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I would like to express my gratitude to the following people for their helpful advice and input: Penny Eckert, Sali Tagliamonte, Dennis Preston, Dominic Watt, Greg Guy, and Cathy Miller. I am grateful also to several anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Subhan Ghani was of great assistance with drawing and designing the map. Any remaining shortcomings or mistakes are, of course, mine.
Affrication in Arabic is a well-known phonological process most often attested to in modern Arabic dialects in the Gulf, Yemen, and Central and North-Central Arabia (see Holes, 1991, for a detailed account of the distribution of affrication in Arabia). In Arabic dialects in Central and North-Central Arabia (currently called Najd), the velar stops /k/ and /g/ are realized as two dental and affricated variants [ ] and [ ], respectively. This process is noted often to occur in the environment of the front vowels (Holes, 1991; Johnstone, 1963, 1967), as in [a il] 'food' and [bri: ] 'teapot'. For /k/, affrication can affect the stem and/or the suffix. For affrication affecting the suffix, the second-person singular feminine object/possessive suffix /-k/ is affricated into [- ], as in [mints] 'from you'.
The present study examines sociolinguistic variation and change in the use of [k] affrication as employed in Qaá¹£imi1Arabic (henceforth QA), a variety of Najdi Arabic mainly spoken in the Qaá¹£im province in central Saudi Arabia (see Figure 1). In particular, this study attempts to identify possible correlations of that variation with the linguistic environment and with social factors of speaker's age, gender, and educational level. It provides a glimpse at the effect of recent socioeconomic change on language use in this particular dialect. Figure 1.
The location of the Qaá¹£im province.
A fair number of studies have examined sociolinguistic variations and changes in a range of Arabic dialects in many Arab countries, including Egypt (e.g., Haeri, 1991, 1994; Schmidt, 1974, 1986), Jordan (e.g., Abd-el-Jawad, 1981, 1987; Al-Khatib, 1988; Al-Wer, 1997, 2002), Iraq (e.g., Abu-Haider, 1989), Bahrain (Holes, 1983, 1986, 1987), and Syria (e.g., Daher, 1999; Jassem, 1987; Kojak, 1983). However, most of the available research on Najdi Arabic has been carried out by traditional dialectologists by describing the general patterns of the...