Abstract
This study presents findings from sociolinguistic fieldwork on Palestinian Arabic in the Gaza Strip and Jordan. The sample includes 30 speakers representing three age groups, both genders, and three Palestinian communities: indigenous Gaza City residents, refugees from Jaffa who live in Gaza City, and Gaza City refugees living in Jordan. Linear mixed effects analyses are presented on the vowel raising of the Arabic feminine ending /ah/. The traditional dialect of Gaza realizes this morpheme consistently as [a] (Bergsträsser 1915), with all other Levantine city dialects raising the feminine ending to [e] or [i] except after back consonants (Al-Wer 2007). Similarly, the traditional Jordanian dialect in the area in which Gaza City refugees live also raises this vowel to [e] (Herin 2014). Results indicate robust sociophonetic variation in the realization of this vowel across these communities. Jaffa refugees in Gaza, whose traditional dialect realizes this vowel as [e], are found to be lowering their realization of this vowel with each successive generation, with younger speakers showing a phonetic realization similar to young indigenous Gazans. Simultaneously, Gaza refugees in Jordan show higher phonetic realizations across generations, indicating convergence toward the local realization of this vowel in Jordanian Arabic.
Highlights
This study provides a sociophonetic account of vocalic variation in Palestinian Arabic, investigating the linguistic outcomes of dialect contact and refugee migration taking place across the Middle East
In the speech of these indigenous Gazans, over each successive generation the realization of the feminine gender marker is lowering and backing. This pattern of change suggests that the complex demographic situation in Gaza City, with much of the wider population in the coastal territory being refugees from other areas in historic Palestine, is having a detectable effect on the traditional city dialect
One interesting point is that Elderly speakers in the sample show higher degrees of fronting and raising for the feminine gender marker than has been attributed to Gaza City Arabic in earlier research
Summary
This study provides a sociophonetic account of vocalic variation in Palestinian Arabic, investigating the linguistic outcomes of dialect contact and refugee migration taking place across the Middle East. I examine the variable phonetic realization of the Arabic feminine gender marker; a word final vocalic morpheme realized in Standard Arabic as [a], but one that is realized variably in spoken varieties as [a, ɛ, e, i] (Al-Wer 2007) This vowel is examined in the casual speech of 15 Palestinians who were born and raised in Gaza City. As a result of the Israel-Palestine conflict, today roughly 80% of the population of the Gaza Strip are of a refugee background from other areas in historic Palestine These refugees were forced to flee their homes in the period surrounding the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 (see Pappe 2006) and have experienced roughly seven decades of dialect contact within the communities in which they live. Before presenting the results of this acoustic analysis of vocalic variation in the speech of these Gaza City residents, I begin with an explanation of the phonological conditioning that constrains this variation
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