nucleus, so a CVV or CVVC syllable is recognised.

How is shadda handled?

Shadda marks a doubled consonant. Phonologically the geminate closes one syllable and opens the next, so the analyzer treats it as a coda on the first syllable plus an onset on the second, which is why a word with shadda gains a closed syllable.

Is this a full prosodic parser?

No. It is a phonological approximation intended for teaching and quick analysis. Edge cases like hamzat al-wasl, definite-article assimilation, and pausal forms may not be modelled exactly, but the core CV parsing is correct for vocalised words.

Arabic Syllable Structure Analyzer

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Arabic has a tightly constrained syllable structure: every syllable opens with a single consonant and a vowel, and may be closed by a coda consonant. This analyzer parses fully vocalised Arabic into those syllables and labels each one by its CV pattern and weight.

How it works

The text is segmented character by character into consonants (C), short vowels (V), long vowels (VV), and codas:

A consonant letter becomes an onset C.
A short vowel (fatha, damma, kasra) is a V nucleus — unless it is followed by its matching madd letter (alef, waw, ya), in which case the pair is a long VV nucleus.
A sukun marks the preceding consonant as a coda, closing the syllable.
A shadda (gemination) splits into a coda on the previous syllable plus an onset on the next.
Tanwin is read as a short vowel plus a final /n/ coda.

Syllables are then built greedily as C + nucleus + optional coda. Weight is classified as light (CV), heavy (CVC, CVV), or superheavy (CVVC, CVCC).

Example

The verb:

كَتَبَ  (kataba)

parses as CV · CV · CV — three light open syllables. The word:

دَرْسَهُ  (darsahu)

parses as CVC · CV · CV, where the sukun on the rāʾ closes the first syllable into a heavy CVC.

Notes

Always vocalise the text; without harakat the vowels are invisible to any syllabifier.
CVVC and CVCC superheavy syllables normally occur only at the end of a word.
This is a phonological approximation for linguistics and teaching, not a complete prosodic engine.