Sociophonetic Variation in Tihami ʿAsiri (Muḥāyil) Arabic and L2 English

Abstract

Abstract

The research is driven by two aims. The first aim is to determine baseline Arabic production through investigating the phonological variation in Tihami ʿAsiri Arabic (TAA) and then to examine its influence on English pronunciation among female speakers from Muḥāyil, Saudi Arabia. The first aim focuses on how social factors, including formality register, social network, attitudes towards Modern Standard Arabic and toward Tihami ʿAsiri Arabic, influence the key phonological features of (k), (q), (ɣ) and consonant clusters in initial positions and how speakers switch between traditional local and prestigious supralocal variants. It also includes linguistic factors, such as lexical items and phoneme position, that affect phonetic variation. The second aim focuses on how these phonological variations contribute to transfer errors in English, particularly the substitution of sounds like /k/ in English pronunciation. The data were collected from 20 Tihami ʿAsiri Arabic learners of English who were from the suburbs of Muḥāyil, gathered through word translation tasks, sociolinguistic interviews, and a sociolinguistic questionnaire. They were then analysed through mixed effect logistic regression. The results reveal that traditional local variants are more frequently used in informal settings, while prestigious supralocal and borrowed from MSA variants dominate in formal contexts in Arabic production. They also reveal that closeness or a tight social network with family and friends who speak the local variety significantly increases the local variants. In contrast, close ties to non-TAA social networks (with friends) who do not speak TAA increase prestigious variants. The lexical items are significant in (q) and CV.C. Phoneme position shows significant results in (q) and (ɣ) but does not influence (k) significantly. Interestingly, the findings reveal that TAA learners of English transfer their traditional local TAA variant of /k/ into their English production. However, the regression results show that their local variant production decreases significantly in informal registers, when they hold positive attitudes toward MSA, and when they have close ties with TAA networks. This result indicates that English /k/ is pronounced correctly without the local variant transfer.