Not-so-strange Bedfellows: Language Documentation and Sociolinguistics in Gaza

Linguistic exploration of Arabic dialects is still often carried out within the dialectological framework that emerged in the 19th century (Behnsdedt & Woidich 2013 for a full historical account). Sociolinguistic interest in Arabic dialects began in the 1970s-80s (Abdel-Jawad 1981). Interestingly, the two approaches currently exist side by side, with dialectologists collecting texts and compiling descriptive grammars and lexica, and variationists focusing on individual variables and their sociolinguistic evaluation. The emerging problem is that oftentimes the dialects investigated for these purposes have never been described beyond the rather narrow prism of the handful of variables analyzed.Thankfully, modern sociolinguistic research typically produces abundant data, recorded at very high quality and elicited from representative samples of speakers. These data lend themselves well to being transcribed, described and preserved (Schleef & Meyerhoff 2010 for the significance of transcription for sociolinguistics). This is especially important because of rapid changes occurring in Arabic dialects, which may be induced by language contact, migration and displacement (Al-Wer 1997, Hachimi 2007) or class and gender effects (Haeri 1996). This paper presents quantitative results from recent sociolinguistic studies conducted on the variable (Q) in the speech of Palestinian refugees in Gaza. These results suggest that phonological variation is split along gender lines. Women show a strong tendency to opt for the supralocal variant, glottal stop (Al-Wer 1997), while men overwhelmingly adopt a localized variant, [g]. The range of possible social meanings of this variable, its indexical field (Eckert 2008; Silverstein 2003; Wortham 2006), is used by the refugees to reflect identity formation and maintenance. The differing linguistic practices of women and men for (Q) aid in integrating speakers into a local identity frame, while maintaining a broader regional identity through relevant indexical meanings, tying community linguistic practices into larger processes of adequation – "long term pursuit of socially recognized sameness" (Bucholtz & Hall 2004).This type of analysis can potentially enrich Arabic sociolinguistics by taking investigations of linguistic variables out of the realm of discrete social categories while highlighting the interface between variationist sociolinguistics and anthropological theory, an approach already employed by many (non-Arabic) "3rd-wave" sociolinguists. What remains to be discerned is how such rich sociolinguistic analyses can simultaneously play a role in documenting the varieties in question. They clearly should play such a role, especially in the case of understudied varieties like Gaza for which descriptions have been limited to linguistic cartography (Bergsträßer 1915) and sporadic oral texts with only partial metadata (Salonen 1979-80, Barnea 1973). In the conclusion of this paper, a concrete proposal for better incorporation of descriptive and documentary techniques into the study of Arabic variation is discussed. We advocate augmenting sociolinguistic investigations with methodologies used by linguistic anthropologists and specialists in language documentation. Emphasis is placed on working with community members in the field, resulting in the potential to transcribe and translate portions of the data that lie outside of our immediate frame of analysis, while involving the community in the production of linguistic knowledge about their language varieties.