Abstract
The study attempts to examine the communication accommodation behaviours of Jizani speakers living in Riyadh-Saudi Arabia (SA). It seeks to document the existence of certain linguistic phenomena in the speech of Jizani informants in intergroup and intra-group interactions with Najdi speakers: people living in Riyadh, the centre of SA. It also aims to determine the attitude of Jizani speakers towards the Jizani variety. Riyadh and Jizan are different in the spoken variety produced by each speech community. Najdi Arabic is classified as a prestigious variety, whereas Jizani Arabic spoken in the south-west of SA is negatively stigmatized. The study comprises mixed method approach to achieve its goals using participant observation, the Matched-guise technique (MGT), and semi-structured interviews. A corpus of the Jizani accent was collected from 8 rural and urban female Jizani speakers in their interactions with 4 female Najdi speakers through participant observation. The findings reveal that the length of residence impacts the degree of convergence and maintenance to the Najdi speakers. Participants who live in Najd for less than 10 years maintain their linguistic features whereas those who were born or lived for more than 10 years in Najd are more likely to accommodate the Najdi accent. The findings also indicate that rural Jizani speakers negatively stigmatize the Jizani accent when spoken in Riyadh.
Author Information
Samah Mushabbab Alsufyani, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Paper Information
Conference: ECAH2023
Stream: Language
This paper is part of the ECAH2023 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Alsufyani S. (2023) The Jizani Arabic in Saudi Arabia: Communication Accommodation and Attitudes ISSN: 2188-1111 – The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2023: Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2023.18
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2023.18
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