ABSTRACT
There has been a surge of interest in sociolinguistic research which focuses on the outcome of dialect contact, especially since the publication of Peter Trudgill’s book Dialects in Contact (Trudgill 1986). A wide range of situations have been documented, such as the dialects of new towns (Kerswill and Williams 2000), dialect boundary regions (Britain 1991), immigrant groups in the city (Kerswill 1994), and the two most recent publications on the formation of New Zealand English (Gordon et al. 2004; Trudgill 2004). The Amman project, on which the present chapter is based, is an investigation of the outcome of contact between Jordanian and Palestinian dialects, which are the dialects spoken by the first generations of the vast majority of the city’s population. The analysis of the Amman data is based on the theoretical principles of variation theory, and benefits directly from the accumulation of knowledge in dialect contact research.
