A Sociolinguistic Study of Selected Iraqi-Arabic Dialects with Reference to TV Series

Abstract

The dramatic series on television have a great impact on people’s attitudes towards dialects of language varieties, by relating the conceptual pictures or prototypes presented by series’ characters to those dialects. This study aims to show the influence of TV series on Iraqi university learners’ gender and age in relating positive or negative semantic qualities to their dialects. To this end, 150 Iraqi EFL learners have participated in this study to examine their attitudes towards Baghdadi, Mousli and Nasiriya dialects. The data are collected by Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, Fillenbaum's (1960) matched guise technique and then labeled by Willmorth’s (1988) subjective reaction test. A structured interview is conducted to support the data analysis. The findings reveal that TV series have an implicit effect on relating a certain image to a certain dialect. Overall, both participants’ genders and ages show that positive semantic qualities are mainly related to Baghdadi dialect and Mousli dialect respectively whereas negative semantic qualities are associated with rural dialect (i.e., Nasiriya dialect).