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Parents and their children's variable language: Is it acquisition or more?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2016

RANIA HABIB
RANIA HABIB*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
*
Address for correspondence: Rania Habib, Syracuse University, 325 H. B. Crouse, Syracuse, NY 13244-0001; tel: 01-315-443-5490; fax: 01-315-443-5376; e-mail: rhabib@syr.edu
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Abstract

This study compares the use of the variable (q), which is realized as rural [q] and urban [ʔ], in the speech of twenty-two parents and their twenty-one children from the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. The study shows that children acquire the general gendered linguistic pattern of the community but do not replicate the linguistic frequencies that exist in their immediate environment. Boys and girls exhibit different linguistic behavior. Boys deviate from the non-local caregivers' proportions and approach men's local linguistic behavior, although their local variant proportions remain lower; girls, even those with local mothers, approach the women's supralocal variant proportions. The study shows that sociolinguistic variation is not acquired from adults from a very early age; it is acquired later in life after accepting and ascertaining the gendered linguistic differences and appropriateness norms.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 628 - 649
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

[*]

I would like to thank the children and their parents who participated in this study and made this research project possible. I am also grateful to Dr Paul H. Bern, who confirmed the accuracy of the statistics during the review process. I would also like to thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this paper.

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