Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted The Social Meanings of Affrication in Saudi Arabia: A Perception Approach(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-07-10) Alharbi, Khalid; Nycz, JenniferPrevious work in Arabic sociolinguistics uses first-wave production approaches to variation, where the speech of a set of speakers is analyzed and correlated with sociodemographic and linguistic factors (e.g., Abd-el-Jawad, 1987; Al-Wer, 2007; Al-Rojaie, 2013). While this body of work contributes to our understanding of sociolinguistic variation in the Arab World, its primary focus on production neglects the role of the listener in the construction of social meaning. In this dissertation, I build on previous research by taking a third-wave perception approach (Campbell-Kibler, 2005; 2009; 2010; Eckert, 2012) to explore the social meanings of /k/ variation - realized via the local affricated variant [ts] and the supralocal stop variant [k] - in a variety of Arabic spoken in the north of Saudi Arabia. This study employs preliminary metalinguistic interviews, followed by an online survey to collect local listeners’ evaluations of digitally manipulated sets of guises containing the two variants in both of these phases. The resulting analysis draws on the reactions of 12 participants in the metalinguistic interview phase, and 133 participants in the survey study, all native speakers of the local dialect of focus. The results uncover important insights into the social meanings of /k/ in Saudi Arabia. The interview phase, which concerns explicit perceptions of the variants, reveals two sets of findings: (a) participants assigned a range of sociocultural, social class, and age-related meanings to the variants; and (b) attitudes towards the northern dialect (of which the variable in question is a distinguishing feature) highlighted a range of ideological associations with it in the broader linguistic context of Saudi Arabia, where it is often contrasted with a perceived supralocal “unmarked dialect”. The findings of the online survey, which mainly deals with the implicit perceptions of the variants, show that the two variants are associated with different social meanings related to social status, sociocultural, and interpersonal dimensions, and that listener-related factors affect perceptions of /k/ in important ways. Specifically, they indicate that the supralocal variant is favored on the social status dimension, while the local variant is favored on the sociocultural one, but no statistically significant difference is observed for the interpersonal dimension. Additionally, the local variant is shown to exhibit older age associations. The results were interpreted through a closer examination of listener-related factors, including gender, self-reported use of the local variant, and label-scale correlations, among others. This dissertation presents the first comprehensive account of a salient sociolinguistic variable through third-wave variation approaches in the north of Saudi Arabia. By extending the scope of sociolinguistic research in the Saudi Arabian context to perception, this dissertation provides a window into the locally-oriented nature of the variable’s social meanings in which listeners play an important role. Further, it suggests that more perception work is needed to capture the dynamic indexical nature of variation in Saudi Arabia and in the broader context of the Arab World.54 0