Abstract
This is a study of Arabic as it is spoken by a group of immigrants of rural background living in the urbanised area of Hijaz in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia. The study is primarily concerned with the effect of social urbanisation on the speech behaviour of rural immigrants. The basic assumption of this sociolinguistic investigation is that linguistic variation and change in the speech of rural immigrants is motivated by the speakers' social change from a non-urbanised to an urbanised community. Thus, by studying the rural speakers' linguistic behaviour in the urban environment, the present study examines the applicability of the widely recognised sociolinguistic view that urban dialects are prestigious to the sociolinguistic situation in Hijaz, Saudi Arabia. The informants of this study have been selected according to the three main social variables of age, education, and sex. The speech behaviour of the population sample has been analysed by examining the speakers' use of six linguistic variables, covering phonological as well as non-phonological aspects of the Arabic language. Results of the data analysis indicate that rural speakers' linguistic adaptation in the new environment is rather characterised by convergence to as well as divergence from the urban speech pattern, depending on linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, which seemed to either encourage or inhibit their speech accommodation. Also in this study interesting results of co-variation between linguistic and extra-linguistic variables are obtained.