![]() ![]() They are also not flawless and not always cutting-edge methodologically or theoretically. In reality, virtually no sociolinguistic study of Arabic that includes statistical modeling is free of qualitative insights. These studies have sparked debates between more quantitatively inclined sociolinguists and those who value qualitative analysis. Variationist studies of Arabic speech communities began almost two decades after Labov’s pioneering studies of American English and have flourished following the turn of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, the insight presented in studies of Arabic can and should be considered in the course of shaping a crosslinguistic sociolinguistic theory. In some respects, Arabic sociolinguistics is still lagging behind the field compared to variationist studies in English and other Western languages. However, in recent years, more nuanced studies of inter- and intra-speaker variation have seen the light of day. Traditional Arabic dialectology has dealt predominantly with geographical variation. It is spoken by some 300 million people in an area spanning roughly from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Given its abundance of dialects, varieties, styles and registers, Arabic lends itself easily to the study of language variation and change. We illustrate how general principles of sociolinguistic theory apply to the Arabic data and provide additional layers of sociolinguistic information that highlight the importance of diverse data for evaluating cross-linguistic generalisations. Our analysis of change is supported by historical accounts of variation and change in Arabic. In our explanation of recent changes in these dialects, we emphasise the role of social motivations for language change and the interactions between these social constraints and purely linguistic ones. We demonstrate that language change does not always follow expected phonological trajectories, even in cases where older changes are reconstructed to have operated along so-called universal patterns. ![]() ![]() We address the complexity of such factors by exploring data from several Arabic dialects in the eastern Arab World. It is received wisdom in variationist sociolinguistics that linguistic and social factors go hand in hand in structuring variability in language and any consequent instances of language change. ![]()
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