Due to the morphological structure of Arabic, vowels only occur in consonantal environment, never in isolation. The issue addressed here is whether static acoustic cues are sufficient to characterize Arabic vowels or dynamic ones are needed. This study is based on Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic (JA & MA), with eight and four vowels, respectively. Ten speakers per dialect were tested on both production and perception. In production, speakers produced vowels in words, syllables, and in isolation (in alveolar context). In perception, they categorized isolated vowels on an F1/F2 plan. Results from production show that, both in JA and MA, (a) vowels in isolation have greater variation than in syllables or words, (b) vowels in a word context are more centralized (than in syllables or in isolation), and that (c) MA vowels are more centralized than JAs. In perception, a high degree of variability within and between dialects is found. A new experiment of vowel perception in syllable context (CV) (i.e., dynamic trajectories) was elaborated to study the effect of contextual information on vowel perception in Arabic. Results on five JA speakers show that the variability has been lessened and that dynamic information seems to be more useful in CV categorization.