Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The sub-variants of Arabic dialects are sub-strata of the High dominant Arabic. So is Syrian Colloquial Arabic (SCA), with its two main parts: the Levantine, specially 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 concern 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 qəltu/ʔelt dialect, an extension of the Mardini dialect of an urban status. Based on the study of Blanc 1964 and Jastrow 1978, Deir Ez-Zor city, as a part of the Euphrates group, the qeltu dialect is confined to the urban side of the city, while gilit is spoken in the surrounding countryside, which comprises the following classifications: namely, the urban, rural and Christians Deiri. This paper considers the social factors that affect language behavior, and the features that would be eliminated–vowel shift, code-switching/mixing–for being stigmatized. This paper also describes the effect of the external social factors, especially gender, war, religion, and urban/rural status, on the prestige criterion of choosing between what I would prefer to label it as a Syro-potamian dialect than the Mesopotamian dialect or the Levantine one.