A Sociolinguistic Study of Religious-Based Proverbs in Al-Bahah Province

Abstract

The initial impetus for studying the dialectical scene as spoken by Ghamed and Zahran in Al-Bahah is to retain a valuable aspect of Al-Bahah province culture in “Apparent Time”. The study is a contribution to the accumulating literature in sociolinguistics which addresses the issue of language use as a social and cultural representative of a particular speech community. The study reconstructs a synchronic analysis of Al-Bahah proverbs that perform certain speech act/s in different speech situations involving speakers of Al-Bahah dialect and relates these proverbial utterances to either the Holy Qur'an or the Prophetic Hadith. The study employs John Searle's (1995) theory of the in/direct speech act/illocutionary act applied to the linguistic analysis of 13 proverbs occurring in conversational situations among speakers who form a speech community – sharing the same language and the same cultural background. Investigating how far the socio-linguistic values of Al-Bahah speech community is embodied in their conversations, the study finds out that their use of these proverbs reveals pragmatic fitness of the performative proverbs to the situational context. Moreover, the findings indicate that the speakers of the dialect are not detached from their authentic religious beliefs and values. Methodologically, the study offers a socio –cultural description of proverbs as employed by the urban Arabic speaking community of southern West province of Al-Bahah, Saudi Arabia. It assigns speech acts to these conversational proverbs. Finally, it relates the proverb proposition either to the Holy Qur'an or the Prophetic Hadith.