I was born and raised in Al-Ahsa in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia. I lived there until I became twenty-three then I moved to Abha in the Southern Province. My family is originally from Al-baha which is also in the Southern Province. I acquired the Arabic Eastern dialect when I was a child to talk to my peers and teachers in Al-Ahsa, however at home I spoke my parents' dialect that (which) is very different from the Eastern Province and from other Southern Province’s dialects. When I was at school I had different social relationships with people from different places in Saudi Arabia that lasts until I graduate from high school. They all speak different dialects and accents; therefore I acquired different pronunciations, different words and different expressions. After my marriage, I moved to Abha. I used to be a teacher and I communicated with wide range of people who have different backgrounds and therefore different cultures. My Eastern dialect did not help to survive in such an environment. So I tried to create a dialect that is more understood by people in Abha. Therefore, living in different regional dialects makes me end up with having a mixture of dialects and accents that makes it hard for the Saudi listener to predict where I am originally from.
Classic Arabic considered to be the high variety and other dialects are low variety. I learned classical Arabic from pre-school until I graduated from undergraduate school. Children learn classical Arabic from an early age and they are asseste according to their proficiency in it. Memorizing versus from the holy Kuraan and parts of Prophet Muhammad’s hadeeth which are in classical Arabic is required in Saudi schools. I learned from an early age that Classical Arabic is...
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...ore efficiently than in informal ones. I find it hard to use the right words to congrats someone for being engaged or for being pregnant. I also find it hard to insist about an invitation or to show compassion and concern. Part of this is cultural differences but in many cases it is me who lack the experience of dealing with different styles and registers.
In text messaging and computer chatting, I use my dialect when I speak to young Arab speakers. However I use classic Arabic with older people and in more formal situations. When I like to read literature or write my diary I prefer using classic Arabic. Many young Arab speakers insert some English words in their speech such as cute, weekend, nice, love you, please and thank you. With older people who did not travel a lot or did not have higher education it is not acceptable to use English words in communication.
As a child, I struggled in school and I found that the more my literacies overlapped, the more I learned. There was a point when I worried that I would never become anything. I had not really thought about how I got to the point I am now, but looking back, I can see that somethings made a big impact on my life, education and the way I learn. Social movements and cultural events as well as Historical and political events influence all of our literacies and education starting at birth. The easiest way for me to express this is going through the events in my life as they affected me.
Have you ever been to another country, state, or even city and realized how different your accent may be? Have you been asked to repeat a word or phrase that you may say differently? Sometimes we were asked for a good laugh, but that’s not always the case. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldúa and “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, both authors use personal narrative to demonstrate how their lives and identity are affected by their language and culture.
Steven Pinker distinguishes the difference between talking to man and women. Pinker showed a lady that was comfortable talking to another lady and the lady became angry when her talking to a man, not women (Pinker 2007 .p112, 113). People used intricacies method to achieve their needs and emotion instead of saying what they need to say directly. (Pinker 2007 .p113) Furthermore, even in a sexual situation, people twist and turn around and turn around their words. For example, “would you like to come up and see my etching?” (Pinker 2007.p113) Moreover, people use a kind word to order something from someone else without making a demand to the receiver or using indirect speeches to avoid a problem that may happen by mistake. (Pinker, 2007
Through the process of acquiring knowledge in this course, I have learned countless aspects about my own self. Amidst the very challenges I faced, the act of communication, management, and leadership, are among them. Being bilingual, my communication skills are on par yet at times hinder me from articulating my intention precisely as I have meant them. With every socialization I have made, I have striven to do better and to be better. I have learned that although you may consider yourself “fluent” in a foreign language, there are phrases or intonations to which come across as something entirely different from what you intended to say causing the message to be lost between the barrier of the two communicators.
In my words, Sociological imagination is a way for a person to look at their life as a result of their interaction with society. It can explain why a life is lived with way it is lived and all events, decisions, successes, and failures that have occurred. In my life I have encountered many situations, problems, opportunities and events. I can use my sociological imagination to examine these and figure out why I am the way I am and also why I have chosen to do certain things
Whenever I travel to another part of the US or another country in the world I find myself taking on the vocal and speech patterns of a native speaker. I lose my own way of speaking, and adopt that area's accent.
During my demonstration speech, I was affected by my speech anxiety. Some of the viewable symptoms were the shaking of my hands and also the stuttering of speech. I was able to control myself and relax after I started getting into my information. I did use some of the suggested relaxation techniques to relieve my anxiety. Before I got up to speak I thought confident of myself to help give me courage and confidence.
I once heard someone say, “I can hear your Washingtonian accent.” “Me?” I questioned him in disbelief. “Yeah,” he replied. Then with a little more cheek than I should of, I responded with, “no ya don’t!” and walked away. I remember thinking to myself he was the one that was dropping letters out of words when he spoke. Later on, I realized why I had responded the way I did. I had a perception about accents and dialects that I had subconsciously acquired as I grew up.
The story of my history as a writer is a very long one. My writing has come full circle. I have changed very much throughout the years, both as I grew older and as I discovered more aspects of my own personality. The growth that I see when I look back is incredible, and it all seems to revolve around my emotions. I have always been a very emotional girl who feels things keenly. All of my truly memorable writing, looking back, has come from experiences that struck a chord with my developing self. This assignment has opened my eyes, despite my initial difficulty in writing it. When I was asked to write down my earliest memory of writing, at first I drew a blank. All of a sudden, it became very clear to me, probably because it had some childhood trauma associated with it.
I was born and raised in Vietnam, so I naturally observed my culture from my family and my previous schools. I learned most of my culture by watching and coping the ways my family do things. My family and my friends all spoke Vietnamese, so I eventually knew how to speak and understand deeply about my language as I grew up. At home, my mom cooked many Vietnamese foods, and she also taught me to cook Vietnamese food. So I became accustom Vietnamese food. I also learned that grandparents and parents in my culture are taken care of until they die. At school, I learned to address people formally and greet higher-ranking people first. In Vietnamese culture, ranking and status are not related to wealth, so they are concerned with age and education.
My socialization started from before my birth. My parents knew that I would be born female and, therefore, bought me pink clothes and other “girl” items. I was born into a lower-middle-class family with both of my parents working a factory job. I spent a lot of my infancy with my grandmother who would watch me when my parents worked. When my parents came home, they would shower me with affection and nurture my needs the best that they could. I would be fed, bathed, and everything that is needed to keep a baby clean and happy. My parents would make sure that I was cared for.
To date, there has been limited sociolinguistic research conducted on the influence of non-linguistics factors on various using kinship terms in Sorani ...
“You have such an interesting accent; where are you from?” That is the question I have heard over and over again since I moved from Puerto Rico to Houston, Texas. While aspiring to a more challenging educational environment from the one exposed to, I made the decision of moving with my aunt and uncle to the United States. Consequently, I sacrificed the time spent with my family and discerned the obstacles that were prone to surface for an individual whose native language is not English.
There are three reasons for selecting Hasawi for this study. First, there is little previous work related to Hasawi even though it is considered an enormous dialect because it is expanded to other Gulf countries, such as Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates. Thus, HD is also spoken as a minor dialect in the previous mentioned countries so that Hasawi is sometimes called Gulf Arabic 'Khaliji'. Secondly, the emergence of a new dialect a few years ago which is Modern Hasawi, a blend of old Hasawi and Najdi, threatens the existence of the original Hasawi in Saudi Arabia in spite of the massive expansion of the dialect to the neighboring countries. Finally, the dialect of Al-Ahsa is seen as a humorous matter among other Saudi dialects because it is hard to understand (Bassiouney, 2010). Probably the cause of such difficulty refers to the sociolinguistic impact of non-Arabian languages, such as Farsi 'Persian' and Turkish. However, it would be proven at the end of this paper that this unattractive dialect has unique acoustic features.
Arabs primarily speak Arabic with “variations in the dialects, words, and meanings in different Arab countries” (Lipson & Dubble, 2007, p. 43). Despite the different variations, most Arabs understand each other. All Muslims are required to read the Koran that is written in Arabic. While they all read this, not all speak Arabic fluently, or at all in some cases. There are some ethnic minorities that speak their own language, and are not understood by most of the surrounding populations. In the United States, nearly 600,000 people speak Arabic in their own homes; professionals and business p...