Linguistic Representations and Dialect Contact: Some Comments on the Evolution of Five Regional Variants in Beirut
Type de matériel :
24
This article focuses on the results of dialect contact in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, a city that has experienced a considerable and continuous level of migration since the beginning of the nineteenth century. We examine the leveling and reallocation of five regional variants Lebanese Arabic, drawing on a corpus of interviews and conversations collected between 2005 and 2009 from forty-seven participants. Using the distribution of two variants as a case study, we will first demonstrate the leveling tendency of minority (geographically speaking) forms. We will then attempt to expose the impact of sociolinguistic representations—latent prestige, stigmatization, and speaker awareness of linguistic variation—on the retention of a third minority form, on the leveling of a majority form, and on the stylistic reallocation of a variable that has remained below the level of speaker awareness (and whose two variants are used relatively equally across geographical areas).
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