No abstract

Four vowel variables are investigated in the speech of 50 rural, nonmigrant children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years in the Syrian village Oyoun Al-Wadi. Contrary to previous studies, the children initially acquire the urban and later the rural forms of these vowels. This process of acquisition shows the following. First, children show reversal in the acquisition of forms, and thus the rules associated with them; instead of acquiring the local forms first, they acquire the supralocal forms. Second, children can acquire the rules of the second dialect after the age of 8. Third, gender emerges as significant as boys and girls exhibit different linguistic behavior. Fourth, preadolescents emerge as the age group that is most active in building a social identity. Fifth, social-psychological factors motivate the shift from urban to rural forms. These include local identity, gendered social meanings of the variants, and the growth of the children's sociolinguistic competence throughout their preadolescence and adolescence.

This study compares the use of the variable (q), which is realized as rural [q] and urban [ʔ], in the speech of twenty-two parents and their twenty-one children from the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. The study shows that children acquire the general gendered linguistic pattern of the community but do not replicate the linguistic frequencies that exist in their immediate environment. Boys and girls exhibit different linguistic behavior. Boys deviate from the non-local caregivers' proportions and approach men's local linguistic behavior, although their local variant proportions remain lower; girls, even those with local mothers, approach the women's supralocal variant proportions. The study shows that sociolinguistic variation is not acquired from adults from a very early age; it is acquired later in life after accepting and ascertaining the gendered linguistic differences and appropriateness norms.

Through ethnographic investigation, this study shows that the different linguistic behavior of girls and boys in the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria is due to gendered linguistic ideologies and attitudes that are utilized in different ways to project gendered (feminine or masculine) and spatial (local or supralocal) identities. Social meanings are gleaned from the naturally occurring speech of 72 speakers aged 6–18 and 29–57 to illuminate the ideologies and attitudes that result in inter- and intra-speaker variation between and among boys and girls and highlight the importance of both the community of practice and the speech community in investigating linguistic variation. The study also highlights the growth of the children’s sociolinguistic competence and their awareness from a very young age of the ideologies and attitudes that exist in their community and their capability to build on them. The results of this awareness are highly observed in preadolescents, particularly boys.

This study investigates two concurrent phenomena—’imalaand rounding — in the Arabic variety spoken in the Syrian village of Oyoun Al-Wadi.‘Imalarefers to the use of [e] and [e:] in place of the urban vowels [a] and [a:] respectively; rounding refers to the use of [o] and [o:] in place of the urban vowels [a] and [a:] respectively. The use of two different vowels for each urban vowel is explained morpho-phonologically. The study economically proposes two phonological rules to account for‘imalaand rounding and shows that only one rule can apply per word, to the final syllable of a word. In light of Lexical Phonology theory, certain morphological patterns and suffixes explain the presence of‘imalain initial syllables and in environments that induce rounding. That is, it is part of the lexical representation of a morphological pattern or suffix in the lexicon. Hence,‘imalacould occur in the initial syllable as part of the morphological pattern, and rounding could occur in the final syllable of the same word as a result of a post-lexical phonological rule.