Staff in the Department of Arabic
Mr Amin Alshangiti
Contact Mr Amin Alshangiti (email at a.m.m.alshangiti@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
LEXICAL BORROWINGS IN IMMIGRENT SPEECH
A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF HASSANIYA SPEAKING IMMIGRANTS IN MEDINA (SAUDI ARABIA)
Project Overview:
This research seeks to highlight the sociolinguistic situation of one of the most important speech communities in Medina (the second Holy place of Muslims); the Shanaqeṭa community. These community speakers originally emigrated from Mauritania during the 20th century, which triggered by religious motivations (performing Hajj and Umrah and visiting the Prophet's Mosque in Medina), in conjunction with French colonialism of Mauritania, when Mauritania became officially attached to the French colonies in West Africa in 1904 (Al-edrīsi, 2009:22).
This research proposes to employ the Labovian sociolinguistic variationist and interview method (Labov, 1994). This research will then be divided into six main chapters: chapters 1-5 a study of lexical borrowings of Ḥassānīya from both varieties of HJA (Urban, and Bedouin Dialects); and the last chapter will be an attempt to create a thematic lexicon of Urban Ḥassānīya, the dialect spoken by the Shanaqeṭa Community in Medina. This thematic lexicon will collect Ḥassānīya vocabulary, indicating the linguistic changes (at phonological, morphological, lexical and semantic levels) that have occurred in Ḥassānīya in Medina, in comparison to either Classical Ḥassānīya Arabic (CHA) or the Urban Ḥassānīya Arabic (UHA) spoken in Mauritania. This thematic lexicon will hopefully trigger future studies of Ḥassānīya under different sociolinguistic disciplines, especially 'dialect contact'. In addition, this Ḥassānīya thematic lexicon will be complementary with the work on Ḥassānīya lexicon conducted during the 20th century. It will, hopefully, encourage conducting more English studies of HA, which suffers from relative insufficiency of lexical works in English.