Rural and urban dialects in contact in Jordan: the case of [tʃ] de-affrication in the rural dialect of Irbid suburbs
Type of content
Publisher's DOI/URI
Thesis discipline
Degree name
Publisher
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
Date
Authors
Abstract
This thesis investigated the effect of phonological and social factors (age, education, word style and phonological environment) on the variation patterns of [tʃ] variant for 24 speakers of rural Jordanian Arabic in suburban Irbid. The findings from the recordings of the participants, which revealed a strong positive tendency toward the use of the marked variant [tʃ] which is an allophone of /k/, were attributed to the largely positive attitudes of the rural speakers toward their dialect as the questionnaire distributed to them demonstrated. The results did not reveal significant variation among the three different age groups (youth, middle-age, and elderly) or education levels (educated and uneducated) though style was slightly significant as the speakers tended to use the supralocal form [k] in favor of the localized variant [tʃ] in naming pictures test versus spontaneous speech or dialogue. Though there was no strong statistical interaction between the independent variables mentioned above, the findings of the study are indicative of the leveling process that was expected to occur in the marked variant of the rural local dialect in Jordan because of dialect contact with the supralocal urban variety. Despite the accelerated socioeconomic changes that have arisen in Jordan in the last few decades, it seems these changes had little impact on the rural speakers in the suburbs of major cities in Jordan.