A Sociolinguistic Study of the Correlation between Social Class and Selected Phonological Variables in Cairene Arabic

Abstract

In Colloquial Cairene Arabic, there is a phenomenon of lengthening the realization of vowels among speakers in Greater Cairo. It is a vernacular phenomenon that is mostly used by the working classes. This paper adopts the Labovian approach to investigate the correlation between two social classes, namely the upper middle class (UMC) and lower working class (LWC) and the production of the short, long and extra-long variants of the three long vowels /ɑɑ/, /ee/ and /aa/ in Colloquial Cairene Arabic. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 48 informants. After transcribing the interviews, five jurists were asked to judge the vowel length realized by completing a forced choice judgment task (Shutze & Sprouse, 2014). A spectrographic analysis of the length of vowels through Praat software speech analysis was performed for selected sample tokens to confirm the findings objectively. Results of the Z-test confirm that LWC informants significantly use extra-long variants of the three long vowels more than the UMC to show solidarity with members of the speech community. UMC informants use the standard forms and rarely lengthen their vowels. One-way ANOVA analysis shows that occupation and the place of residence play asignificant role in the use of the extra-long variants by the LWC speakers. In contrast, occupation, education and place of residence factors show homogeneity in affecting the use of the standard forms by the UMC.