Análisis Horizontal por los periodos 2014-2015

In the course of his intense research activity on English dialect variation and change, Peter Trudgill contributed significantly to examining some major issues related to the contact- induced decrease of linguistic dissimilarities between mutually related dialects (Trudgill, 1986). His (1986) Dialects in Contact study is an investigation of dialect levelling (DL) within a contact framework and is basically concerned with contact between two or more mutually intelligible dialects. Chambers (1992: 674) argues that the value of Trudgill’s book stems from the fact that it ‘makes a convenient landmark for the growth of recognition of mobile populations, at the heart of dialect studies’. Trudgill (1986: 3) deals with the case in which ‘regionally mobile individuals’ accommodate to a ‘non-mobile majority’ and views the geographical spread of linguistic features from one place to another as a result of contact between individuals (Trudgill, 1986: 39).

Research within the contact framework in Arabic has revealed an interrelationship between linguistic change and people’s mobility and contact. It is assumed that the common features of the process by which modern Arabic dialects originated and developed is one of convergence, rather than divergence (Versteegh, 1993: 68). Since the publication of Peter Trudgill’s book Dialects in Contact (1986), a number of researchers investigated linguistic changes caused by mobility and internal migration (e.g. Kerswill and Williams, 1999; Britain,

2009). In the Arab world, a number of studies have examined situations of dialect contact in some Arab countries, namely Bahrain (Holes, 1987), Syria (Jassem, 1987), Jordan and Palestine (Al-Wer, 2002, 2007), Morocco (Hachimi, 2007), Saudi Arabia (Al-Essa, 2008), and Sudan (Manfredi, 2013). The majority of these studies follow Trudgill’s framework in that they investigated language change resulting from contact between two or three mutually intelligible dialects. Most importantly, most of them focused on war-induced internal migration. Despite the mass waves of war-induced internal migration in Iraq since the early 1980s, which brought the two main dialect groups i.e. qiltu and gilit into contact, no study was conducted to investigate the outcomes of this contact. Noticeably, most of these studies examined the speech of immigrants and not the speech of the host communities. In other words, they focused on the speech of mobile populations in Trudgill’s terms. This study will be different in that it will examine potential change in the speech of the non-mobile populations.

Jassem (1987) investigated phonological change and variation in the speech of the Golan immigrants in Damascus, Syria. Immigrants’ realisation of eight linguistic variables were examined in relation to social variables, education, gender, age, and area. His study is one among very few studies that are concerned with immigrants’ speech. The immigrants’ speech situation is a tri-dialectal one, in that three language varieties are used in the speech community under investigation: the immigrants’ dialect, which they brought with them from the Golan Heights, the Damascus dialect spoken by the host community, and Standard Arabic (SA), which is used mainly by educated people there. Gender differences are significant among younger informants, but are insignificant for the older informants. Younger women in all social groups were found to lead change away from the standard variety. They adopted local non-standard, but prestigious features. For example for the SA (q) variable, younger women used /ʔ/ more frequently than men did. One of the interesting findings of this study is related to level of education. Level of education comes to contravene the majority of studies,

which correlated it with the use of the standard forms. In this study, level of education correlated positively with the use of immigrants’ dialect, but inversely with the adoption of the host dialect.

Al-Wer (2002) investigated contact-induced language variation and change in Amman, the capital city of Jordan. She examined the dialect situation between Jordanian Arabic represented by the Sult dialect and Palestinian Arabic represented by the Nablus dialect. She used as a sample for her study 30 informants covering three age groups and ranging in age from 12 to 70. The outcome of this form of contact is a koine represented by the emergence of new features which are part of neither of the two dialects. Koine is a new variety which occurs as an outcome of contact between two or more dialects.17 The new language varieties resulting from contact between languages are called creole and pidgin. Creole may be the first language of some groups of speakers and is used in all social functions. Pidgin is a contact language, which is the first language of neither group and is used in specific social contexts (Meyerhoff, 2006: 307,312). Siegel (1985: 361) claims that Blanc (1968) is the first author to use this process in his study of Hebrew. Siegel (1985: 363-4) distinguishes between ‘regional koine’ and ‘immigrant koine’. Regional koine comes into existence through a contact between regional dialects and remains in the place where the dialects under contact are spoken, and it is sometimes spoken outside the region, as is the case with koineised colloquial Arabic and Greek koine. The immigrant koine differs in that the contact between the dialects does not take place in the place they originate, but in the region in which big numbers of immigrants come into contact. It then replaces the earlier features. An example of this type is the Fiji Hindustani (Siegel, 1975, 1983, reported in Siegel, 1985). Female informants were found to use features of the new dialect more frequently than male informants did (Al-Wer, 2002: 78). For example, they fronted /aː/ more often than the males did. On the consonantal level, the

17 _{One of the concepts that Trudgill discussed is the process of koineization which involves levelling and simplification}

realisation of/ɡ/played a significant role in defining gender differentiations and determining the sense of identity among them. For example, while their feeling of local identity necessitated males’ adoption of the Jordanian /ɡ/ variant, females replaced it with the Palestinian variant /ʔ/ (Al-Wer, 2002: 67). Except for/ɡ/, male and female speakers favoured all the Palestinian consonantal features. While in most of the sociolinguistic studies examined contact situations take place between urban and rural dialects, this method does not apply to the situation in Jordan. Al-Wer (2002: 65-66) ascribes this to the fact that before the growth of Amman, the linguistic situation in Jordan was lacking urban centres and consequently lacking urban populations.

One of the cases that follows the urban-rural competition is Hachimi’s (2007) that is between the Fes and Casablanca dialects in Morocco. One evidence of new dialect formation is the case where the youngest informants used a hybrid of Palestinian phonological patterns and Jordanian phonetic patterns. Al-Wer (2002: 77) employs Trudgill’s concept of ‘fudged form’ and argues that it is possible to have a reverse rule where informants adopt phonological patterns characteristic of Palestinian Arabic and phonetic patterns characteristic of Jordanian Arabic. Hachimi (2007) investigated the linguistic and social outcomes of the migration- induced dialect contact between Fessi and Casablancan dialects in Morocco. She examined the role of Levelling and maintenance in constructing the social identities of fifteen Fessi women migrants in Casablanca (Hachimi, 2007: 98). Her study, therefore, aimed at revealing the interaction between migrants’ sense of identity and DL and maintenance. Hachimi made use of the notions of in-group and out-group contacts and interspeaker accommodation. The concept of local identity stems from the fact that Fessis carry higher social and linguistic status. Socially, migrants had moved from a ‘bourgeois’ city i.e. Fes to a city with no history (Hachimi, 2007: 100). With regard to the linguistic status, the Fessi dialect is older and better established than the Casablancan dialect. In addition, the Casablancan dialect is considered by Fessis to be ‘rural, non-prestigious and masculine’ (Hachimi, 2007: 104). The decision to

examine women’s’ speech rather than men’s speech that women have the motivation to accommodate towards a ‘masculine’ dialect. Results showed an interaction between age of exposure and Social Network Integration (SNI), and that most of the levellers of Fessi features have relatively weaker SNI with in-group rather than with out-group members (Hachimi, 2007: 107). The main finding was that all informants retain the Fessi variant /q/ in all lexical items, except for the verb [qa:l] ‘to say’ for which women fall into [qa:l] and [ga:l] producers. One interesting finding was that adopting [ga:l] allows them to sound ‘normal’ and casts them as Casablancan. Moreover, the study showed a significant correlation between maintenance of features of Fessi dialect, positive attitudes towards it, and strong in-group contacts. Interestingly, both levellers and maintainers showed positive attitudes towards their local dialect. This is despite the existence of a correlation between DL and negative attitudes. Al-Essa (2008) examined the consequences of dialect contact between two varieties in Saudi Arabia: the Bedouin Najdi dialect and the sedentary Urban Hijazi dialect. In other words, the contact takes place between a conservative dialect i.e. the Najdi dialect and a dialect undergoing ‘reduction’ of some of its features, which is the Urban Hijazi dialect (Al- Essa, 2008: 1). However, unlike other Arabic sedentary dialects such as Cairene Arabic, Urban Hijazi dialect still retains some features. Al-Essa investigated the correlation between ten linguistic variables and three social variables (i. e. age, gender and level of contact).18 _She investigated variability in the use of three interdental phonemes /θ, ð, ðˤ/ and the affricate /ʈʃ/. She found that level of contact proved to be more significant than age and gender (Al-Essa, 2008: 133). Degree of maintenance of the Najdi variants by the younger informants is determined by the low level of SNI and limited degree of contact with the Hijazi community.

18 _{Alessa (2008: 1) examined the following linguistic variables:}

1. Five phonological variables: [θ, ð, ðˤ, k, g].

2. Five morpho-phonemic variables: The second person feminine suffix (-ik) the third person masculine suffix (-ih), the third person masculine plural suffix (-in), the third person masculine plural suffixs (-aw, -u:n).

Al-Essa interprets this in terms of the younger informants being more related to their parents than to peers from the host community. Consequently, they have higher levels of integration with their in-group members (families), than with out–group members (peers from the host community).

It is claimed that mobile populations with a high level of dialect contact promote the loosening of social ties, and thus giving rise to rapid DL (Williams and Kerswill, 1999: 10). During interpersonal interactions, people modify their communicative behaviour to achieve several goals. One of these goals is to signal in-group or out-group membership (Willemyns et al., 1997: 3). This takes place when individuals have their contacts within their speech communities i.e. in-group contacts, or outside them i.e. out-group contacts. As Coupland and Coupland (1988: 25) argue, deciding on a situation to be ‘intergroup’, we do two things: we homogenise the out-group members, and adopt the characteristics of the in-group members. Levels of accommodation are associated with the sense of identity. For this, Willemyns et al. argue that informants who are attached to in-group are more likely to adopt maintenance in order to signal differences in their identity (Coupland and Coupland, 1988: 5). Likewise, Giles and Billings (2005: 197) argue that ‘when a non-standard speech style is, or becomes, a valued symbol of in-group pride,…individuals who are strongly committed to their social group membership display evaluative preferences for their own variety’. In addition to the sense of identity, motivation toward accommodation depends in one way or another on the amount of in-group as compared to out-group contacts. For example, when out-group contacts appear more frequently than in-group ones, the change is more likely to be away from the individuals’ original variety (Britain, 2009). This leads to the process of innovation diffusion, characterised by the emergence of linguistic features with which the accommodating individuals are unfamiliar (Britain, 2009: 4). Although Britain does not clearly adopt it, the notion of ‘out-group dense networks’ tends to be the main driver of such a change. This takes place when individuals move to live in a new speech community; they begin to replace some

of their features with others from the host community (Trudgill, 1986: 40). In this scenario, as migrants will desire to use forms from the host dialect, they will disfavour native forms that are stigmatised in their native dialect. This might lead to what Trudgill calls ‘interdialect’ forms i.e. forms that are intermediate between the migrants’ native dialect and the host dialect. It was found that dialect maintenance is identified in individuals with close-knit relations (Milroy, 1980), while Levelling was typical of those with loose-knit ties (Kerswill, 2003). For example, Belfast residents come into contact minimally with outside communities due to their in-group dense networks. Trudgill (1996: 12) directly associates close-knit networks with low contact cases, and loose-knit networks with high contact situations. His hypothesis was supported by Milroy’s finding that it is the close-knit relations which enable members of Belfast’s working class to preserve their allophonic system (Milroy, 2002: 10).

Kerswill (1993) examined the role of dialect contact in defining the notion of the speech community that Labov applied in his New York (1966) and Norwich (1972) studies. He applied four of Labov’s community criteria: 1- Nativeness of speech community members, 2- The existence of systematic patterns of linguistic variation, 3-Uniform evaluation of linguistic features, and 4- How closely related the language varieties are; and he examined the effect of removing the nativeness criterion (Kerswill, 1993: 36). With the aim of testing the presence of linguistic boundaries between the native residents of the Norwegian city Bergen and the rural migrants, he applied a dialect perception test which revealed no significant distinction between the two communities, and that the rural migrants’ language was well interpreted when related to the migrants’ networks with the whole community. This is ascribed to the fact that the migrants in Bergen, who originally came from Stril, display the effects of long-term accommodation, which consequently reduces any signs of native-to-non-native distinction. In light of this finding, Kerswill (1993) presented a model where the whole community falls into two tiers. These are the ‘lower tier’, which covers natives and subgroups and partially corresponds to Labov’s ‘smaller-scale community’, and the ‘higher tier’, which includes the

remaining population and fully represents Labov’s ‘larger- scale community’. As for who affects whom, Kerswill (1993: 51) employs the notions of ‘focused’ and ‘diffuse’ speech. The former is found in communities characterised by close-knit networks, whereas the latter occurs in communities undergoing high levels of social mobility. Furthermore, Kerswill suggests that the communities under study, may carry features generalisable elsewhere, but he did not clarify which communities he meant. In his study, he supports Torgersen and Kerswill’s (2004) conclusion that internalised individual factors affect linguistic change more than external factors.

The concept of the linguistic market, adopted by the community of practice approach pioneered by Eckert (1988), may take place in situations of language, as well as dialect contact. An example of the language contact framework is the case of the Dutch Limburg, a small village located on the Dutch-German border, in which Levelling moves not in the direction of Dutch, but towards a new standard language, which is German. This form of change, is what Britain (2009: 4) terms ‘innovation diffusion’ which implies the emergence of new features, far away from the levelled and diffusing dialects, rather than ‘Levelling’, where the resulting variety still possesses pre-existing features. This tends to be due to the expectation that ‘out-group contact’ appears more than ‘in-group contact’ (Britain, 2009: 41). The concept of the linguistic market is observable in most, if not all instances of dialect contact in the Arab world. In the western world, the standard-to-nonstandard conflict tends to be a predominant issue because English is a spoken variety where other varieties either converge to it, or diverge from it. The situation in Arabic is different due to the existence of Arabic diglossia, which means that Standard Arabic or, SA is not a spoken variety (Ferguson, 1959).