Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The sub-variant Arabic dialects are sub-strata of high dominant Arabic. The Syrian Colloquial Arabic has two main parts; the Levantine, especially the Damascene dialect that has the upper hand over the other dialects and the Mesopotamian - the dialects of the eastern part of Syria. My main focus is the eastern part, specifically Deir Ez-Zor city. The geo-social nature and socio-historical dimension of the city, sharing its border with Iraq, created an abundant milieu for the linguistic variations of the local dialects along with the extra-linguistic variables that predetermined the co-existence of three distinct dialects; the Deiri qəltu Dialect- of an urban status, the Shawi gələt dialect-of a rural status, and the Christian dialect - an extension of the Mardini dialect of an urban status. The paper considers the social factors that affect language behavior and the features that would be eliminated - vowel shift, code-switching/mixing- for being stigmatized. Besides, describing the effect of the external social factors, especially gender, war, religion and urban/rural status, on the prestige criterion of choosing between the Mesopotamian dialects and the Levantine ones. I argue that conceptualization of the Deiri dialect is a substratum of the pre-Arabic languages with the influence of Persian, Turkish, English, and French on formulation of the phonetic system of the dialect.