 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the part of the realistic second series. We are happy and delighted to have Professor Enam aware, as our guest speaker this afternoon. Enam is a good friend of ours. She's been here many times, and she is part of a very likely Arabic realistic community in the Arab world wide. And she just is, I guess, at the end of a free version of the research project. The beginning. Ah, at the beginning of the research project, which looks at the formation of dialects, and in particular dialects in Arabic. And her field site is in Jordan and Amman, which talks about today about nominatibization and the hyper dialect of developments in the formation of the Amman dialect. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lutz. And thank you very much for the kind invite again. And I apologize to those of you who may have read quite a bit about this, because I've been working on Amman for some time now. So as Lutz said, this is finally being completed. This is the third phase of it, where in fact I am at the beginning of this project. And I gave the main line in the title to something that I'm working on currently. So you won't hear very sophisticated analysis of that, I'm afraid. It's just, I thought I wanted something, I wanted your thoughts really on what I'm at the moment analyzing. So in this talk what I'll do is I'll go through the project. So this is very much, as I said, work in progress, but there are very important results that help me in fact complete the project at the moment. So the project started with a pilot study mainly. So I'll talk about the project as a whole, what it's supposed to do, what it aims to do. And I will recap on some of the findings. Some of you here, especially Hanadi, Chris, will know some of these features that have been analyzed. So I'll recap on some of the features. And along the way I'll talk about a couple of features in details and the reason I want to do that is to really link with the second part of the talk, the final part, namely this normativization that is happening in Amman. Which brings me to the last part, namely post formation. Now, I'm calling it post formation only as a suggestion really, that these processes probably happen after the focusing stage. So in dialect formation, we normally talk about diffuse stage and it's not always necessarily the case that dialects go through focusing afterwards. But if they do, like Amman dialect has, we could witness some further developments which we see without being able to observe how it was formed in normal dialects that are hundreds of years old or thousands of years old. So if we think of English dialects, for instance, there's something probably that is prescriptive about the way people think about different dialects or standard English, for instance, is thought about as being better than others. So what I'm trying to do here is really understand how this happens from the start. So I'm claiming that a case like this where a dialect is being formed allows us to actually observe that happening, how the rules get set from the start. Okay, let me kick off with a general description of this project. This is a study in new dialect formation and what new dialect formation in the case of Amman means is brand new. Clean slate, there is no previous dialect upon which this can be, this can build, which is currently in its third and final phase, I think, of being formed. The research traces the formation of this dialect right from inception through stabilization and we are on to the fourth generation really now. So it spans a period of about 80 years. And the framework of analysis, as some of you will be familiar with my work, is variationist paradigm as pioneered by William LeBov in his major three works on the topic. And more specifically, I benefit from the work of Peter Truggle, who in 1986 wrote a full-fledged book on dialect contact and the outcome of contact and also probably more so his work on New Zealand English. New Zealand English is a very good comparison, in fact, to many of the cases that we find around the Arab world. So here we had, in the case of New Zealand, we had migrants from various dialectal backgrounds interacting in a new social context, almost tabula rasa, clean slate, a new dialect emerges. And this is the topic that is investigated in Truggle 2004. The major importance really of that book is that it sets some sort of theoretical framework for dialect contact studies. Within the Arabic context in particular, the project in Amman is quite unique and hopefully will be a model for what can be done around the so-called Arab world where you do see very many cases of new cities with new dialects being formed. Now, Amman is a new city in a sense and a very ancient city in another sense. It is only new as an Arabic-speaking capital of a political entity. It is, as some of you may be aware, a very ancient location. Its history goes back to probably 12 centuries before Christ. But as an Arabic city, and this is something that even Ammanis themselves, Jordanians generally do not think about, as an Arabic-speaking city, it is very new. And the reason it is new is that it was simply deserted. It was left derelict until the early years of the 20th century, from the 17th century, well until the early years of the 20th century. Virtually no one was there. But I must here mention that the very first, if you want to call them indigenous population of Amman, in fact were the Circassians who arrived in the later part of the 19th century and were settled in various places in the city. But in terms of, and the Circassians were obviously not Arabic-speaking, but in so far as Jordan is concerned, this was not the urban center. This is a place that was designated then as the capital of Trans-Jordan, which later on in 1946 becomes the kingdom of Jordan. And therefore, because of that, it attracted migrants from everywhere. They flocked into the city from other internal locations in Jordan, from various urban centers and villages, as well as from elsewhere. So the statistics here are a little bit fragmented, but what I have on the board is quite reliable. In so far as we can tell. So by the 1930s, the city probably had 10,000 inhabitants. Now imagine this. I found the statistics from the Ottomans that claimed that at the turn of century, Amman had 5,000 Circassians. This must mean that, so this must mean that between the early years of the 1920, sorry, the 20th century and 1930s, only about 5,000 Arabic-speaking individuals were around. So by the 1930s, we have a figure of 10,000 people. And by 1946, about 65,000 was the population of Amman. Now, the early migrants, this is important in contact studies to know as much as we can about the early migrants. These are the founders, if you like. As Peter Truggill has shown, for instance, that regardless of number sometimes, the founding population can have a very significant effect on what the dialect is going to be later on. So the early migrants constituted two groups. We know that the vast majority were economic migrants or civil servants who worked in the new state. And they came mainly from Jordan and Palestine, but there were also individuals from Syria and Lebanon. Some of the merchants, others, political activists, Syria and Lebanon then were still under French colonial rule. So the political activists, if you like, ran to a place where there was an Arabic-central government. So the early population, predominantly Jordanian-Palestinian, but also there is a Syrian element and the Lebanese element. The precise statistics about the numbers of each one of, the number of individuals from each one of these groups is not available at all, but I was able to reconstitute what it might have been like through ethnographic interviews. Fairly satisfied that when I say that these two locations in particular were the most important locations from which the early population arrived, I feel confident about that on the basis of the data that I have collected. And the two locations are the city of Salt, probably over 95% of those from Jordan, from within the East Bank came from the city of Salt, which is just outside Amman, and from Palestine from the city of Nablus on the other side of the river. I think I have a map here, so you can see Amman is there, Salt, written Salt there. No one can agree on how it is written, really. And Nablus towards the North, somewhere there, I can't see it, somewhere there. Okay, just some more details about the population. The numbers are very important. The largest population increase in the earlier years in particular happened as a result of the two wars in the region, the major wars in 1948 and 1967. It is estimated, we don't again have reliable statistics, official statistics I should say. But rumor has it, if you like, this is the number that is often quoted that well over three million Palestinians were displaced. The vast majority of whom settled in Jordan during that period. Many more were displaced later on and continue to be. From the 1950s, the population increased like this. These are reliable statistics from the Department of Statistics and you notice that between the 1950s and 1990s, the population doubled more than 15 times. So we start with just over 100,000, 1994, nearly a million and it gets worse, if you like, in terms of the speed with which the population was increasing. So the latest official consensus that we have puts the population at this in a month or 2.5 with Jordanian citizen, plus 1.5 non-Jordanians, but people who live in the city, most probably from Iraq and Syria in particular, which constitutes about 49% of the total population of Jordan, so almost half of the country's population are concentrated in the city. And it is estimated that by 2025, the population of Amman will be six million. Okay. Now, against this demographic background, the important points really to bear in mind for a study of direct formation can be summed up as follows. There is no geographically neutral variety of Jordanian Arabic, so all speakers speak some sort of local dialect, regardless of social class as well. Now, whereas in neighboring countries, the capital of the city tends to be the standard dialect for that particular norm, Jordan never had such a linguistic center. So we talk about, for instance, in the southern and central part of Syria, Damascus certainly is a standard. We talk about Cairo as a standard. We talk about Beirut as a standard. Baghdad also became a standard, but Jordan never had that linguistic center. So very often it looked outside its borders for a linguistic center. Jordanians and Palestinians generally identify, so when I say Jordanians and Palestinians, what I mean to say here is the majority of the population of Amman. So they generally identify themselves with the original place from where their forefathers came. This is certainly true of the first and the second generation to this day. So if you ask them where you're from, even if they've always lived in Amman, so the second generation, very many of them were born in the city. They don't tell you, I am from Amman. They often cite the name of the village or the town, Jordanian or Palestinian, from which their families come from. And very many of them go back to their hometown for family weddings or funerals, et cetera. So the attachment is still there. However, in the case of the third generation, a very important development in my view was that many in the third generation, and now we're on to the fourth generation, began to identify themselves with the city. So actually they invented a new town that never existed this time, Ammaniyin, by which they meant, if I can find it, by which they meant that they were native to the city. In my view, this shows something very important, that as the dialect is forming, a community is formed. So both the community and the dialect are being formed together. So Amman is acquiring a native population, if you like, which will make it very similar, which will give it very similar status to the status of Damascus, let's say. Okay. And this represents a radical shift in my view, in social linguistic patterns, from a plethora of local varieties to situations similar to what we find in Damascus. Okay. The project itself began with a pilot study very long time ago in 1998. In fact, I started walking on that. And the pilot confirmed these... I had a hunch that there was a dialect, a stable dialect, and indeed the pilot study confirmed that this is the case, that this dialect is unique, that the native speakers of this dialect, who are the third generation, they are the ones who made the dialect, speak considerably differently from their fathers and from their grandfathers. And in this case, in the case of Amman, we still have access to the original dialects, which is very lucky in my case. In the case of New Zealand, it was probably more difficult. So I can always check what's happening in these places from which the forefathers came. And the third generation certainly speak a unique dialect that is not the same dialect as the one that their families spoke. And the formation of this distinctive dialect is associated with stabilization in the population. If I wanted to make a guess, I would make a guess that it was probably made sometime between 1975 and 1990, something like that. That's when focusing probably occurred. And that is because that is the only time in the life of the city where the population was more or less stable. Here are some provisors now for what's to follow. So the data that I will be citing comes mostly from West Amman. So this is a simple map of the city. That's where the pilot study started. And that is because I also had the hunch that that's where the dialect is being made. The city is divided socially, almost sharply so, between wealthy West Side and less wealthy East Side of Amman. The pilot study started there, but now as the project is being carried out to completion, I have quite a bit of data from the East Side now, about 40 hours so far from the East Side. And what I'm seeing, based on the preliminary analysis, very preliminary, I'm still collecting data, is that in fact, in the East Side of Amman, the third generation behaves very similarly to the second generation in Amman. And I'll talk about that in a second. Okay. Here are the generations. So this is really the sum of the aspects, so the stages of the formation of the die, which is based on empirical evidence. So here we see the first generation, and I had access to a sufficient number of speakers from the first generation. These are the ones who arrived in the city as adults. Mainly in the 1930s, there are a few before that. I think the oldest arrived 1926 or something like that. But the vast majority of them arrived in the 1930s. And these individuals speak very much of the original dialect of the places from which they migrated. Nevertheless, and this is something that we expect, you do find what Peter Truckel called rudimentary levelling. Even in the first generation, levelling starts to happen. And here are some examples of these levelling, the features that have been levelled out from the speech of the first generation from both backgrounds. So this is completely there, this affrication of ke that comes, that is in the dialect of salt, this is a traditional feature in the dialect of salt, and this is conditional affrication of ke, in the vicinity of front and high vows. In Amman, it completely disappeared already from the first generation. You simply do not find it, it's levelled out. From the Palestinian side, this extreme raising of ah, which is marked. I mean, we notice that these are marked features. So they're not only minority features. Of course, same minority or majority depends on where we are. But generally speaking, they are minority features. So these very marked features get levelled out. So Palestinian, very high raising of ah, form, also disappears in the first generation. The same in this word, for instance. So se'a becomes sa'a, also disappears in the first generation. Very interestingly, you may be aware that Jordan received new cohort of migrants from Kuwait in the 1990s in the aftermath of the first so-called Gulf War. These items, I am noticing, appear in the speech of the generations who came from Kuwait. The younger generations. Which must mean that Palestinian dialects in diaspora outside Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, are very much dialects in isolation. There are probably good social reasons underpinning this. So we notice, for instance, especially until recently, that expats in the Gulf kept themselves to themselves, if you like. They socialized with each other. They never really acquired the dialects of the places in which they live. They continued to speak their original dialect. And these original dialects that they continued to speak are much more similar to how the dialects used to be when their fathers or forefathers migrated for work purposes. So they're much more conservative. One example that I can mention is the Queen of Jordan. She does not speak Abmani. She doesn't know that, but I know that. She has very many features that are very old Palestinian features that are still used in Palestine. But you don't find that in her generation in Amman. Okay, the second generation arrived with their parents, either as very young children or were born in the city. We want to imagine how the situation was. So these Maya flock in the city. Their kids then go to school together. They play in the neighborhood together. So the second generation are exposed to a variety of dialects. They're exposed to a lot more variety of dialects. In the speech of this generation, you find a mixture of all types. Really it is chaotic. In one of my articles I called it chaos. And what I meant by that is that you find extreme degree of variability. But it is not structured variability, if you like. It is chaotic in this sense. So you find a mixture of these are the two most important sounds really that distinguish between the urban Palestinian and local Jordanian. So you find both. You find interdental and stopping used at the same time. These are very important. These have been sorted out completely in Amman. So the ones with our non-Jordan, not local, they're urban Palestinian as well as urban Syrian, urban Lebanese. In the speech of the second generation from both backgrounds, you find these are pronominal suffixes. So you find Ku as well as Khan, Hum as well as Hon being used. And very importantly, in the second generation, we find a complication in the social linguistic situation. And what I mean by this is the emergence of new constraints on variation. In this generation, we start to see gender emerging as a very important constraint on variation. But the speech of this generation is identifiably either Jordanian or Palestinian. The third generation is a completely different story. Here, all of them were born in the city. They diverge quite clearly from the speeches of their parents and grandparents. And the mixture and variability that we see in the second generation is much reduced. There is focusing, so orderly linguistic behaviour is established in the third generation and stable usage of very many features. And if we want to characterise these features that emerge, some of them are fudged features by which we mean a mixture. So the contact between urban Palestinian dials and Jordanian dials gave rise to either new features, completely new features, or features that are intermediate between the two, really fudged features. And the social linguistic correlates in this generation, this affiliation with the city of Ammanin is perfectly well established. And there is an agreement on what is Ammanin and what is not. Now, people who speak some sort of dialect, take this for granted, right? So if I ask you about the grammar of your dialect, you can immediately say, no, you can't say that in my native dialect. You can't say that in Cockney, you can't say that in XYZ dialect. In cases of dialect formation like this, unless there is a dialect, native speakers obviously cannot say that. Unless there are native speakers of the dialect, obviously you don't get that. And indeed you do in Ammanin in the third generation. With confidence they tell you, you can't say that in Ammanin, which means that they have developed intuition for what is grammatical or ungrammatical in their own dialect. Okay, here is a summary of the features that I have analyzed. And there are some that I should have listed here that are being analyzed. Most importantly, quantifiers are doing all sorts of interesting things in the city. So I'll just go through some of these. The vowels, in fact, I focused on the vowels to begin with because vocalic differences, vocalic features are very important, significant salient features that distinguish between urban Palestinian and Jordanian. There's some sort of connected vowel movement, perhaps starting with the raising of long a and certainly the phonisation of a is happening. I am yet to confirm with empirical data that this is connected, that this is a chain shift, really, but I think it might be. Now, the development that happened here, this is a very important feature. The feminine ending, some of you who may be familiar with Arabic, so many nouns and adjectives end in a in Arabic and this a can be realised either as a low vowel a or as a raised vowel a, or sometimes the raising can be as high as e as in Lebanese dialects. Some dialects raise unconditionally, so Iraqi dialects for instance are raised unconditionally. Jordanian, so Leventine dialects generally raise unconditionally, either they raise unconditionally or they lower unconditionally. The difference between the two types of dialects even though the two types are raised unconditionally is that in one type raising is the default feature in the other type raising lowering is the default feature and that is precisely the difference between Jordanian and urban Palestinian even though both of them raise and what I found in Amman is really astounding. I call it a fudged form because the phonology comes from urban Palestinian or Syrian or Lebanese, they're all the same but the phonetic quality of the raised vowel is Jordanian, is not Palestinian. So it's almost as if they got the phonology from one place and the phonetics from another place and this is not ad hoc at all because for the urban Palestinian phonology to win out if you like in this case is not at all surprising because it is identical to all other city dialects in the region. So this is the majority form if you like and we do expect majority forms to win in normal situations. Okay, so in the context so the Ga'a I will talk about it with some details in a second because it's rather important so I didn't ask how much time do I have because I tend to talk a lot and I'm trying not to. You still have plenty of time so we have to leave the room by 5. Don't worry, I won't keep you until then. And the interdentals certainly are probably disappearing you still find them being used in Amman also in the third generation and the fourth generation but my guess based on the statistics is that they're on their way out so the and the will probably disappear in the future and what I mean by the nation of J here in particular is that J is becoming J but in fact it is further being fronted to something like Z in what I call the hyper-dialect I'm not sure it has a chance of surviving that one but J is the one that is focused so the friccative rather than the affricate and there were features in the morphophonology that I also investigated this feature the um feature kif hal kum was made in Amman it occurs in other Arabic dialect but in Amman it is actually completely new it does not occur in any of the dialects in the input varieties if you like and the conjugation of the third person masculine verb I won't go through that but I've published an article about it and I will talk with some details about this the conjugation of two particular verbs and we call them so Glotto stop initial, Hamza initial verbs okay let's then look at a couple of examples from these features that have focused in Amman and I intentionally chose one that is undergoing has undergone reallocation and it is a famous one the Vila versus the Glotto stop there's hardly any study from the region that doesn't talk about this variable sometimes I call it infamous variable but in fact there's important information to be gained from that it is being reallocated and here's what we mean in social linguistics by reallocation sometimes in the dialect context situation both variants survive the coinization process so very often one variant wins over kicks the other one away but often what we find is that both survive for various reasons but they do not survive exactly in the way that so their pattern of occurrence in the new dialect is not exactly the same as the pattern of occurrence in the original dialect so you tend to find sometimes grammatically reallocation and sometimes you tend to find social and stylistic reallocation just to give you one example from English so Peter Truckel for instance thinks that Canadian raising was probably a case of reallocation so in Canadian English you have raised O, A after voiceless sounds so house but no raising of the voice sound before voice sounds so houses but house houses so that's it and the explanation for that at least one of the credible explanations for that is that in fact both arrived the one with shorter diphthong so the O and A probably from Scottish originally and the other one was there it's a case of dialect contact so rather than the wide diphthongs O and I ousting the shorter ones both survived in the new dialect in Canadian English but were reallocated to specific linguistic environments so in Canadian English we find the shorter one after voiceless consonants which makes sense right Monique whereas the wide one used elsewhere in the case at hand this is the reallocation of Go you might have heard a lot about it Go is a label this is how dialects are actually identified in the region in Jordan in particular and the reason it is so salient is that there is something that is different so it's the Go business but in particular Go is associated with loads of social values so some people think it is rural, outdated but at the same time it is an important symbol of identity others talk about it as being tough and therefore more appropriate for men but recently I am finding that girls are using it to fend off sexual harassment for instance and so on and so forth so it's laden with social linguistic meaning so what happened is the following just a little bit of background for the Indian diet all of them have Go there is no exception to this absolutely all of them have this which is a regionally less dominant less dominant but not necessarily it's a localized way but not necessarily in the minority in fact if you if you think of the region as a whole the whole of south and a lot of eastern Syria all uses this and yet this has less dominance socially and that is most probably connected with the fact that the city dialect none of them has this Urban Palestinian has this which is absolutely typical of all city dialects in the region as well as Cairo for instance even though Egyptian Arabic really has no influence on Leventine dialects it isn't involved in any social linguistic processes but in addition to this to regional affiliation whether you come from here or there and hence your choice of the variant these variants are associated as I said with a range of social values now across the three generations gender has a consistent effect but we know we start to see that its effect increases in the following way so in the first generation remember I said in the vast majority of cases really apart from these features that I talked about they stick to their original dialects but already in the first generation we notice two particular groups diverging from the norm for their heritage dialects and these are Palestinian men and Jordanian women already in the first generation few tokens about 5% something like that few tokens of g appears in the speech of Palestinian urban Palestinian men where I say PM here where I say Palestinian I mean urban I don't have time to talk about rural Palestinian so this is urban Palestinian so these individuals who come who speak normally dialects that have also used in a few tokens and Jordanian women who would have grown up in families who would have acquired dialects who started use a few tokens the other two groups these are the most conservative groups there's absolutely no variation they simply stick to whatever they use as young children in the second generation suddenly we see women in the use of this app and I think that is when this gender distinction started so very often you probably read about this so as considered soft and is considered tough of course linguistic features aren't endowed with values like that these are social values that have bases and how these things emerge you always find something in the social history of the community that explains that and in fact this is the case and it probably this very sharp distinction in Jordanian probably started after the internal war particularly in 1970 so here we find that the same groups diverge from the speech of their parents exactly the same groups the Jordanian women the Palestinian men the Palestinian men in fact here used about 50% of of Jordanian the Jordanian tokens so this stereotype that people have in Amman a stereotype that is talked about that is soft this is appropriate for men this is appropriate for women is based on usage so if they hear more men using this and more women using that then the correlation is established but then of course we have to ask the more important question why did this become associated why did this become more attractive to men and why is that became and that the story of that is normally found in the history of the community so if one carefully analyzes the social history of the community you find the answer and there is a story for this in Jordan so in this generation what we notice since these speakers these diverging groups are not using variants that are associated with their heritage dialect so what we find is that ethnicity is blood it doesn't go nothing goes what you find is that social constraints are layered with different importance gender becomes more important but ethnicity becomes less important so these social constraints on variation are layers nothing replaces nothing at least in this case and for the diverging groups there seems to be some sort of conflict so based on usage this is the conflict for the diverging groups and the diverging groups are the Palestinian men and the Jordanian women and the reason I say there is a conflict here is that their ethnicity points in one direction but their gender choices point in another direction in the case of the men Palestinian men their ethnicity so dialectal heritage that's what it means here points in the direction of the glottal stop of but their gender choices so there is pressure on men to use g away from their heritage and vice versa in the case of the Jordanian women in the third generation there are two very important developments so in addition to gender and ethnic affiliation so remember in the first generation it was dialectal heritage it was ethnic affiliation that really told you how the variation is structured very straightforward type of structure of variation second generation a second layer is added namely gender and here it becomes more complex because you cannot predict simply by gender or simply by dialectal heritage you have to look at the interaction of both in the third generation it becomes a lot more complicated in the third generation context and interlocutor become very important they emerge as further constraints and here gender becomes a major organizing factor such that the female speakers in the third generation and beyond predominantly almost consistently in public use the glottal stop so there is almost no variation in the case of the women so in other words what they do they advance the trend that would have started by their grandmothers grandmothers started to use a few tokens it is very comforting for me to see that it is the men who are doing a lot more work with this variation for what it is the men really in a man who have to watch out for their tongues when it comes to this particular sound not the women the women use a and that's acceptable that's fine the men are extremely valuable but there is an important structure you can predict how these constraints are layers and these are observations from my research so normally in group interactions so they are interacting with their families basically they use their heritage variance this is the men if they interact with with girls supporting girls in particular or talking to very young children they tend to use a they tend to use the other one in ethnically mixed male interactions especially if there are disputes if there are fights I am very polite here I call it disputes it's fights really there are many fights all over the city all the time you do not hear a man fighting in a they would take the mickey out so that's when you hear consistently absolutely and recently and this is the one I am analysing currently type of employment is very important you always find that where you have changes in the economy it is reflected in social linguistic patterning and the new type of employment in the service sector that brought a wide sector of Jordanians into new types of employment in hotels so waiters for instance, receptionist bank and the new type of shops these trans national globalised stores so all the shops you see in London you find the Rahman all of these changes in the economy have repercussions on the social linguistic on the social linguistic patterning and that is because they create new linguistic markets for different linguistic features so this new types of employment as some of the examples I will show will demonstrate also influence the choice between go and so what we notice is that none of these social variables correlate with linguistic usage in a simple way it is a very complex structure of variation so you cannot predict by relying on any of these factors independently of the other factors it is an interaction between all of these and hence the value of quantification really in social linguistics so the variationist model that we work with would be able to predict based on statistics who does what, when and why if we have enough data of course and the second variable that I want to talk about still not focused but is on its way of being focused now the reason I chose this is that I am now able in fact to say which I wasn't a couple of years ago that it looks like all of the input dialects were similar in the conjugation in the first one so the input was similar from both sides from Jordanian and Palestinian and similar and different here means one thing either you conjugate these verbs with an all type of conjugation of vowel or with an a type now there isn't enough information about Palestinian that there isn't enough reliable information from Palestine but together with the data that have been collected by my colleague Uri Khoresh has been very helpful and helped us to in fact determine what variants were used in which locations and it looks to this day it looks like the only Palestinian city that doesn't have this pattern that has this pattern with a is Hebron, Khalil all others have or despite what Bergstress, Bergstress in fact has Jerusalem I think or the app but I don't think it is Gaza, the jury is still out on that okay so there are two basic ways of conjugating these verbs either by using an a vowel or a beakol etc which is exactly the pattern that you find in Syrian Lebanese dialects as well as in Iraqi dialects in Egyptian in fact this is the pattern you find everywhere except in this in this particular area except in Jordan, Palestine this very central area there are a couple and of course southern Syria all of the of the Choran that you find this same you don't find as you find all and down in the southern peninsula there are a couple of areas in Yemen that have been quoted as all type of dialects as well as a couple of locations in Oman so if you look at the distribution that's what I'm trying to say if you look at the distribution in Arabic dialects of where you get this pattern with all their isolated areas nowadays and disconnected which is a strong suggestion that it might be a very ancient feature that so the fact that you find it in Jordan, Palestine is disconnected is not connected with its occurrence in Yemen or in Oman I'm still not quite sure where it came from there were suggestions at possible Aramaic connection it doesn't seem to be successful there is no conclusive evidence but it looks not not from Aramaic but in any case so this is the so the input varieties have this all so instead of vocal it's vocal a talkal or vocal there are very many here is a range of variation in the conjugation of these verbs no less than 24 forms instead of 6 or 7 24 forms are available and are used in fact and the same is true for the second one for the verb to take all of these forms are available and you notice that there are more forms in the third singular masculine and the reason that there are more forms here and one more here so in the third person pronouns is that in Amman with here or without here is also variable so the Yod either with Yod or without Yod is also a possibility and that is because other verbs ordinary verbs can be conjugated with or without Yod so in the case of third person you have a further possibility with or without Yod and hence the more forms available. Okay here are the results for the analysis of this this is I think the 39 speakers something like that and this is all the variants sorry this is the whole sample together regardless of ethnicity or age so you see already that in the first person the all forms are in the minority so this is extremely interesting because what you see here is not only increase in the use of the new form but you see it being structured in the paradigm in a specific way so it disappears fast from fast singular followed by whatever so there is clearly a root that it is following in the case of introduction in the system and the root through which the all is making an exit through the paradigm if we now look at and here you will start to see the importance of these different constraints that I talked about ethnicity context, ethnicity and age in particular so if we look at these in the third generation and age in the third generation in particular immediately you see more blue right and the blue so if you look at this one and then look at this one you see more blue the blue is the air form so immediately you notice that the air form in the third generation is being focused so the all form is being shunned the air form is being noticed and then if we look at ethnicity even in the third generation you still see that there is an influence the influence of something as basic as dialectal heritage now these kids in their forties now some of them in fact have never lived in the places from which their grandparents migrated and in the case of many of them even their parents never lived in those places and yet the effect of home the dialect at home shines through it still shows it doesn't show for instance in Ga'a it doesn't show in Qum both groups just use Qum regardless but it shows in some way so here in the way in which it shows is that what you can conclude from this is that it is those with Palestinian heritage who are in the vanguard of this transition from O to A now we don't know why it may be that this transition actually from O to A started to happen in Palestine so already their grandparents had some talkings of this so they already had more input in their childhood than those with Jordanian heritage so those with Jordanian heritage would never have heard at home the air forms okay and the same is true for for Ahad let me just point out something now the final thing that I wanted to say about this feature clearly I am anticipating that Amman is moving in that way but it's moving in that way again this is not ad hoc similarly to the feature that I talked about earlier the fudged for the feminine ending where I said it's not an ad hoc choice the choice of the phonology of Arab and Palestinian is not ad hoc when we consider that all other city features all other city dialects in the region do exactly the same thing and contact is plentiful between these cities and cultural cohesion is there as well identify as a cultural unit if you like this is also this shows that regional coenization also has a role to play so it's not only what happens in that locality but also what happens in the region so there is at some level pressure from the region pressure from dialects that are politically outside the country in question which if you think about it this is probably what gives regional dialects the distinctive flavour that they have so if we talk about the north west of England or the north east or if we talk about Australian English or if we talk about Moroccan Arabic and Leventine Arabic whereas the native speakers of these dialects don't think that they speak like each other that much as much as outside this thing but why do outsiders actually have that impression and the reason they have that impression is that there is such a thing as regional coenization the region that so I am taking for instance in Morocco which I find extremely funny people think I am Lebanese and to me this is extremely funny because I speak traditional Jordanian for instance but of course to them the features the salient features about Leventine dialect are different from the ones that I think are salient to identify me as Jordanian for instance and the last thing that I want to talk about which is supposed to be the which is really the topic that I wanted to bring in the totality of the results that I obtained so far which is something that literally I started noticing about three, four months ago but have had some field notes about and these sorts of data do not come from recorded interviews so these are the field notes that occur very naturally situations that you come across as you are doing field work and one that I thought might be some sort of normativization in fact hyper dialect might be some sort of normativization as well and it is something that I thought is probably post formation something that happens after the dialect has been focused there is a new dialect now what I mean by normativization I must admit I don't like words with asian and isms sometimes you cannot avoid them so this asian word what I mean by it is a stage in standardization where in certain context I am very careful to say in certain context because the data that I have come from certain context the norm and values associated with it acquire the status of a prescriptive standard so basically telling you how to speak how does this happen now in my readings in sociology of course normativization is something that sociologists have analyzed quite intricately and you also find analysis in philosophy so one of the definitions that I thought quite apt for the situation that I have is by someone whose name I can't say properly in front of you so Jedlikowska probably so she says the term denotes the supply of a range of desirable ways of thinking and behaving which ensure that the shaping of reality is made subject to certain standards and she further elaborates on that by citing a project about the underlying the concept normativity how it is seen as having two meanings one meaning which explains ontological meaning basically which explains to us how all rules exist why we think something is pretty for instance so all social rules how they all exist in the first place but also which is what I am really interested in currently now in order to interpret the data that I have the epistemological meaning namely the criteria and relationships underpinning action and judgment precisely what leads to this particular situation so in the case of dialect so normative dimension of course there is normative dimension of how we speak but also there is normative dimension of how we dress what we think of food how we perceive beauty etc so what I am interested in of course is the normative dimension of a dialect which tells us basically how we speak you mustn't speak like that you speak like that and here is some of the situations that I recorded this one is actually unique whereas the second situation is not all that unique I have come across it very many times but in this case with these girls and here it is women who are involved I call them girls they were in their 20s something like that so basically what happened is that I was shopping and I shop as part of my fieldwork so as it happened so I went into a store in fact it is an English store so and there were two shop assistants one of them helped me for about an hour or something like that and I speak traditional Jordanian so I don't speak I speak with a gut if you like which is very strange in Amman and should be silent people should notice that and indeed many do so what I am trying to say is that one would have expected that this young woman would have noticed how I speak but she consistently spoke with with how girls are expected to speak in Amman and this happened as I came to Paiso at the cashier her colleague was next to her so she started she was wrapping my glassware and she whispered to her colleague saying this how I hate wrapping glassware now the way she pronounced glassware which is gazaz in the traditional Jordanian dialect in the Amman dialect is supposed to be azaz with global stop for a woman but she pronounces it with gas and that was the first gas that she used for interaction but she wasn't talking to me she was talking to her friend I immediately heard that social linguists always interfere don't they so and she turned to me and said are you paying by visa madam so I I actually asked her that I felt I could ask her that because we'd been talking friendly and she'd been helping me and everything so I simply asked her why did you speak with your colleague the accent used with me and her answer was because a woman customer previously told her off for speaking with gas she was actually told off in the place where she worked by a woman and then then I said what did she say to you so that woman apparently said this beware of speaking like this again she told her off women don't speak like this and it isn't nice for them to speak like this and can you imagine how how strong these stereotypes are and how strong the normalization is I mean she's telling a total stranger who's helping her in the shop how to speak and I yeah I'll wrap up I think probably 10 minutes tops perhaps 5 just because I'm sure because it's so much interesting stuff thank you so and what did you reply I started to get angry in fact I was fuming but of course you have to keep distance from this and what did you reply she said I apologized and I said why did you apologize and at that point in fact her friend interfered and she said we were afraid she'd complain about us it turned out that both of them in fact come from dialectal heritage where they speak at home with gas but they were both told told off by this woman so I've been urged to this is men so that was women at another store quite upmarket and I'd been interacting I went there over a period of 3 weeks I did buy lots of things as well as collect some data so this young man helped me a lot over the 3 weeks so I was able to actually out with me throughout the reason I said they must have noticed how I speak in fact they don't the stereotype is so strong that they don't notice that they needn't do that with me in particular but they still do it this is how strong normalization can be so this one I actually asked him who is your tribe about the name of his family and he told me that Jordanians know where families come from so I was able to he is Jordanian and I actually asked him that he speaks to me why do you do that and do you do that at home and he said no at home I speak ex dialect he named his dialect but here I speak now it is not easy to understand what normal means it is something like conventionally and this is another aspect of what is happening to this dialect so it is becoming the conventional way of talking so to speak so for him the normal the norm is not how he spoke at home but the norm is how he should be speaking okay so I'll skip that and now at the same time what one notices in Amman is some sort of a hyper dialect and by which I mean very much what Lebov meant sorry there is an extra either by hyper correction so overshoot it if you like or exaggerated use of certain features and these are the ones that I was able to record now interestingly and these features are mocked by native speakers of Amman they are actually mocked so they talk about women who speak like that as being some sort of wannabees some sort of you know one thing to show off now interestingly one of these features was investigated by Hanadi in Damascus and in fact so a limited r so r becomes almost an approximate so the normal r is a tap probably so r becomes a r or something like that but what Hanadi found was that it was changing progress in Damascus and it was used by all social classes but it was also used by the middle classes whereas in Amman it is mocked it is not something that that is progressive if you like and this heavy aspiration or pelletalized stops is something that Nilo Farhairi talked about in Damascus and she did make the difference the distinction between slight pelletalization and heavy pelletalization and in fact Hanadi has also data from Damascus that shows that that is also happening in Damascus we don't know the social status of these yet but in Amman I am guessing heavy aspiration or heavy pelletalization is also stigmatized so I have just short recordings here where are they are here so let me just play to you and the interesting thing is that features of this hyper dialect are actually used by speakers from all backgrounds not particular background this one for instance is a gas speaker so if you listen to how she pronounces the bits that I've highlighted there so this is actually an emphatic originally so this is the word for Palestinians so it should be pa but the way she pronounces it is t and she aspirates the d there and in this one in the second in the second one what you will hear is actually almost africation it's not that africate but very heavy pelletalization this is the word for Catholic basically the word for Catholic is Latine in Jordanian Arabic so the way she says Latine or something like that so let me just play these quickly so you also heard her use the English word pure this is also a feature of the upper dialect I'll just play this again oh sorry gremlins okay here's the second one do you hear that Latine now compare this to here I have little clips from mainstream Ammani the young woman here is from very similar background as the one you've just heard Palestine so this is the word Palestinians the same word up there Palestine this is what happened Palestine can you hear that so it's Palestine with pa it's no longer t if you listen to this Palestine heard the difference okay I'll stop there sorry for talking so much thank you very much very rich presentation lots of research findings and examples the floor is open for comments or questions shop I was curious about the story in the shop that you mentioned the two female I was wondering whether you asked them or I didn't I mean that's an important question probably I don't know whether they would have known but my guess is that it was a woman who spoke with her of course unlike them yeah nice question I had a question on exactly the same thing I'm wondering do you think the customer the unpleasant customer she's horrible what do you mean unpleasant she said she was do you think all she was doing I mean I'm asking about her motivation do you think her motivation was purely like policing femininity or is was she perceiving the shop worker as rude like taking a rude tone or a rough tone yeah thank you very much for asking that it's very important and in fact one of my friends who my told the story immediately after it happened said something as kind as you said maybe she was trying to help them basically it's a very important question very we don't know the answer is we don't know I mean this needs further analysis but there are important observations as well as questions would she have done that to a young man I doubt it but that's only my intuition so gender has something to do with it would she have done it you asked about her origin I mean my guess is that she was not local Jordanian would she have done it had she been one now on the answer to my second question on the basis of other types of data I think not because what I heard in other situations because I myself do that all the time and of other girls now who are using the old dialect again is praise from the locals but all of these all of these questions are important totally I was just wondering now that they speak differently let's say a young woman at home and when they find work do you have an idea of which one will sort of win will they always use both if they're outside the workplace and inside the workplace or at one point the sex or the job will sort of win of course it's very difficult to predict of language change what is going on but based on for instance my experience as a Jordanian very many of my friends became by dialect and continue to be using one dialect at home and another outside home and normally it's the one outside home that eventually wins out and this is what happened really here but whether this situation is young women for instance they're beyond the stage of acquisition so they are native speakers of the other one of their traditional dialect they may or may not be native speakers of Ammani but what we can anticipate on the basis of what has happened is that their children are very likely to become native speakers of Ammani and maybe there will be a generation where their children will also acquire the original dialect as well as this now if you look at what's happening elsewhere I'm looking at this question in fact there is discrimination at home from very young age so as soon as they start school or something people even speak to the girls differently from the boys so you end up with a situation where the boys actually acquire can if they need to can speak the local dialect but the girls can't even if they wanted to because I was just wondering if this assistant the person who was at the shop they were ashamed so they said they thought that she would complain so then I suppose that if they had a little girl at home maybe they would want to prevent to go through the same deal and then they will start to influence that was the problem across exactly the same thing in my research in 1987 a mother said to me that because her daughter spoke differently from the boys and that was outside Ammani even insult she said that she speaks to the girl differently because this is nicer for a girl so even at home she spoke to her but yes because it's rather complex but there is always in the case of in Jordan generally speaking so I think 1970 was turning point very important turning point now let me try and recall this argument concisely so if you think about it this way Jordan didn't have a linguistic centre but not only that it's always been considered by the surrounding countries as being less urbanised so almost automatically it had less prestige so as soon as there was contact or exposure there's always been exposure so the others were more dominant so people started acquiring especially women the new way of speaking in particular but I think what was also men didn't to a large extent but I think also what was happening is that women were excluded from the workplace so there were only 16% of women who worked so it's men who if you like benefited from the values of the other one but in any case so it was women who introduced it in the community and women do I haven't investigated this but it just stands to reason to expect that if the women are doing this and based on what we know from other cases of language change a change is likely to succeed because they interact with young children much more frequently so had it remained that way probably the Jordanian one would have been a lot weaker than it is today I don't think it will disappear but what happened in 1970 in particular there was an internal war if you like it which was perceived as a war between indigenous people and non-indigenous people and in the aftermath of that and this is something that one can can find very easily you do tend to find that there was a strategy on the part of the state to include Jordanians in development so indigenous Jordanians in development so suddenly you see a lot more Jordanian men in political power and in the army so the Jordanian accent acquired new dimensions acquired the meaning of being local authentic from a large tribe and man and have power all of these are so women were excluded from that as well so they continued to be influenced by other things and I think that is when there was increase then when Palestinian men started to adopt Jordanian that's when the real gender divide started when so people from all backgrounds started to use the same variables sorry variants I was just wondering about the so the second generation and the third generation men the ones that do Palestinian men sorry and Jordanian women yes yes are there are there like kind of linguistic purely linguistic factors that are relevant like you know it strikes me that if you're kind of this is it's kind of at least semi-conscious or more than semi-conscious you're trying to project a certain image and you know people might do that more successfully in some areas of the lexicon for example than others like sometimes people call it they call it guh but sometimes they use the verb guh or guh or whatever right you know that verb in particular it's very attached to but then you know I could imagine with kind of you know less high frequency items people might find it harder to perhaps deviate from their local variety or something like that I just wonder if you can say yeah the analysis is now being refined that way but you're absolutely right absolutely so because commonly words do behave differently but there are words that are not subject to variation at all so there are names for instance agab no one says agab regardless of what background there are special expressions so which means disgusting you don't hear it with a and speakers tell you it sounds dirtier it sounds you know more effective with guh and there are speakers in the third generation who even adopt africation they put it on if they're fighting or if they want to express you know particular particular emotion about this and that and so on but this level of analysis I think is necessary but you're right absolutely but it's the same story with qah and ah in Syria as well where rural and yes and I don't know if it dates back to the accumulated knowledge of these societies of communities and it's dependent on you know because whether it's qah or ah qah or ah we still have more or less the same general dynamic yes yes I think so I think so I think the Syrian case like your region in particular is a lot more interesting not a lot more interesting but even more interesting because there if you look at power as it correlates with which variant actually it's the other way around isn't it so in your region the qah varieties and at the same time this is the standard variant so the qah dialects are associated with the dominant power exactly with a dominant social and yet socially it is it is stigmatized the qah I think this is my impression is subject to change maybe in the past few years it has witnessed different sort of phases so you might have your 1970 which is what happened in Jordan in fact exactly but I mean I was just like questioning or thinking rather about the ways that people acquire these norms in terms of normative normalization yeah I know it's a whole lot rather than in prescriptive direct verben prescriptive rules but rather the set of acquired absolutely these are extremely important questions and thanks for bringing them up because at the same time this happens this is only the end result I mean for someone to feel comfortable enough to come up to someone to say that it must have been almost the end process of normativeization so for instance if you look at soap operas if you look at tv programs comedy shows very often those who speak with girls have broken teeth they're ugly, they're dirty they're not sophisticated of course this works on the subconscious of course over the years and decades and this is what we see is the end result of that definitely and I think from that we have to end the session please join us for the degree at the Institute of Education but first thank you and I'm again for one of us thank you