Lexical Borrowings in Immigrant Speech: A Sociolinguistic Study of Ḥassāniyya Arabic Speakers in Medina (Saudi Arabia)

This study investigates lexical borrowings and the phonological processes associated with them as an outcome of the dialect contact situation in Medina (Saudi Arabia) between the Shanāqiṭa immigrant community, who immigrated to this holy city from Mauritania and who speak Ḥassāniyya Arabic, and the urban Hijazi community, who speak urban Hijazi Arabic. The study introduces to the reader the main phonological and morphological features of these two Arabic dialects and presents traditional and modern approaches towards lexical borrowings in Arabic. The present study adopts the quantitative sociolinguistic method which is widely used in sociolinguistic studies in order to analyse the speech of this immigrant community (focusing on borrowings from urban Hijazi Arabic), and correlates it with the social variables of age, educational attainment, ethnicity and gender. The study focuses on six phonological variables which are correlated with the social variables; these variables represent common phonological features which contrast both dialects. These phonological variables are divided into two groups: consonantal and vocalic variables. For the consonantal variables, the present study investigates the variation of three variables: de-affrication ([dʒ] → [ʒ]), lenition ([f] → [v]), and initial hamza dropping ([ʔ] → [Ø]). As for the vocalic variables, the research examines three variables: re-syllabification, consisting of initial [CV] and sequenced [CV.CV] → syncope, epenthesis and metathesis; diphthongisation: monophthongs → diphthongs; and vowel centralisation: (i), (u) → [ə]. The statistical data analysis reveals that age (generation) plays a central role in the phonological variation between the study participants when they borrow linguistic elements from urban Hijazi Arabic; ethnicity is the second most important factor. The analysis also shows that socio-cultural and socio-psychological factors facilitate the strong linguistic preservation of Ḥassāniyya Arabic by this immigrant community in Medina

Arabic in the lead-up to the arab spring: fusion or diffusion

This article aims to place the Arabic language in its recent historical context and proposes to describe the situation of Arabic in the period preceding and leading to the Arab Spring from the perspective of the degree to which Arabic language change and variation are moving in the direction of more fusion or diffusion. By diffusion I mean a situation in which divergences among the dialects of one language continue to grow and fragment, causing them eventually to develop into separate and largely mutually unintelligible system

Arabic Fluency Assessment: Procedures for Assessing Stuttering in Arabic Preschool Children

The primary aim of this thesis was to screen school-aged (4+) children for two separate types of fluency issues and to distinguish both groups from fluent children. The two fluency issues are Word-Finding Difficulty (WFD) and other speech disfluencies (primarily stuttering). The cohort examined consisted of children who spoke Arabic and English. We first designed a phonological assessment procedure that can equitably test Arabic and English children, called the Arabic English non-word repetition task (AEN_NWR). Riley’s Stuttering Severity Instrument (SSI) is the standard way of assessing fluency for speakers of English. There is no standardized version of SSI for Arabic speakers. Hence, we designed a scheme to measure disfluency symptoms in Arabic speech (Arabic fluency assessment). The scheme recognizes that Arabic and English differ at all language levels (lexically, phonologically and syntactically). After the children with WFD had been separated from those with stuttering, our second aim was to develop and deliver appropriate interventions for the different cohorts. Specifically, we aimed to develop treatments for the children with WFD using short procedures that are suitable for conducting in schools. Children who stutter are referred to SLTs to receive the appropriate type of intervention. To treat WFD, another set of non-word materials was designed to include phonemic patterns not used in the speaker’s native language that are required if that speaker uses another targeted language (e.g. phonemic patterns that occur in English, but not Arabic). The goal was to use these materials in an intervention to train phonemic sequences that are not used in the child’s additional language such as the phonemic patterns that occur in English, but not Arabic. The hypothesis is that a native Arabic speaker learning English would be expected to struggle on those phonotactic patterns not used in Arabic that are required for English. In addition to the screening and intervention protocols designed, self-report procedures are desirable to assess speech fluency when time for testing is limited. To that end, the last chapter discussed the importance of designing a fluency questionnaire that can assess fluency in the entire population of speakers. Together with the AEN_NWR, the brief self-report instrument forms a package of assessment procedures that facilitate screening of speech disfluencies in Arabic children (aged 4+) when they first enter school. The seven chapters, described in more detail below, together constitute a package that achieves the aims of identifying speech problems in children using Arabic and/or English and offering intervention to treat WFD

The Arabic (Re)dubbing of Wordplay in Disney Animated Films

Although audiovisual translation (AVT) has received considerable attention in recent years, evidence suggests that there is a paucity of empirical research carried out on the dubbing of wordplay in the Arabophone countries. This piece of research sets to identify, describe and assess the most common translation techniques adopted by translators when dubbing English-language animated films into Arabic. The focus is on the special case of dubbing Disney animated films into Egyptian Arabic (EA) and their subsequent redubbing into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), during the 1975-2015 period. The ultimate goal is to ascertain the similarities as well as the differences that set the two versions apart, particularly when it comes to the transfer of wordplay. To reach this objective, the methodological approach adopted for this study is a corpus of instances of wordplay that combines a quantitative phase, which has the advantage of identifying correlations between the types of wordplay and particular translation techniques and results and is then followed by a qualitative analysis that further probes the results and determines the different factors that contribute to the way wordplay is translated. The analysis reveals that, in their attempt to render this type of punning humour, in both Arabic dubbed versions, Arabic translators resort to a variety of translation techniques, namely, loan, direct translation, explication, paraphrase, substitution and omission. The examination of the data shows that achieving a humorous effect in the target dialogue is the top priority and driving factor influencing most of the strategies activated in the process of dubbing wordplay into EA. Dissimilarly, there is a noticeable lower amount of puns crossing over from the original films to the MSA dubbed versions, highlighting the fact that the approach generally taken by the dubbing teams seems to give priority to the denotative, informative dimension rather than the socio-pragmatic one. By shedding light on the intricacies of dubbing, it is hoped that this study would contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the translation of wordplay in the Arabophone countries and, more specifically, in the field of dubbing children’s programmes

The Role of the Syllable Contact Law-Semisyllable (SCL-SEMI) in the Coda Clusters of Najdi Arabic and Other Languages

Final consonants in Arabic are semisyllables; that is, moraic unsyllabified segments that are attached to the prosodic word (Kiparsky, 2003). If this is the case, optional vowel epenthesis in Najdi Arabic final clusters cannot be attributed to violations of the Sonority Sequencing Principle, because sonority restrictions apply within syllables only. In a new perspective, this dissertation argues that the existence of vowel epenthesis in Najdi coda clusters that have rising sonority, and its absence in clusters that have a falling sonority, are instead due to violations of the Syllable Contact Law (SCL), where sonority must drop between syllable codas and the following onset. It specifically argues that SCL is further divided into two sub-constraints where it not only applies across two syllables (SCL-SYLL), but also across syllables and the following unsyllabified semisyllable (SCL-SEMI). The new constraint SCL-SEMI is shown to be operative in other languages and dialects of Arabic, as well, including German, Slovak, English and Jordanian Arabic. Optionality of vowel epenthesis when words are produced in isolation vs. followed by a vowel-initial suffix is accounted for by adopting the Reversible Ranking Strategy introduced by Lee (2001) where the two constraints DEP-IO and SCL-SEMI are reversed following this ranking: *CCC, MAX-IO, ONSET \u3e\u3e ALIGNR\u3e\u3e DEP-IO, SCL-SEMI \u3e\u3e SCL-SYLL, *CXCOD. In addition, a psycholinguistic study is conducted to test the perception and production of ten Najdi speakers to observe whether they epenthesized a vowel into nonsense words with final rising-sonority clusters. It also investigates the generalizability of the semisyllable consistutent, by asking whether Najdi listeners will assign semisyllable status to any unsyllabifiable consonant, even those occurring in nonsense words. Results show that most participants apply their preferred vowel epenthesis pattern to nonesense words, which reflects their implicit knowledge of this pattern. Results also show a harmony effect where inserted vowels copy stem vowels

Phonological adaptation of English loanwords into Qassimi Arabic :an optimality- theoretic account

IPhD ThesisWithin the field of loanword phonology, this study enhances our understanding of the role played by the contrastive features of the borrowing language in shaping the segmental adaptation patterns of loanwords from the source language. This has been achieved by performing a theoretical analysis of the segmental adaptation patterns of English loanwords into Qassimi Arabic, a dialect spoken in the region of Qassim in central Saudi Arabia, using an Optimality-Theoretic framework. The central argument of this study assumes that the inputs to QA are fully-specified English outputs, which serve as inputs to QA. Then, the native grammar of QA allows only the phonological features of inputs to surface that are contrastive in QA. Thus, redundant or noncontrastive phonological features in QA are eliminated from the outputs. The evidence behind the argument that the contrastive features of QA segments play a main role in the adaptation process emerges from adapting the English segments that are non-native in QA. For instance, English lax vowels /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /æ/ are adapted as their tense counterparts in QA [i], [u] and [a]. I have argued that the reason for this adaptation lies in the fact that the feature [ATR] is not a contrastive feature within the QA vowel inventory. Therefore, dispensing with the value of the input feature [-ATR] culminates in the tense vowels appearing at the surface level. To identify the contrastive features of QA phonological inventory, I rely on the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory proposed by Dresher (2009). This theory suggests that phonological features should be ordered hierarchically to obtain only the contrastive features of any phonological inventory. This is achieved by dividing any inventory into subsets of features until each segment is distinguished contrastively from all others. Therefore, the features of QA segments are built initially into a contrastive hierarchy model. Within this hierarchy, features are created and ordered according to one or more of the following motivations: Activity, Minimality and Universality. Finally, the contrastive hierarchy of QA segment inventory is converted into OT constraints. The ranking of these constraints is sufficient to account for the evaluations of the segmental adaptation patterns of loanwords from English into QA. For instance, based on the contrastive hierarchy of QA, /b/ is contrastively specified as [-sonorant, +labial, -continuant]. In the adaptation of English consonants, the English input segment /p/ is mapped consistently to [b] in the QA. In this case, the contrastive hierarchy of QA consonant inventory contains the co-occurrence constraints *[αVoice, +labial] and *[αCoronal, +labial], which filter the input features if the input is fully-specified [-sonorant, +labial, -coronal, -continuant, -voiced, …], and permits only the contrastive features [-sonorant, +labial, -continuant] to surface.Qassim University in Saudi Arabi

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact