The Arabic dialect of a Šawāwī community of Northern Oman

This article examines the Arabic dialect of a Šawāwī community of northern Oman. The Šawāwī are nomadic pastoralists who live in the mountainous interior of Oman, and are distinguished from the sedentary populace of the towns and villages of the mountain region by their lifestyle, patterns of social interaction, and dialect. The aim of the present study is to describe certain structural features of the dialect and to place the findings within the broader Omani typological context. The primary classificatory division of Omani dialects is that of the familiar socially based sedentary (S) versus Bedouin (B) dichotomy, the former being spoken among the historically settled populations of the mountain regions, and the latter by the nomadic and recently settled communities of the deserts. In the present study it is shown that in spite of the nomadic background of the Šawāwī, their dialect conforms in all respects with the Omani S type (Holes 1989, 1996). The results of the present study illustrate that the division of dialects into the S and B types does not correspond with a set of clear-cut social and economic contrasts to the same degree as in the northern Arab world (Holes 1996:50)