THE STUDY OF FAIFI SPEAKERS' LINGUISTIC ACCOMMODATION

Author

Mohammed Alfaifi, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

5-1-2014

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Applied Linguistics

First Advisor

Berry, James

Abstract

This study examined the use of communication accommodation among speakers of Faifi Arabic. Twenty participants from the Faifi speech community were selected based on two social factors: age and locality. The participants were divided into two age groups of 18-35 (younger generation) and 45 and over (older generation). With regards to locality, half the participants came from the Faifi Mountains, where the Faifi dialect is spoken natively, and half from cities in Saudi Arabia outside the Faifi Mountains. The data were collected by online survey and examined through statistical analysis via SPSS software version 18.0 for Mac OS X, 10.6.8. The findings revealed that Faifi speakers generally chose convergence communication accommodation in their speech when communicating with speakers from other dialects of Saudi Arabia. With respect to the examined social factors, the results of the effects of age in the communication accommodation indicated that the younger generation accommodated their speech more than the older generation. Further, the results reflected that locality had significant effects on the process of communication accommodation within the Faifi speech community. It was found that Faifi speakers who live out of Faifi Mountains used divergence accommodation when speaking with someone from their speech community and they probably did so to show their identity and to achieve the group solidarity.