Bidirectional linguistic change in rural child and adolescent language in Syria
Investigating the spread of the urban feature the glottal stop in place of the rural voiceless uvular stop [q] in the speech of rural children and adolescents in the Syrian village, Oyoun Al Wadi, a bidirectional linguistic change is observed. Girls retain their mothers' urban feature in preadolescence and adolescence; boys who initially acquire the urban feature start switching to the rural feature around age eight and increase their use of this feature with age. Thus, the observed variation a nd changes are gender and age related and result from different meanings associated with urban and rural sounds. Preadolescence emerges as the period in which kids are emotionally involved in building a social identity, indicating early development of soc iolinguistic competence.