Abstract

The study of dialects may be subsumed under the very broad rubric of colloquialism which comes at the bottom of the formality versus informality scale. We focus on the Najd dialect perception, as the central dialect in Saudi Arabia, among Saudi male college students. By conducting two experiments, questionnaires and follow-up semi-structured interviews, on 137 male students, user-based frequencies of the topper 50 Najdi words are generated. The second phase aims at semantically categorizing the topper content words so that conclusions can be drawn about the inclination of using Najdi words among the college students. Results show that the categorization of the retrieved 50 Najdi words, according to the part of speech, demonstrates that the most applauded Najdi Arabic words are verbs and adjectives. Synonyms are even retrievable from this method of compilation. Nouns are the most resistant part of speech at the morphological level.

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