Phonological variation and change in immigrant speech : a sociolinguistic study of a 1967 Arab-Israeli War immigrant speech community in Damascus, Syria

Zaidan Ali Jassem. Phonological Variation and Change in Immigrant Speech: A Sociolinguistic Study of a 1967 Arab-Israeli War Immigrant Speech Community in Damascus, Syria. Ph. D. Thesis (University of Durham). 1987. This thesis follows the theoretical framework of the variable paradigm (Labov 1966, 1972a; Trudgill 1974; etc. ) and is one of very few dissertations that is concerned with the investigation of immigrant speech patterns (Payne 1976,1980; Bortoni-Ricardo 1985; Kerswill 1985). It attempts to describe the sociolinguistic situation of one immigrant speech community, known as al FaD1, who have been living in the District of Damascus including the City itself, after their forced expulsion from their motherland, the Golan Heights, by the occupying Israeli forces in June 1967. The immigrants' speech situation involves three dialects, namely, one standard, and two vernaculars: i. e. the immigrants' own vernacular which they brought with them from the Golan Heights, and the local vernacular of the host areas. The immigrants variably utilize the three dialects in their everyday communications with one another and with other speakers especially those of the host areas. The predominant use of one variety rather than another largely depends on social and stylistic constraints. While previous immigrant sociolinguistic studies have relied on the standard Labovian framework in interviewing informants and eliciting speech styles despite its criticisms and limitations (see Bell 1984; Wolfson 1976), the sociolinguistic speech repertoire of the immigrants in this study cannot be fully captured by the usual Labovian methodology as they were observed to adapt and switch their speech according to whether they conversed with speakers of (a) immigrant speech or (b) local speech. In the former, the immigrants' own vernacular was dominant and in the latter the local vernacular was switched to to a greater extent by most speakers. As the questionnaire -based interview is very limited in its capacity to obtain this type of speech accommodation, the immigrants were, therefore, recorded in non-questionnaire-based, free or open interviews or sessions. This mainly involved recording each immigrant informant with an immigrant and a local speaker, though separately. All in all, four speech styles were isolated: immigrant to immigrant style (LLS), immigrant to-local style (ILS), word list style (WLS), and Quranic recitation styles (QRS), the latter being administered to illiterate speakers only who were asked to read some Quranic verses from their memory. The judgement sample consisted of 38 immigrant informants divided by education, sex, age, and area. Also 9 local informants were included, for comparative purposes. Eight linguistic variables which comprised seven phonetic variables and one related morpho-phonemic vairable were analyzed. The results arrived at can be summarized as follows. The linguistic analysis of the effect of the conditioning environment on the alternation among the immigrant, local and standard speech forms has shown that, for all the phonetic variables, it is lexically constrained in the same manner that holds for lexical diffusion (Wang 1969, etc. ) which it strongly supports. The morpho-phonemic variable was not found to be subject to any linguistic constraints. Sociolinguistically, one's educational status correlated with language shift in a way such that the higher the educational level the greater the movement away from the original immigrant vernacular towards especially the local vernacular. The next highest-status group displayed not only hypercorrection in their speech behaviour but also undercorrection and underdiscorrection which are of related function. The acquisition of and shift to the local vernacular was mainly observed in and practised by the young and almost none at all by the old. The adoption of the local speech forms was led by women of the young group while sex was unimportant for the old group. Also women, unlike men, were found to minimize or lack social stratification altogether. Stylistically, the immigrant speech forms were favoured greatly by all the immigrants in their conversations with one another whereas the local speech forms were greatly favoured by all the immigrants, except for the old and the young non -educated males, in their conversations with the locals. Women, in particular, adapted their speech the most. The standard speech forms were categorical in WLS and QRS for almost all of the variables and the informants.