A change in the usage of negators in Abha Arabic through dialect levelling

Abstract EN

The current study adopts a quantitative approach to investigate the usage of the four negators in the Abha dialect, namely mā, lis, lim, and lā.

The Abha dialect, which is spoken in Abha city in southwest Saudi Arabia, seems to be making less frequent use of some of these negative particles, which is resulting in being simplified in the dialect.

Previous studies have shown that young educated speakers drive this simplification process.

This study shows that in case of negators, there is a kind of ‘levelling’ taking place among middle-aged speakers and that a major shift in usage is being led by younger speakers.

Our results show that the negator mā substitutes the other negators lis, lim and lā in some cases.

This substitution is occurring in both verbal and non-verbal predications.

Changes seem to occur among ʕasīri speakers more than among Qaћṯāni speakers.

One possible explanation is that this change is indicative of a shift towards a variety of Abha dialect that is used by the Qaћṯāni and that is regarded as more prestigious, but this does not seem to be the case as these negative particles are also becoming less used by Qaћṯāni speakers.

Overall, the results show that both groups are levelling their own dialects towards a common variety.