Journal articles on the topic 'Arabic as spoken in Irbid City'

The paper investigates the foreign words used in spoken Jordanian Arabic in Irbid city. It also examines the causes behind using them. The data are collected by means of direct interviews and observations. The sample of the study was chosen from fifty participants living in Irbid city. They were thirty males and twenty females who cover different ages, genders and different educational background. The results show that Jordanians use different borrowed words in their daily conversations. English and Turkish are the main source of borrowing these words.

All major languages in the world have minor, categorical counterparts known as dialects. Although there exists one standardized version of the language, the dialects share features with that language that are common and some which are distinctly different. This paper talks about the linguistic dynamic extant amongst the population in the North Jordanian city of Irbid. Through a phonological, morpho-syntactic analysis of their speech in contrast with the so called standardized Jordanian, This paper attempts to discover certain feature distinctions in the North Jordanian speech and more specifically in the Arabic Spoken in Irbid region.

The study of silence has not got much concern in the Arab world in general and in Jordanian Arabic in particular. The purpose of the current study is to seek to understand the practice and perception of silence in casual conversation in Jordanian society. Twelve dyadic conversations were conducted for 30 minutes each. The participants were 24 university students at Yarmouk University (Jordan-Irbid): twelve males and 12 females. They were categorised into two main groups: friends and strangers. Ninety seconds are analysed from the beginning, the middle, and the end of each conversation. The theoretical framework of this study draws on Turn-Taking system, ethnography of communication Speech Act Theory and Grice's Conversational. One of the more significant findings to emerge from this study is that silence is functional and meaningful in Jordanian society. It also has different interpretations in different contexts depending on the relationship between the interlocutors, the context of situation and the topic.

<p class="1"><span lang="X-NONE">The present paper investigates the emotive and expressive socio-pragmatic function in the Jordanian parent-child interactions in Irbid City, Jordan. A sample of 100 children from different areas of Irbid was chosen randomly from schools in Irbid governorate in North Jordan. It consisted of pupils at grade 5 who are 11 years old. Half of the sample were males, whereas the second half were females. A questionnaire of 5 items was directed to the school children to measure the expressive and emotive socio-pragmatic function. The results showed that parent-child interactions in Jordanian Arabic exhibit the emotive and expressive socio-pragmatic function. The results also showed that parents' interactions affect the children's personality and behavior positively through applying certain tactics and styles. </span></p>

Slang language has become the most used language in the most countries. It has almost become the first language in the social media, websites and daily conversations. Moreover, it has become used in many conferences to clarify information and to deliver the required purpose of them. Therefore, this great spread of slang language over the world. In Jordan indicates that it is important to know meanings of Jordanian slang vocabularies. Mainly, In research system, we created a system framework allows users to restore Arabic information depending on queries that are written in slang language and this framework was made basically by context-free grammar to convert from slang to classical and vice versa. In addition, to conclude with, we will apply it on the colloquial slang in North of Jordan specifically; Irbid, Ajloun, Jerash, Mafraq and AlRamtha city. As well as, we will make a special file for Non_Arabic words and the stop words too. After we made an evaluation for the system relying on the results of recall, precision and F-measure where the results of precision about 0.63 for both researches slang and classical query, and this indicates that the system supports searching in Jordanian slang language. The purpose of this research is to enhance Arabic information retrieval, and it will be a significant resource for researchers who are interested in slang languages. As well as, it helps tie communities together.

The aim of this paper is to study Regressive vowel harmony induced by a suffixal back round vowel in the Libyan Arabic dialect spoken in the city of Misrata. The skeletal structure in the collected words is a /CVCVC-/ stem followed by the third person plural suffix /-u/. Consequently, the derived form of the examined words becomes /CVCVCV/. Following a rule of re-syllabification, the coda of the ultimate syllable in the stem becomes the onset of the newly formed syllable (ultimate in the derived form). Thus, in the presence of the suffix /-u/ in the derived form, all vowels in the word must harmonise with the [+round] feature of /-u/ unless there is a high front vowel /i/ intervening. In such cases, the high front vowel is defined as an opaque segment that is incompatible with the feature [+round]. Syllable and morpheme boundaries within words do not seem to contribute to blocking the regressive spreading of harmony. An autosegmental approach to analyze these words is adopted here. It is concluded that there are two sources in underlying representations for regressive vowel harmony in Libyan Arabic. One source is floating [+round] and another source is [+round].

The following description of Hausa is based on the variety of the language spoken in Kano, Nigeria. The sample text is transcribed from a recording of a male native of Kano in his late 30's. This variety of Hausa is considered “standard”. Though Kano is a large urban center with some internal variation in speech, the sound inventory is relatively homogeneous within the city and surrounding area. Kano Hausa is the variety most commonly heard on national and regional radio and television broadcasts in Nigeria as well as most international broadcasting, such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Moscow, and Voice of America. Kano Hausa is therefore familiar throughout the Hausa speaking areas of Nigeria as well as Hausa speaking communities in Niger, Ghana, and other areas outside northern Nigeria. Hausa has a standard orthography, in use since the 1930's and also based on the Kano variety. It is familiar to all Hausa speakers literate in the Romanized orthography. (Many Hausas are also literate in Arabic orthography, a variety of which has been used to write Hausa, probably for several centuries. The Arabic orthography for Hausa is less standardized than the Roman orthography and has little formally published literature.)

AbstractThis study investigates the effect of linguistic and social factors (age, gender, and level of education) on the patterns of variation in the affrication of [] for [k] in the stem and suffix in the informal speech of 72 speakers of Qaṣīmī, a local dialect of Najdi Arabic, spoken in the Qaṣīm province in central Saudi Arabia. Findings indicate that affrication is significantly favored in the phonological context of front vowels, particularly the high front ones. Whereas suffix-based affrication is categorically used as [-], stem affrication is strongly correlated with the age, educational level, and gender of the speaker. In particular, older uneducated speakers from both sexes tend to maintain the use of the local variant [], whereas younger and middle-aged educated speakers, particularly women, increasingly shift toward the use of the supralocal variant [k]. The present findings are suggestive of patterns of variation that are typical in regional-dialect leveling, wherein the supralocal variant(s) associated with the major city dialect is (are) diffusing outward, at the expense of traditional and socially marked variant(s), by speakers of smaller towns' dialects. The substantial socioeconomic changes that Saudi Arabia has undergone in the last half century are suggested to have triggered and accelerated the linguistic shift.

Zwara Berber is a variety of Nafusi (ISO 639-3; Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016) which belongs to the eastern Zenati group within northern Berber (where Berber is the scientific term for Tamazight), a branch of Afro-Asiatic. Zwara (Zuwārah, Zuwara, Zuāra, Zuara, Zouara) is a coastal city located at 32.9° N, 12.1° E in Libya. The speakers refer to themselves as /at ˈwil.lul/ (also /ajt ˈwil.lul/) ‘those of Willul’ and to their specific variety of the language as /t.ˈwil.lult/ ‘the language of Willul’. Having no official status during the Italian colonization of Libya and the first period after the country's independence in 1951, repression of the language became severe after the Cultural Revolution of 1973. Its propagation through teaching and the media fell under a constitutional ban on the denial of the Arab identity of the state, and qualified as such as treason, a capital offense. Until the revolution of 2011 (‘17 February’), the language was therefore not spoken in cultural, educational or governmental domains and could not be taught, printed or broadcast. The number of Tamazight speakers in Libya is estimated at 184,000 in Lewis et al. (2016) and at 560,000 by Chakel & Ferkal (2012). In the absence of a municipal register, the number of inhabitants in Zwara is uncertain. A conservative estimate is between 50,000 and 100,000, which is also the number of speakers of the Zwara variety. Other than through exposure by radio and television, children learn Arabic only from age six, when attending school. Speakers have variable L2 Arabic competence depending on exposure to the language.

<p><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p>The aim of this study was to determine the situation of 3rd Group Turkey based immigrant mothers who have children of 0-6 year-old and their children. The study group was formed with 30 immigrant mothers living in Nicosia Surlariçi Region. The Snowball Sampling Method was used when reaching the working group. Here, at first a mother was interviewed, and then other mothers were reached either through the reference of the interviewed mother, or by a voluntary participation of another friend who knew her to participate in the study. 16 of the mothers in the working group migrated from Hatay, 7 from Mardin, 3 from Adana, 3 from Mersin, 1 from Urfa and settled in Cyprus.According to the results, it is found that most of the families migrated from Hatay and Mardin, most of them were Arabic based, some of them were Kurdish based and few were Turkish based, their first language that was spoken in the family was Turkish and most of the families were multi-child family. Most of the mothers were housewives where the others were working as cleaners and caregivers. Fathers were mostly working as a construction worker, driver, waiter, dyer etc. The results show that immigrant mothers had financial worries, they were not aware of how to raise their children, how to deal with them and their needs, they were living in the same region with the other immigrant families having a resemblance to them and their social environment consisted of the other immigrant families.</p><p> </p><p><strong>ÖZ</strong></p><p>Bu çalışma Kuzey Kıbrıs’ta Lefkoşa’nın Surlariçi Bölgesi’nde yaşayan 3. Grup Türkiye Cumhuriyeti kökenli 0-6 yaş çocuğu olan göçmen anneler ve çocuklarına yönelik bir durum tespit çalışması niteliğinde bir çalışmadır. Çalışma Lefkoşa Surlariçi bölgesinde yaşayan 30 göçmen anne ile gerçekleştirilmiştir. Çalışma grubuna ulaşılırken Kartopu Örnekleme Yöntemi kullanılmıştır. Burada da ilk önce bir anne ile görüşme yapılmış, daha sonra görüşme yapılan annenin referansı yoluyla, ya da onu tanıyan diğer bir arkadaşının da çalışmaya katılmaya gönüllü olarak katılması yoluyla diğer annelere de ulaşılmıştır. Çalışma grubunda yer alan annelerin 16’sı Hatay’dan, 7’si Mardin’den, 3’ü Adana’dan, 3’ü Mersin’den, 1’, ise Urfa’dan göç ederek Kıbrıs’a yerleşmişlerdir. Araştırma sonucunda, ailelerin daha çok Hatay ve Mardin’den göç ettiği, büyük çoğunluğunun etnik olarak Arap kökenli, bir kısmının Kürt kökenli, çok azının ise Türk kökenli olduğu, aile içerisinde konuşulan dilin daha çok Türkçe olduğu, ailelerin çoğunun çok çocuklu aileler olduğu ortaya çıkmıştır. Annelerin çoğu ev hanımıdır, diğerleri temizlik işlerine gitmekte ya da çocuk bakıcılığı yapmaktadır. Babalar ise çoğunlukla inşaat işçisi, şoför, garson, boyacı vb. olarak çalışmaktadırlar. Araştırmadan elde edilen bulgular doğrultusunda, göçmen annelerin maddi kaygılar yaşadıkları, çocuklarının yetiştirilmesi, onlara nasıl davranılması gerektiği ve ihtiyaçlarının neler olabileceği konusunda bilinçli olmadıkları, daha çok kendi durumlarına benzer özellikler gösteren diğer göçmen ailelerle aynı bölgede yaşadıkları, sosyal çevrelerinin yine diğer göçmen ailelerden oluştuğu sonucuna varılmıştır.</p>

In the original model of Prosodic Hierarchy (Selkirk 1984, 1986; Nespor &Vogel 1986), the prosodic representation was partly autonomous from the syntactic structure, and prosodic recursion was not possible. Recently, it has been proposed in Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) that each prosodic unit has a corresponding syntactic constituent, and prosodic recursion exists, as proposed in some recent empirical studies (Féry and Truckenbrodt 2005; Wagner 2005, 2010, Selkirk 2009, 2011, Itô & Mester 2012, 2013; Elfner 2012among others). This paper empirically investigates the phonological phrase construction in Jordanian Arabic as spoken in Irbid. The empirical results indicate that phonological phrases match XPs and are marked by low phrase accents and pre-boundary lengthening. They also suggest that syntactic nesting motivates prosodic recursion: a nested XP matches a recursive phonological phrase which is cued by gradient pre-boundary lengthening. However, a recursive phonological phrase is limited to two subcategories, i.e. a minimal and maximal layer. In accord with that, prosodic recursion is neither prohibited as proposed in the early version of Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk 1984, 1986; Nespor &Vogel 1986), nor freely allowed to perfectly mirror syntactic nesting as in Match Theory (Selkirk 2011).

Gaza City, with a population of over half a million residents, is the largest urban center and de-facto capital of the Gaza Strip, which itself has a total population of over 1.8 million. As of 2018, it is estimated that at least 1.3 million of the residents of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees from other areas in historic Palestine, having fled to Gaza after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. These refugee communities originally come from the many historic rural areas that surrounded the Gaza Strip, smaller towns and cities along the Mediterranean coast, as well as areas further afield such as Jaffa, 69 km north of Gaza on the coast, and Bir il-Sab‘, the largest city in the Nagab desert region (see Figure 1). Linguistically, many of these refugee communities are of Palestinian Arabic dialect backgrounds, although varieties of Arabic spoken in the Nagab are classified as originating in the Hijaz area of what is today Saudi Arabia (see Shahin 2007 on Palestinian Arabic and Henkin 2010 on Nagab Arabic).

06–579El-Yasin, Mohammed K. (Yarmouk U, Irbid, Jordan; majlouny@yahoo.com) & Abdulla K. Al-Shehabat, Translating proverbs. Babel (John Benjamins) 51.2 (2005), 161–173.06–580Flowerdew, John (City U Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; enjohnf@cityu.edu.hk) & Alina Wan, Genre analysis of tax computation letters: How and why tax accountants write the way they do. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.2 (2006),133–153.06–581Francis, Norbert (Northern Arizona U, USA; norbert.francis@nau.edu), The development of secondary discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness in second language learners. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 37–60.06–582Gimenez, Julio (Middlesex U, London, UK; jgimenez@mdx.ac.uk), Embedded business emails: Meeting new demands in international business communication. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.2 (2006), 154–172.06–583Hamston, Julie, Pathways to multiliteracies: Student teachers' critical reflections on a multimodal text. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Australian Literacy Educators' Association) 29.1 (2006), 38–51.06–584Hassan Al-Saqqaf, Abdullah (Sultan Qaboos U, Muscat), The linguistics of loanwords in Hadrami Arabic. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.1 (2006), 75–93.06–585Hüllen, Werner (U Duisburg-Essen, Germany;werner.huellen@uni-essen.de), Foreign language teaching – a modern building on historical foundations. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 61–87.06–586Léwy, Nicolas (U Neuchâtel, Switzerland; nicolas.lewy@unine.ch), François Grosjean, Lysiane Grosjean, Isabelle Racine & Carole Yersin, Un modèle psycholinguistique informatique de la reconnaissance des mots dans la chaîne parlée du français [A computational psycholinguistic model for word recognition in French connected speech]. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 15.1 (2005), 25–48.06–587Macken-Horarik, Mary, Hierarchies in diversities: What students' examined responses tell us about literacy practices in contemporary school English. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Australian Literacy Educators' Association) 29.1 (2006), 52–78.06–588Nelson, Mike (U Turku, Finland; mike.nelson@utu.fi), Semantic associations in Business English: A corpus-based analysis. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.2 (2006), 217–234.06–589Siepmann, Dirk (Universität-GH Siegen, Germany; dsiepmann@t-online.de), Collocation, colligation and encoding dictionaries (Part II: Lexicographical aspects). International Journal of Lexicography (Oxford University Press) 19.1 (2006), 1–39.06–590Thue Vold, Eva (U Bergen, Norway; eva.vold@roman.uib.no), Epistemic modality markers in research articles: A cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary study. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 61–87.06–591Williams, Ian A. (U de Cantabria, Santander, Spain; williams@unican.es), Thematic items referring to research and researchers in the Discussion section of Spanish biomedical articles and English-Spanish translations. Babel (John Benjamins) 51.2 (2005), 124–160.06–592Williams, John N. (U Cambridge, UK; jnw12@cam.ac.uk), Incremental interpretation in second language sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press) 9.1 (2006), 71–88.06–593Winter, Jo & Anne Pauwels (U Western Australia; jewinter@cyllene.uwa.edu.au), Men staying at home looking after their children: Feminist linguistic reform and social change. International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell) 16.1 (2006), 16–36.

IntroductionFor many, north is an abstract point on a compass, an arrow that tells you which way to hold up a map. Though scientifically defined according to the magnetic north pole, and/or the earth’s axis of rotation, these facts are not necessarily discernible to the average person. Perhaps for this reason, the Oxford English Dictionary begins with reference to the far more mundane and accessible sun and features of the human body, in defining north as; “in the direction of the part of the horizon on the left-hand side of a person facing the rising sun” (OED Online). Indeed, many of the words for ‘north’ around the world are etymologically linked to the left hand side (for example Cornish clēth ‘north, left’). We shall see later that even in English, many speakers conceptualise ‘north’ in an egocentric way. Other languages define ‘north’ in opposition to an orthogonal east-west axis defined by the sun’s rising and setting points (see, e.g., the extensive survey of Brown).Etymology aside, however, studies such as Brown’s presume a set of four cardinal directions which are available as primordial ontological categories which may (or may not) be labelled by the languages of the world. If we accept this premise, the fact that a word is translated as ‘north’ is sufficient to understand the direction it describes. There is good reason to reject this premise, however. We present data from three languages among which there is considerable variance in how the words translated as ‘north’ are typically used and understood. These languages are Kuuk Thaayorre (an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on Cape York Peninsula), Marshallese (an Oceanic language spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands), and Dhivehi (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Maldives). Lastly, we consider the results of an experiment that show Australian English speakers tend to interpret the word north according to the orientation of their own bodies and the objects they manipulate, rather than as a cardinal direction as such.‘North’ in Kuuk ThaayorreKuuk Thaayorre is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken on the west coast of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula in the community of Pormpuraaw. The Kuuk Thaayorre words equivalent to north, south, east and west (hereafter, ‘directionals’) are both complex and frequently used. They are complex in the sense that they combine with prefixes and suffixes to form dozens of words which indicate not only the direction involved, but also the degree of distance, whether there is motion from, towards, to a fixed point, or within a bounded area in that location, proximity to the local river, and more. The ubiquity of these words is illustrated by the fact that the most common greeting formula involves one person asking nhunt wanthan pal yan? ‘where are you going’ and the other responding, for example, ngay yuurriparrop yan ‘I’m going a long way southwards towards the river’, or ngay iilungkarruw yan ‘I’m coming from the northwest’. Directional terms are strewn liberally throughout Kuuk Thaayorre speech. They are employed in the description of both large-scale and small-scale spaces, whether giving directions to a far-off town, asking another person to ‘move a little to the north’, or identifying the person ‘to the east’ of another in a photograph. Likewise, directional gestures are highly frequent, sometimes augmenting the information given in the speech stream, sometimes used in the absence of spoken directions, and other times redundantly duplicating the information given by a directional word.The forms and meanings of directional words are described in detail in Gaby (Gaby 344–52). At the core of this system are six directional roots referring to the north and south banks of the nearby Edward River as well as two intersecting axes. One of these axes is equivalent to the east—west axis familiar to English speakers, and is defined by the apparent diurnal trajectory of the sun. (At a latitude of 14 degrees 54 minutes south, the Kuuk Thaayorre homeland sees little variation in the location of sunrise and sunset through the year.) While the poles of the second axis are translated by the English terms north and south, from a Western perspective this axis is skewed such that Kuuk Thaayorre -ungkarr ‘~north’ lies approximately 35 degrees west of magnetic north. Rather than being defined by magnetic or polar north, this axis aligns with the local coastline. This is true even when the terms are used at inland locations where there is no visual access to the water or parallel sand ridges. How Kuuk Thaayorre speakers apply this system to environments further removed from this particular stretch of coast—especially in the presence of a differently-oriented coast—remains a topic for future research.‘North’ in MarshalleseMarshallese is the language of the people of the Marshall Islands, an expansive archipelago consisting of 22 inhabited atolls and three inhabited non-atoll islands located in the Northern Pacific. The Marshallese have a long history as master navigators, a skill necessary to keep strong links between far-flung and disparate islands (Lewis; Genz).Figure 1: The location of the Marshall IslandsAs with other Pacific languages (e.g. Palmer; Ross; François), Marshallese deploys a complex system of geocentric references. Cardinal directions are historically derived from the Pacific trade winds, reflecting the importance of these winds for navigation and wayfinding. The etymologies of the Marshallese directions are shown in Table 1 below. The terms given in this table are in the Ralik dialect, spoken in the western Marshall Islands. The terms used in the Ratak (eastern) dialect are related, but slightly different in form. See Schlossberg for more detailed discussion. Etymologies originally sourced from Bender et al. and Ross.Table 1: Marshallese cardinal direction words with etymological source semantics EastWestNorthSouthNoun formrearrilik iōn̄ rōkEtymology‘calm shore (of islet)’‘rough shore (of islet)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’Verb modifier formtatonin̄a rōn̄aEtymology‘up(wind)’‘down(wind)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’As with many other Oceanic languages, Marshallese has three domains of spatial language use: the local domain, the inshore-maritime domain and the navigational domain. Cardinal directions are the sole strategy employed in the navigational domain, which occurs when sailing on the open ocean. In the inshore-maritime domain, which applies when sailing on the ocean or lagoon in sight of land, a land-sea axis is used (The question of whether, in fact, these directions form axes as such is considered further below). Similarly, when walking around an island, a calm side-rough side (of island) axis is employed. In both situations, either the cardinal north-south axis or east-west axis is used to form a secondary cross-axis to the topography-based axis. The cardinal axis parallel to the calm-rough or land-sea axis is rarely used. When the island is not oriented perfectly perpendicular to one of the cardinal axes, the cardinal axes rotate such that they are perpendicular to the primary axis. This can result in the orientation of iōn̄ ‘north’ being quite skewed away from ‘true’ north. An example of how the cardinal and topographic axes prototypically work is exemplified in Figure 2, which shows Jabor, an islet in Jaluit Atoll in the south-west Marshalls.Figure 2: The geocentric directional system of Jabor, Jaluit AtollWhile cartographic cardinal directions comprise two perpendicular axes, this is not the case for many Marshallese. The clearest evidence for this is the directional system of Kili Island, a small non-atoll island approximately 50km west of Jaluit Atoll. The directional system of Kili is similar to that of Jabor, with one notable exception; the iōn̄-rōk ‘north-south’ and rear-rilik ‘east-west’ axes are not perpendicular but rather parallel (Figure 3) The rear-rilik axis takes precedence and the iōn̄-rōk axis is rarely used, showing the primacy of the east-west axis on Kili. This is a clear indication that the Western abstraction of crossed cardinal axes is not in play in the Marshall Islands; the iōn̄-rōk and rear-rilik axes can function completely independently of one another.Figure 3: Geocentric system of spatial reference on KiliSpringdale is a small city in north-west of the landlocked state of Arkansas. It hosts the largest number of expatriate Marshallese in the United States. Of 26 participants in an object placement task, four respondents were able to correctly identify the four cardinal points (Schlossberg). Aside from some who said they simply did not know others gave a variety of answers, including that iōn̄, rōk, rilik and rear only exist in the Marshall Islands. Others imagined a canonical orientation derived from their home atoll and transposed this onto their current environment; one person who was facing the front door in their house in Springdale reported that they imagined they were in their house in the Marshall Islands, where when oriented towards the door, they were facing iōn̄ ‘north’, thus deriving an orientation with respect to a Marshallese cardinal direction. Aside from the four participants who identified the directions correctly, a further six participants responded in a consistent—if incorrect—way, i.e. although the directions were not correctly identified, the responses were consistent with the conceptualisation of crossed cardinal axes, merely that the locations identified were rotated from their true referents. This leaves 16 of the 26 participants (62%) who did not display evidence of having a conceptual system of two crossed cardinal axes.If one were to point in a direction and say ‘this is north’, most Westerners would easily be able to identify ‘south’ by pointing in the opposite direction. This is not the case with Marshallese speakers, many of whom are unable to do the same if given a Marshallese cardinal direction and asked to name its opposite (cf. Schlossberg). This demonstrates that for many Marshallese, each of these cardinal terms do not form axes at all, but rather are four unique locally-anchored points.‘North’ in DhivehiDhivehi is spoken in the Maldives, an archipelago to the southwest of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean (see Figure 4). Maldivians have a long history of sailing on the open waters, in order to fish and to trade. Traditionally, much of the adult male population would spend long periods of time on such voyages, riding the trade winds and navigating by the stars. For Maldivians, uturu ‘north’ is a direction of safety—the long axis of the Maldivian archipelago runs north to south, and so by sailing north, one has the best possible chance of reaching another island or (eventually) the mainlands of India or Sri Lanka.Figure 4: Location of the MaldivesIt is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many Maldivians are well attuned to the direction denoted by uturu ‘north’, as well as to the other cardinal directions. In an object placement task performed by 41 participants in Laamu Atoll, 32 participants (78%) correctly placed a plastic block ‘to the north’ (uturaṣ̊) of another block when instructed to do so (Lum). The prompts dekonaṣ̊ ‘to the south’ and huḷangaṣ̊ ‘to the west’ yielded similarly high rates of correct responses, though as many as 37 participants (90%) responded correctly to the prompt iraṣ̊ ‘to the east’—this is perhaps because the term for ‘east’ also means ‘sun’ and is strongly associated with the sunrise, whereas the terms for the other cardinal directions are comparatively opaque. However, the path of the sun is not the only environmental cue that shapes the use of Dhivehi cardinal directions. As in Kuuk Thaayorre and Marshallese, cardinal directions in Dhivehi are often ‘calibrated’ according to the orientation of local coastlines. In Fonadhoo, for example, which is oriented northeast to southwest, the system of cardinal directions is rotated about 45 degrees clockwise: uturu ‘north’ points to what is actually northeast and dekona/dekunu ‘south’ to what is actually southwest (i.e., along the length of the island), while iru/iramati ‘east’ and huḷangu ‘west’ are perpendicular to shore (see Figure 5). However, despite this rotated system being in use, residents of Fonadhoo often comment that these are not the ‘real’ cardinal directions, which are determined by the path of the sun.Figure 5: Directions in Fonadhoo, Laamu Atoll, MaldivesIn addition to the four cardinal directions, Dhivehi possesses four intercardinal directions, which are compound terms: iru-uturu ‘northeast’, iru-dekunu ‘southeast’, huḷangu-uturu ‘northwest’, and huḷangu-dekunu ‘southwest’. Yet even a system of eight compass points is not sufficient for describing directions over long distances, especially on the open sea where there are no landmarks to refer to. A system of 32 ‘sidereal’ compass directions (see Figure 6), based on the rising and setting points of stars in the night sky, is available for such purposes—for example, simāgu īran̊ ‘Arcturus rising’ points ENE or 67.5°, while simāgu astamān̊ ‘Arcturus setting’ points WNW or 292.5°. (These Dhivehi names for the sidereal directions are borrowings from Arabic, and were probably introduced by Arab seafarers in the medieval period, see Lum 174-79). Eight sidereal directions coincide with the basic (inter)cardinal directions of the solar compass described earlier. For example, gahā ‘Polaris’ in the sidereal compass corresponds exactly with uturu ‘north’ in the solar compass. Thus Dhivehi has both a sidereal ‘north’ and a solar ‘north’, though the latter is sometimes rotated according to local topography. However, the system of sidereal compass directions has largely fallen out of use, and is known only to older and some middle-aged men. This appears to be due to the diversification of the Maldivian economy in recent decades along with the modernisation of Maldivian fishing vessels, including the introduction of GPS technology. Nonetheless, fishermen and fishing communities use solar compass directions much more frequently than other groups in the Maldives (Lum; Palmer et al.), and some of the oldest men still use sidereal compass directions occasionally.Figure 6: Dhivehi sidereal compass with directions in Thaana script (used with kind permission of Abdulla Rasheed and Abdulla Zuhury)‘North’ in EnglishThe traditional definition of north in terms of Magnetic North or Geographic North is well known to native English speakers and may appear relatively straightforward. In practice, however, the use and interpretation of north is more variable. English speakers generally draw on cardinal directions only in restricted circumstances, i.e. in large-scale geographical or navigational contexts rather than, for example, small-scale configurations of manipulable objects (Majid et al. 108). Consequently, most English speakers do not need to maintain a mental compass to keep track of North at all times. So, if English speakers are generally unaware of where North is, how do they perform when required to use it?A group of 36 Australian English speakers participated in an experimental task where they were presented with a stimulus object (in this case, a 10cm wide cube) while facing S72ºE (Poulton). They were then handed another cube and asked to place it next to the stimulus cube in a particular direction (e.g. ‘put this cube to the north of that cube’). Participants completed a total of 48 trials, including each of the four cardinal directions as target, as well as expressions such as behind, in front of and to the left of. As shown in Figure 7, participants’ responses were categorised in one of three ways: correct, near-correct, or incorrect.Figure 7: Possible responses to prompt of north: A = correct, B = near-correct (aligned with the side of stimulus object closest to north), C = incorrect.Every participant placed their cube in alignment with the axes of the stimulus object (i.e. responses B and C in Figure 7). Orientation to Magnetic/Geographic North was thus insufficient to override the local cues of the task at hand. The 9% of participants showed some awareness of the location of Magnetic/Geographic North, however, by making the near-correct response type B. No participants who behaved in such a way expressed certainty in their responses, however. Most commonly, they calculated the rough direction concerned by triangulating with local landmarks such as nearby roads, or the location of Melbourne’s CBD (as verbally expressed both during the task and during an informal interview afterwards).The remaining 91% of participants’ responses were entirely incorrect. Of these, 13.2% involved similar thought processes as the near-correct responses, but did not result in the identification of the closest side of the stimulus to the instructed direction. However, 77.8% of the total participants interpreted north as the far side of the stimulus. While such responses were classified incorrect on the basis of Magnetic or Geographic North, they were consistent with one another and correct with respect to an alternative definition of English north in terms of the participant’s own body. One of the participants alludes to this alternative definition, asking “Do you mean my North or physical North?”. We refer to this alternative definition as Relative North. Relative North is not bound to any given point on the Earth or a derivation of the sun’s position; instead, it is entirely bound to the perceiver’s own orientation. This equates the north direction with forward and the other cardinals’ points are derived from this reference point (see Figure 8). Map-reading practices likely support the development of the secondary, Relative sense of North.Figure 8: Relative North and the Relative directions derived from itConclusionWe have compared the words closest in meaning to the English word north in four entirely unrelated languages. In the Australian Aboriginal language Kuuk Thaayorre, the ‘north’ direction aligns with the local coast, pointing in a direction 35 degrees west of Magnetic North. In Marshallese, the compass direction corresponding to ‘north’ is different for each island, being defined in opposition to an axis running between the ocean and lagoon sides of that island. The Dhivehi ‘north’ direction may be defined either in opposition to the (sun-based) east-west axis, calibrated to the configuration of the local island, as in Marshallese, or defined in terms of Polaris, the Pole star. In all these cases, though, the system of directions is anchored by properties of the external environment. English speakers, by contrast, are shown to—at least some of the time—define north with reference to their own embodied perspective, as the direction extending outwards from the front of their bodies. These findings demonstrate that, far from being universal, ‘north’ is a culture-specific category. As such, great care must be taken when translating or drawing equivalencies between these concepts across languages.ReferencesBender, Byron W., et al. “Proto-Micronesian Reconstructions: I.” Oceanic Linguistics 42.1 (2003): 1–110.Brown, Cecil H. “Where Do Cardinal Direction Terms Come From?” Anthropological Linguistics 25.2 (1983): 121–161. 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