Rural Migration and Language Variation in Hims, Syria

Abstract

This study deals with the variable use of the voiceless uvular stop, [q], and the glottal stop, [ ], in the Colloquial Arabic of Christian rural migrants to the city of Hims in Syria.This variation results from their attempt to adopt the urban form [ ] to appear urbanite.The study explores the roles of age, gender, residential area, and social class in this variation.The naturally occurring speech of fifty-two speakers constitutes the data set.A detailed quantitative analysis reveals that age, gender, and residential area play significant roles in this variation.Social class emerges as insignificant.The quantitative analysis shows interaction among age, gender, and residential area regarding the use of [q].This interaction is insignificant with respect to [ ].The data shows a clear linguistic shift towards the use of [ ] by the younger generation, whereas linguistic maintenance or variation are more likely to characterize the older generation's speech.The variable (q) 1 has been investigated in a number of Arab countries from different perspectives.Abdel-Jawad (1981) showed that the variable (q) has different realizations in Amman in Jordan.[q] merged with [g] in the Bedouin dialect, [k] in the rural dialects, and [ ] in the urban dialects.For him, the "merger of the qaf 2 with the glottal stop has been one of the most sweeping phonemic changes that many dialects of Arabic have undergone" (Haeri 1996: 122).Abdel-Jawad (1981) treated [q] as the SA variant that appears in certain lexical items in colloquial speech.Haeri (1996: 156) introduced (q) as a "diglossic variable" during her investigation of the reappearance of [q] in Cairene Arabic (CA) after its disappearance and merger with the glottal stop sometime between the 11 th to the 15 th centuries (Garbell 1978(Garbell [1958]]).Haeri (1996: 105) found that this reappearance of [q] is due to "a process of lexical borrowing" from Classical Arabic.Similarly, Daher (1998a), in his study of Damascene Arabic (DA), showed that the use of [q] in males and females' colloquial speech is due to lexical borrowings from SA.Thus, most of these studies focused on the effect of education, and thus SA, on the use of [q] in colloquial speech.Some researchers dubbed this phenomenon in a diglossic situation such as the one in the Arab World as lexical conditioning (e.g., Abdel-Jawad & Suleiman 1990), that is there is a correlation between the lexical term and its phonetic realization.This suggestion is borne out and is w e l l r e c e i v e d w h e n r e f e r r i n g t o t h e u s e o f S A l e x i c a l t e r m s v e r s u s Colloquial Arabic lexical terms within speech.Moreover, most previous studies on the variable (q) mainly referred to [q] as the SA variant and [ ] as the local urban variant.In this study, [q] is the salient rural variant that undergoes change in the speech of rural migrants.It carries a number of connotations and social meanings depending on the context, the social setting, age group, gender, and religion. 3The latter is beyond the scope of this study.The variable use of 1 Parentheses are used to refer to the variable (q); brackets are used to refer to the variants [q] and [ ]; and / / are used to refer to a phonological unit, /q/ and / /. 2 Qaf is the Arabic name for the voiceless uvular stop, [q]. 3 Religion could be considered a variable, as there is always the possibility that Christian rural migrants may behave differently from other rural migrants from other religions, such as Alawites.This variable is not tested in this study, but it could be a good source of information in future studies and comparisons among various rural migrant speakers to the city of Hims or any other urban area in Syria.