Important Figures
He showed that speech varies in regular ways, not randomly.
Who is William Labov?
City mixing + leveling → a new common city speech.
What is koineization?
These social ties (tight or loose) help keep/change speech
What are social networks?
Common word order in these contact varieties.
What is SVO?
In Arabic morphology, feminine is treated as this (relative to masculine).
What is marked?
This early Arab grammarian noticed morphosyntactic differences among Arabic speakers and still evaluated them against Classical Arabic.
Who is Sibawayh?
Spread/visibility of Bedouin features in mixed settings.
What is Bedouinization?
This is the basic claim of the chapter: all human languages have it at every level.
What is language variation?
When that (contact) code becomes kids’ first language.
What is a creole?
In Al-Ahram obituaries, women’s names are often…
What are omitted/given only relationally?
She argued that close-knit social networks act as a conservative force, resisting change, based on Belfast communities.
Who is Lesley Milroy?
In the Arab context, shifting between High and Low registers in the same speaker is treated as this kind of variation.
What is diglossic code-switching?
These are the two types of constraints Labovian work talks about.
What are internal and external constraints?
A contact code with no native speakers.
What is a pidgin?
In the bargaining study, who was more direct/insistent?
Who are WOMEN?
He proposed that Arabic colloquial dialects developed through pidginization, creolization, and later decreolization.
Who is Kees Versteegh?
The phrase for “structured variation,” not chaos.
What is orderly heterogeneity?
Language is not just for communication but also reflects these...
What are social and historical processes?
Behnstedt says these can differ from geographic maps because they reflect people’s perceptions of dialect borders.
What are mental maps?
Some Arab women adopt this kind of talk to cope in male-dominated spaces or to gain fuller cultural participation.
What is “masculine talk”?
He framed language as a historical entity and said variation/change are “usage-based,” arising in replication and interaction.
Who is William Croft?
A line on a map that marks the boundary of a single linguistic feature.
What is an isogloss?
In the chapter’s examples on koineization and urban dialects, this is the social value that makes speakers drop rural/Bedouin features and adopt the city variety.
What is prestige?
These zones make drawing clear dialect borders hard because speakers mix or alternate between features.
What are transition zones?
In Morocco, the data showed that women who work tend to use more of this code to signal prestige and professional authority.
What is French?