Geolinguistic diglossia in the gulf cooperation council countries

Zusammenfassung

This sociolinguistic research falls within the broad field of diglossic cross-cultural communication, the social evaluation of accents and social identity theories. The study of dialectal variations in the pronunciation of Educated Standard Arabic (ESA) is central to the understanding of the degree of agreement that the informants showed regarding their interpersonal evaluations in terms of the standard accented varieties and according to the standardised rating constructs (see Wiggins and Trobst, 1999). The aim of this research was to analyse a specific international reference framework of standard dialectal variations in the Arabic dialectal continuum from Gulf Cooperation Council countries between men and women alike who are likely to attach more prestige to a specific oral language variety. This research proposes that the degree of agreement that the informants showed for a particular accent is a determinant in the implementation of effective communication in order to achieve concord and harmony in interpersonal cross-cultural interactions...