Dialect Identification in Saudi Dialects: A Socio-Phonetic Approach

Abstract

Dialect identification research as a subset of perceptual dialectology has largely debated whether the presence of phonetic/phonological cues can significantly boost listeners’ recognition of a speaker’s place of origin. Therefore, this paper developed the dialect identification method, proposed by Preston (1999), by controlling the presence of phonetic cues, which was achieved by presenting 15 pairs; each pair had the same meaning in the two researched dialects and differed only in one vowel segment. Using an online questionnaire, this study examined the perceptions of a demographically represented sample of 289 Saudi towards phonetic differences in two main dialects in Saudi Arabia: the Najdi and Hijazi dialects. The results revealed that listeners’ overall identification of the speakers’ origin was highly accurate for both the Hijazi and Najdi dialects at 83.2% and 86.3%, respectively. Second, following Le page’s (1980) model of predicting language variation and change, the results revealed that both dialects did not show language variation and change. Third, the effects of controlling phonetic cues were successful. However, this research argues that successful identification was boosted by other linguistic and cultural factors specific to Hijazi and Najdi dialects. Therefore, we encourage researchers to further test the developed methodology for other dialects where cultural and linguistic factors are not as salient.