Patterns of communal language variation in Bahrain

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Arabic-speaking speech communities of the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain are undergoing a special kind of sociolinguistic change which requires the recognition of both dialectal and supradialectal prestige systems. Variation can be accounted for in terms of the articulation/conflict of these two systems. Although it appears at first sight that all of the observed variation could be explained at the phonological level, a closer analysis of the data suggests that, psycholinguistically and sociolinguistically, a lexical explanation fits part of it better. (Variation studies, standard and nonstandard languages)