Dialect variation among Omani migrants in Muscat: The construction of social identity through style shifting

Intraspeaker variation is a social practice that indexes social meaning and reflects speakers’ identity affiliations in disparate speech contexts. This study examines the stylistic variation in the use of phonological and morphosyntactic features of the dialect of speakers who migrate from the city of Nizwa in Oman to the capital Muscat. These features are: vowel labialization, vowel syncope, the future prefix, the third person feminine singular suffix and the yes/no question particle. The sample consisted of 38 speakers and data was collected following the variationist paradigm. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted to elicit casual speech while controlled tasks, including a picture naming task, a map task and a translation yielded monitored speech data. Results from this study are in line with sociolinguistic research which shows that speakers use language variably in different situational contexts (Labov, 1972; Schilling-Estes, 2006). Yet, the direction of the stylistic change in this study is shown to be opposite to that documented in the literature as it is revealed that Nizwa migrants increase their use of their local variants in the careful speech, except for the variable of labialization. This observation indicates that the migrants’ deliberate changes in language use are an attempt to reflect their local “Nizwa” identity, yet the change can sometimes be resorted to as a means to align with the prestige of the capital. Such an unusual result confirms that geographical mobility does not only lead to contact-induced change, but rather that dialect maintenance can be an expected outcome, as certain local dialectal features can be retained so as to index ethnic affiliations.