Search Results (4)

The current study investigated the attitudes of 340 Saudi college students towards two Arabic dialectal variations, kaskasah and kaʃkaʃah, utilizing the matched-guise technique. Participants listened to recordings of a speaker using each variation and evaluated the speaker on various personality traits, regional origin, and hireability. The findings revealed generally positive attitudes towards both variations, with the majority associating the speaker with desirable traits such as humility, kindness, friendliness, and respectfulness. However, the kaskasah variation was perceived slightly more favorably overall compared to kaʃkaʃah. The study also found distinct regional associations, with kaskasah slightly more strongly linked to the Najdi dialect and kaʃkaʃah overwhelmingly associated with the Southern dialect. Notably, a considerable minority indicated that they would not hire speakers of these variations, particularly kaʃkaʃah, suggesting some degree of dialect-based bias. The study contributes to research on language attitudes in Saudi Arabia by highlighting the complex interplay between dialectal variation, regional identity, and social evaluation. The findings underscore the importance of promoting linguistic awareness and inclusivity to mitigate the negative effects of dialect-based stereotyping and bias. Full article

This study harnesses the linguistic diversity of Arabic dialects to create two expansive corpora from X (formerly Twitter). The Gulf Arabic Corpus (GAC-6) includes around 1.7 million tweets from six Gulf countries—Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain—capturing a wide range of linguistic variations. The Saudi Dialect Corpus (SDC-5) comprises 790,000 tweets, offering in-depth insights into five major regional dialects of Saudi Arabia: Hijazi, Najdi, Southern, Northern, and Eastern, reflecting the complex linguistic landscape of the region. Both corpora are thoroughly annotated with dialect-specific seed words and geolocation data, achieving high levels of accuracy, as indicated by Cohen’s Kappa scores of 0.78 for GAC-6 and 0.90 for SDC-5. The annotation process leverages AI-driven techniques, including machine learning algorithms for automated dialect recognition and feature extraction, to enhance the granularity and precision of the data. These resources significantly contribute to the field of Arabic dialectology and facilitate the development of AI algorithms for linguistic data analysis, enhancing AI system design and efficiency. The data provided by this research are crucial for advancing AI methodologies, supporting diverse applications in the realm of next-generation AI technologies. Full article

This study empirically investigates functional and social variation in the use of TAYYIB (‘okay, well, right’) in light of grammaticalisation. Thirty naturally occurring conversations of 60 Najdi Arabic speakers were recorded in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The analysis demonstrates that TAYYIB has two realisations: full Tayyib [tˁajjib] and reduced Tab [tˁab]. Drawing on the conversation analytic approach within a variationist framework, TAYYIB was used to perform multiple discourse-pragmatic functions: interpersonal, textual and interpersonal–textual. The statistical analysis reveals that variant choice is significantly conditioned by the pragmatic functions. While Tayyib is employed to perform all three functions, Tab is only used for textual and interpersonal–textual meanings. As for social factors, Tab is significantly more likely to be used by younger speakers than adults and also more likely to be used by females than males. This can be interpreted as an indication of ongoing change driven by young people, primarily females, towards the greater use of the innovative Tab. Given the evidence of linguistic change in Tab including semantic bleaching, pragmatic strengthening and phonological reduction, the study suggests that Tab has undergone advanced grammaticalisation. Full article

The existential sentence is a noncanonical sentence type that is used crosslinguistically to assert the (non)existence of one or more entities. It consists of a set of syntactic items that includes an expletive, pivot, and coda. Two different syntactic analyses have been identified in the literature for the existential construction. The first type of analysis, the standard analysis, treats the existential sentence as a nonraising counterpart of copular sentences. In this analysis, both existential and copular sentences are derived from a single underlying structure, which takes the pivot as a subject and the coda as a predicate. The other type of analysis, the nonstandard analysis, treats the existential sentence differently from the copular sentence. In this analysis, the copular verb takes the pivot NP as its complement, and the coda is treated as an adjunct. The purpose of this paper is to examine the syntactic status of the three syntactic items, namely, the expletive fiih, the pivot NP, and the coda XP, in the existential construction in the dialect of Najdi Arabic (NA). Using the nonstandard analysis, I propose that the existential pronoun fiih is an NP merged in the Spec, vP, the pivot is an NP complement selected by a copular verb, and the coda is an adjunct that serves as either an internal or external modifier. This work about NA existentials may fruitfully contribute to the ongoing discussion on the syntax of existential constructions. Examining existential constructions in various unrelated languages may help obtain a better understanding of this interesting syntactic phenomenon, thereby enabling a more plausible analysis. Full article