ABSTRACT
Since its establishment in 1932, Saudi Arabia has witnessed extreme socioeconomic and political changes that have reshaped the social and cultural structure of the evolving Saudi society. The huge socioeconomic changes, particularly the rapid urbanization process associated with mass internal migration to urban centers, have transformed settlement patterns and lifestyles of most Saudi people throughout the country, which has resulted in the emergence of a new national identity in Saudi Arabia, with no previous cohesive national integration and identification creating social and cultural effects. This chapter explores the linguistic outcomes of such changes at the national level, i.e., the emergence of a national shared variety (koiné) based on a newly developed Saudi national identity. Drawing on perceptual dialectology, this study examines perceptions that the Saudi people hold about the emerging linguistic koiné and its perceived spatial placement and extent, using hand-drawn maps of the closest Saudi dialect with which it is most linguistically and socioculturally associated. The analysis of composite maps based on 674 hand-drawn maps demonstrates that the majority of respondents perceived Najdi Arabic, in general, and the dialect spoken in the capital city, Riyadh, in particular, as the closest variety to the Saudi national koiné, which is associated closely with Saudi national identity as well as an emerging urban linguistic model. Further examination of the results indicates that slight differences also exist among age and gender groups in terms of their perceived spatial identification of the emerging koiné based on their aggregated levels of agreement, as shown in composite maps. The current findings reveal the need for further examination of the dynamics of linguistic identity in the Arabic-speaking world and the importance of incorporating perceptual dialectology methods in the study of language ideologies and attitudes for its better visualization and analysis.
