• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 787

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Cities of migration: urbanization and linguistic change in Jeddah

Authors: Al-Essa, Aziza Mohammad
Submitted by: Al-Essa, Aziza Mohammad (King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia)

One of the sociolinguistic consequences of cityward  migration and rapid urbanization is dialect contact and the development of linguistically diffuse speech communities where there are no clear linguistic norms (Kerswill 2004:30).  Cities in the Arab world witnessed massive rural–urban migration in the second half of the twentieth century and the sociolinguistic impact of this in-migration is addressed in Miller (2007). In Saudi Arabia, development planning strategies of the Saudi government led to highly polarized growth of three major urban centers in the country, one of which is the city of Jeddah.  To counteract this urban polarization, the government adopted strategies which encouraged the re-distribution of regional population to achieve equitable distribution of national wealth. The present paper aims at examining the linguistic change initiated by the internal migration of people from the central and southern regions of Saudi Arabia to the city of Jeddah.

The influx to Jeddah of people who speak dialects that are distinct from the local dialect has reshaped  the sociolinguistic scene in the city. The native population of Jeddah speaks a mixed dialect which had been  largely shaped  by geopolitical and socio-religious factors, most importantly the external migration of different ethnic groups from outside the Arabian Peninsula in the past centuries. The recent internal migration has resulted in a linguistically diffuse community in Jeddah.  My data show that the process of supraregionalisation  (Hickey 2010), which entails the avoidance of salient linguistic features in the input varieties, is operating in the speech of 100 immigrants in Jeddah. While the regionally marked morphophonemic variants [-its] and [-iš] of the feminine suffix (-ik) are levelled out from the speech of second generation immigrants, the socially salient stop variants [t], [d] and [ḍ] of the interdental variables (Ө), (ð) and (ḍ) which mark the  local  dialect  of the city are acquired at a remarkably  lower  rate.

 In this paper I will present the details of the analysis of the dialect leveling and diffusion of linguistic variants in the speech of second generation immigrants in Jeddah, and I will argue that the direction of linguistic change, i.e. selection and propagation of the competing variants, is determined by the degree of the immigrants’ orientation to a supra-regional norm rather than the local norm.

References:

Hickey, Raymond. (2010). Supraregionalisation. In Laurel Brinton and Alexander bergs (eds), Historical Linguistics of English (HSK series). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Kerswill, Paul. (2004). Social dialectology/Sozialdialektologie. In Klaus Mattheier, Ulrich Ammon & Peter Trudgill (eds.), Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik. An international handbook of the science of language and society, 2nd edn., Vol 1. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Kerswill, Paul.  (2006). Migration and  language. In Klaus Mattheier, Ulrich Ammon & Peter Trudgill (eds), Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik. An international handbook of the science of language and society, 2nd edn. Vol 3. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Miller, C. (2007). Arabic Urban Vernaculars; development and change. In C.Miller , E. Al-Wer, D. Caubet and J. Watson (eds), Arabic in the City: Issues in dialect contact and language variation. Abdington:Routledge.