Dialect contact and change in Gaza City

This thesis examines dialect contact between the indigenous residents of Gaza City and refugees originally from the city of Jaffa, roughly 40km north of the Gaza Strip. The study that follows offers a quantitative sociolinguistic investigation of the outcomes of this contact in the speech of 22 residents of Gaza City. The sample has been divided along the lines of dialect background, biological sex, and has been separated into three age groups corresponding with major life stages in Palestinian history and collective memory. These social categorizations are examined alongside two linguistic variables; the uvular stop (q) and the feminine ending (ah).Analysis of the data has revealed that for (q) a significant correlation exists with dialect background and gender, with female speakers and speakers of a Jaffa dialect background showing the highest tendencies to favour the glottal [Ɂ] realization for (q). For the feminine ending (ah), analysis shows a significant correlation with dialect background and age, with speakers from the elderly generation and speakers of a Jaffa dialect background showing the strongest tendency to favour the raisesd [e] realization for the feminine ending. Additionally, results suggest that in the speech of indigenous Gazans the feminine ending is not in fact a sociolinguistic variable, maintaining the unraised [a] realization almost categorically. At the same time, a clear tendency is present in the data for speakers of a Jaffa dialect background to use the raised Jaffa variant, [e], but less with each successive generation, possibly suggesting a change in progress towards the loss of this raised urban Palestinian dialect feature as a result of dialect contact.