FOS: Fw: Dissertation defense 3/13 - Aspects of Jazani Arabic

[Wagner, Suzanne]

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce that I am defending my dissertation entitled Aspects of Jazani Arabic on Friday March 13, 3:00-6:00pm, B-243 Wells Hall. Abstract is attached and included below:


ASPECTS OF JAZANI ARABIC
Mohmmed Qasem Ruthan

The dissertation investigates two phonological features that are socially salient in Jazani Arabic: Word-initial consonant sequences (Hamdi, 2015), and /r/ (Ruthan, 2017). It addresses three main questions: (i) What is the syllabic organization of word-initial consonant sequences, i.e. are they simplex or complex onsets? (ii) What are the salient socio-phonetic features in Jazani Arabic? (iii) What are Saudis’ attitudes toward Jazani Arabic? The dissertation provides novel descriptions and analyses of the two features, examining the social meanings associated with them, thereby expanding on current theories and approaches like syllable structure theory (Fudge, 1969; Kahn, 1976),  the temporal coordination approach in phonology (Browman & Goldstein, 1988), and folk linguistics and attitudes research in sociolinguistics (Labov, 1966; Preston, 1986).

Unlike Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, Jazani Arabic allows word-initial consonant sequences. Their status as simplex or complex onsets has not been previously determined. The dissertation teases apart these two possibilities. 14 native Jazani speakers were recorded producing target words in two experiments. I measured the midpoint of the leftmost consonant to the end of the vowel (left edge), the midpoint of the rightmost consonant to the end of the vowel (right edge), and midpoint of the consonant sequences to the end of the vowel (c-center). In both experiments, the results show the right edge to anchor interval (end of the vowel) to have more stability in Jazani Arabic, indicating that Jazani Arabic has a simplex onset organization for word-initial consonant sequences. That is, the consonants in a word-initial consonant sequence are not all in the same onset but rather are parsed as C.CVX; e.g., [smaʕ] ‘listen’ is parsed as [s.maʕ]. This is a novel contribution to the literature on Arabic syllables and in line with a growing body of research in phonology. It also supports the effectiveness of acoustic methods of examining temporal interval durations to understand syllabic organization.

Jazani Arabic is socially stigmatized among speakers of other Saudi regional dialects, and, like other southern Saudi dialects, is judged as ‘bad’, ‘unbearable’, and ‘it sounds like Yemeni Arabic’ (Alrumaih, 2002). Yet whereas word-initial sequences clearly set Jazani Arabic apart from other Saudi varieties, the other socio-phonetic features of Jazani Arabic that make it socially distinctive have not been identified. Qualitative responses to recordings of three Jazani speakers by 183 native Saudis shows that variably non-emphatic /r/ was identified as a salient feature of Jazani Arabic, and it merits future research.

Respondents also rated the speakers on a 6-point Likert scale for characteristics like slow-fast, educated-uneducated. Najdis (speakers of the central region dialect of Saudi Arabia) held more negative attitudes to Jazani speakers than respondents from other dialect areas on the educated, smart, and friendly scales. Such negative attitudes by Najdis toward Jazani Arabic speakers reflects the social stratification in Saudi Arabia. The results also show that older respondents perceived Jazani speakers to have fast speech slightly more often than younger respondents did. Qualitative responses confirm beliefs, stereotypical views, and social status representations of Jazani speakers, such as ‘sounds like Yemeni’, and low-income jobs such as ‘security guard’, and ‘handcrafter’. The dissertation is the first of its kind to document and reveal Saudis’ beliefs and attitudes toward Jazani Arabic. The significance of the dissertation relies in presenting and analyzing new data of Jazani Arabic, shedding light on an understudied dialect of Saudi Arabic, which lends itself into phonology and sociolinguistics with its unexplored features.


Best regards,
Mohammed Ruthan
PhD Candidate
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824

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