Linguistic Variation in Zaouit Kounta Spoken Arabic -Lexical Level-

Abstract

Sociolinguistics is a large scope which studies language with reference to society. Our present research is concerned with the lexical variation that exists within language and even inside dialect. That phenomenon happens due to several reasons among them the social factors which are age, social class or ethnic origin, and gender, in addition to that the geographical origin which influences the way the speaker pronounces sounds, chooses the vocabulary. Lexical variation leads to the change of language in general and dialect in particular. This work is set to describe lexical variation in Zaouit Kounta Spoken Arabic and seeks the differences in choosing words that exist between its ksours (villages) within the same speech community , our aim is to analyze that sociolinguistic phenomenon in an attempt to show that within this small area which along 25km only is worth to be studied, the second aim of that dissertation is to show the variability between MSA and ZKSA, the third aim is show the influence of other language varieties in Touat dialect in general and ZKSA in particular. Before we tackle the field work of study, we introduced some linguistic key concepts which will occur along the study: language varieties, speech community, code switching and mixing, borrowing, language change and language variation in all levels of language, and lexical variation and its relation to diglossia, the second part of the research is devoted to the practical side of the study where we described the linguistic situation of Touat dialect, and then we discussed them separately in relation to lexical variation , we also referred to lexical variation between three different zones in Zaouit Kounta district i.e. villages or ksours (Tillouline, Anzegmir, and Zaouit Kounta the centre). In addition to that, we focus on differences between some neighboring ksours where the distance is so short which is limited between 2km and 4km. iii