Stigmatized Identities and Phonological Accommodation to the Urban Dialect in Palestine: A Sociolinguistic Study

Abstract

Communication accommodation is concerned with people's linguistic behavior during oral interaction with others. Convergence with the listener is one of the most salient features of accommodation that is determined by various contextual, regional, social and psychological factors. This paper investigates the tendency to use the urban phonological and non-rural features in the speech of villagers who come from rural settings for educational purposes in the town of Abu-Dees in Palestine. It also attempts to reveal the potential goals behind this accommodative linguistic behavior. The study traces how nine phonological rural sounds in the speech of the target group are shifted to the urban varieties. Through quantitative data, the study found that villagers accommodate to the urban dialect in different degrees. Rural phonemes, mainly the palatal affricate /ʧ/ and the interdental /ðˁ/, are missing the ground to the urban equivalents, and from a sociolinguistic perspective, the results are significant and interpretable. The significance of the study arises from the fact that the findings showed that some villagers relinquish their rural varieties for the sake of imitation, prestige, softness and bullying avoidance.