Phonological stylistic variation: A case study of Ghamdi migrants in Mecca

Intra-speaker variation, stylistic variation or style shifting is a common linguistic behavior among bi-dialectal speakers where they shift across different styles.Publications on style shifting in Arabic are, however, scarce.The few available Arabic studies in this field only investigate shifting between modern standard Arabic and local Arabic dialects, while no study looks at what is found across local Arabic dialects.Therefore, this paper is an attempt to fill in this gap; it examines style shifting between two modern Arabic dialects, Ghamdi and Meccan, in Saudi Arabia.It builds on phonological data collected from recorded sociolinguistic interviews with a female and a male Ghamdi migrant in Mecca.The target linguistic features are the variants of the diphthongs /ai/ and /aw/.The occurrence percentage is calculated for each variant.The style shifting is analyzed and interpreted within the speaker design framework by using a situational-types model to predict phonological selection.The results reveal that both speakers do style shifting specifically to express different social meanings and achieve different personal goals.At the same time, they are definitely influenced by the values and norms of their native societies and cultures.