A Sociophonetic Study of Interdental Variation in Spoken Jordanian Arabic

This study examines the potential influence of linguistic and social forces on interdental variation in JA using Goldvarb application. A total of 1756 tokens were coded and analyzed for the three variables ((θ), (ð), (ðʕ)) in a corpus of 9 young speakers (7 female; 2 male) gathered in interviews.The sociolinguistic factors examined include the immediate phonological context, stress, word class, syllable and word position, frequency, sex of speakers, and urbanization. Data analysis shows that stopping is favored by the urban and semi-urban female speakers, while the stridents are exclusively favored among the urban group. Linguistically [t], shown to be the salient linguistic variant, is favored by preceding and following stop segments and by salient linguistic positions such as stressed syllables. On the other hand, [d] and [dʕ] appear to be favored in preceding non-stop segments; the linguistic conditioning of the stridents appears to be marginal due to insufficient occurrences.