Perceptions of Hijazi Arabic Dialects: An Attitudinal Approach

Language attitude research is mainly concerned with the opinions, beliefs, stereotypes and prejudices that speakers hold with respect to certain language or speech varieties (Garrett, 2010). In doing so, it involves investigating how cognitive processes, which include stored beliefs about languages or speech varieties, within one’s mental lexicon result in an act of being positive or negative about a certain speech variety or language (Cargile, Giles, Ryan, & Bradac, 1994; Kristiansen, Garrett, & Coupland, 2005). Simply put, language attitude research explores how behavioural input such as stereotypes and beliefs might lead to behavioural output such as language variation and change processes (Garrett, 2010; Oppenheim, 1982). Using an attitudinal approach, the present study examines how the historical background of Makkah city within the Hijaz region and the rapid urbanization of Saudi Arabia affected the make-up of the social structure and led to a dichotomous dialect situation in Hijaz. Thus, two main dialects have emerged in the Hijaz region: the urban Bedouin Hijazi dialect and the Hadari Hijazi dialect. I adopted an integrated approach where I used direct and indirect measures to study Hijazi Saudi attitudes towards dialect variation in Hijaz. Three research questions are addressed: RQ1: What do Hijazi people perceive to be occurring linguistically in Hijaz? RQ2: What are the most common characteristics that are associated with the urban Bedouin Hijazi and Hadari Hijazi dialects, and what are the dimensions behind the observed characteristics? RQ3: How do Hijazi people identify urban Bedouin Hijazi and Hadari Hijazi? Do they rely on linguistic factors or metalinguistic factors in the identification of dialects? Findings were discussed and compared to studies in the field of language attitude research (Garrett, Williams, & Evans, 2005a; Giles, 1970; Ladegaard, 1998; Stewart, Ryan, & Giles, 1985), socio-phonetic research (Hay & Drager, 2010; Hay, Nolan, & Drager, 2006; Niedzielski, 1999), Hijaz region historical research (Bianchi, 2004; Munt, 2014; Tagliacozzo & Toorawa, 2015), migration and urbanization in Saudi Arabia research ( Weston, 2011; Wilson & Graham, 2016), and dialectology research in SA (Alrumaih, 2002; Alahmadi, 2016; Ingham, 1971, 1982).