In this article we present the methodology employed for the design and evaluation of a Basic Arabic Expressive Speech corpus (BAES-DB). The corpus, which has a total length of approximately 150 minutes, is constituted of 13 speakers uttering a set of 10 sentences while simulating 3 emotions (joy, anger and sadness) in addition to a neutral utterance. The 10 sentences have been selected to meet phonetic equilibrium and absence of emotional content criteria, from a corpus of sentences proposed in Boudraa [1]. The corpus was evaluated through various tests of guided categorization, performed through a website. The overall good recognition rate is currently at 83.03%, with sadness being the most well recognized type of expressive speech (90.93%) and joy being the least well recognized (73.87%).