التحول أو الإبقاء اللغوي (دراسة لغوية اجتماعية حول استخدام اللغة الفارسية بين الكويتيين من أصول إيرانية) (باللغة الإنجليزية).

الملخص

It is widely acknowledged by sociolinguists that when minority groups and their respective languages come into contact with a majority group, choices of a language or a variety of language are deployed by different participants in different social contexts according to interlocutors, settings etc. Literature on dialect contact scenarios suggests that in contact situations, changes may influence the phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of minority (and majority) groups. A relevant kind of linguistic change to the present study is the gradual movement away from the habitual use of an ethnic language to the use of the majority language. Sociolinguists believe that whenever two languages or two varieties of a language are complimentarily distributed in a given speech community, diglossic communication will eventually take place. However, the movement away from the ethnic language is referred to by sociolinguists as language shift. One fact of the linguistic situation of the state of Kuwait is that Farsi is one of the languages that exists in the linguistic repertoire of Kuwaitis. It is worthwhile mentioning that Farsi is heavily spoken by many Kuwaitis either at home or in other domains. But I would like to assume that Farsi speakers are shifting more and more to Arabic.
This study was meant to verify and shed more light on Kuwaiti Ajams’ use of Farsi and to investigate the extent to which they have shifted to Kuwaiti Arabic or maintained Farsi. Implicational scales were provided, showing patterns of language choice among two Kuwaiti Ajam Families living in two different neighbourhood. Their choices were then examined through analysing their social networks. Despite the fact that the analysis has clearly shown factors such as migration, religion and intermarriage of relative importance, the social network of members of the two Families proved to be extremely crucial in language maintenance and shift scenarios. Age and gender, on the other hand, were not as significant as social network. Moreover, the analysis clearly indicates that shift from Farsi to KA has already occurred among the grandchildren’s generation of Family 2. Consequently, it could be argued that Farsi in Kuwait is likely to be extinct within the next one or two generations.