OverviewThe sociolinguistics of Arabic varieties is much more complex than the conventional nomenclature of Arabic dialects may lead the non-specialist to believe. One hears or reads of linguistic entities such as "Egyptian Arabic," "Syrian Arabic," "Moroccan Arabic," which imply that each of these is a singular, cohesive unit, which one can describe, study, and become proficient in. Furthermore, these nation-state-based labels create the illusion that today's political borders, many of which are artificial colonial or post-colonial creations of the early-to-mid 20th century, are able not only to each contain a single dialect of Arabic, but also delimit the beginnings and endings of dialect areas, as if political events are the sole factors in the formation of isoglosses.Compare Arabic to another well-studied language, e.g., English, and it becomes clear.While in some instances it may be useful to distinguish "British English" from "American English" from "Canadian English" and so forth, the multitude of sociolinguistic studies now at our disposal from each of these countries demonstrates just how limited these taxonomies are.Add to that regional, social, interpersonal and intrapersonal variation, and -most importantly to the case we shall be presenting henceforth: migration, isolation, and dialect contact -and it will become clear that in Arabic, as in other languages, a fine-tuning of our understanding and definition of dialect boundaries is in order.The current study concerns a Palestinian speech community. This community can, actually, be viewed as two communities which have split from one another as a result of ethnic cleansing and displacement and subsequent immersion in a third community. More specifically, the city of Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coast of central Palestine, which had been a thriving
Page 1 of 42For review only. Confidential. Should not be cited. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 Being a refugee in Gaza carries some degree of social markedness, as well as the refugee status that most speakers are afforded by the United Nations. Part of this social markedness has to do with dialect differences. The traditional dialect of Jaffa differs from that of Gaza in a number of interesting ways. This is one prime example of two dialects, both urban, both Palestinian, both coastal-Mediterranean -three features which are known in Arabic dialectology to indicate convergence of dialectal features -which have nonetheless diverging features, as we will demonstrate below.
Journal of SociolinguisticsOur analysis provides an examination of the linguistic outcomes of politically induced and maintained dialect contact in one of the world's most volatile areas. At the same time, we suggest that a sociolinguistic variable of high social salience in the Arabic speaking world is being re-contextualized as an identity marker in...