Variation in the Speech of Two Palestinian Immigrant Groups

Abstract Introduction. This study is a sociolinguistic study that investigates the speech of two Palestinian groups. The first group immigrated to Jordan from Palestine in 1948, and the other group immigrated to Jordan in 1967. The political status of the two groups at the beginning of their immigration played a major role in the speech of these two groups. The first group immigrated to Jordan when it was considered a Palestinian group, and the second immigrated when it was considered a Jordanian group because Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950. This political status played role in determining the kind of variation that occurred in their speech. The first group was treated as Palestinian refugees, which minimized them from a social perspective. Thus, the study shows that the middle-aged and younger generations of this group abandoned their dialect, and 98% of them adopted the local variant. The second group was treated as Jordanian, having simply migrated from one part in the country, namely, the West Bank, to another part of it, namely, the East Bank (Jordan). The study found a strong correlation between an individual’s identity and the political status granted by a country. Though both groups consist of Palestinians, the study shows that the members of each group behaved linguistically differently depending how they are perceived politically and legally in Jordan. Conclusion. Palestinians emigrated in two large waves from their homeland to Jordan as the result of war. The first took place in 1948, and the second took place in 1967. The study shows that the linguistic behavior of both groups differs. The social and the political situations that each group found itself in determined, to a great extent, the linguistic behavior they adopted. Some of the statistical methods I used: I have used percentages and SPSS to support my results. A good sample in this study is the following: Young Silawi females used the [?] variant in 90.0% of the total number of occurrences of the (Q) variable in their speech. SPSS analysis shows that gender has a very powerful significance in the use of the [?] variant among the young age group (P