Abstract
The study of dialects may be subsumed under the very broad rubric of colloquialism which comes at the bottom of the formality versus informality scale. We focus on the Najd dialect perception, as the central dialect in Saudi Arabia, among Saudi male college students. By conducting two experiments, questionnaires and follow-up semi-structured interviews, on 137 male students, user-based frequencies of the topper 50 Najdi words are generated. The second phase aims at semantically categorizing the topper content words so that conclusions can be drawn about the inclination of using Najdi words among the college students. Results show that the categorization of the retrieved 50 Najdi words, according to the part of speech, demonstrates that the most applauded Najdi Arabic words are verbs and adjectives. Synonyms are even retrievable from this method of compilation. Nouns are the most resistant part of speech at the morphological level.
Highlights
1.1 Problem StatementThe poor resourcing of Arabic language and its dialects, unavailability of competent morphological analyzers and syntactic parsers, specificity of the informal discourse and user-generated content, writing inconsistency of users and the dynamic sociolinguistic shifts are obstacles that impede any synchronic understanding of language dynamics and change
The second phase aims at semantically categorizing the topper content words so that conclusions can be drawn about the inclination of using Najdi words among the college students
What are the most frequent Najdi content words according to the Saudi male college students? Second, how accurate is the automatic detection of dialectal vocabulary and of their frequency?
Summary
The poor resourcing of Arabic language and its dialects, unavailability of competent morphological analyzers and syntactic parsers, specificity of the informal discourse and user-generated content, writing inconsistency of users and the dynamic sociolinguistic shifts are obstacles that impede any synchronic understanding of language dynamics and change. To validate our proposed lexicon, we investigate the familiarity of 137 Saudi college male students with the collected set of words. This effort aims to answer two questions. What are the most frequent Najdi content words according to the Saudi male college students? Second, how accurate is the automatic detection of dialectal vocabulary and of their frequency?
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