Abstract:

The study aims to analyze the dialect of Akçaabat, the second biggest district of Trabzon province (Akçaabat İlçe Nüfus Müdürlüğü, 2016), spoken by female informants in an open marketplace called kadınlar pazarı where women are vendors selling fruits and vegetables they produced. The historically established marketplace was selected intentionally to analyze the language use in diverse interaction and dynamic venues in such spaces as local markets. Oral communication among women coming from rural areas and working in the designated urban places for a day was recorded and transcribed. The presentation of the linguistic characteristics of Akçaabat dialect was realized through codification and categorizations of the transcribed speech data. Linguistic analyses of the dialect spoken by the women in the rural part of the district showed significant deviations with Akçaabat dialect from standard Turkish in terms of phonetics, morphophonology and morphosyntax. This study is significant in providing a snapshot of the ‘living’ representative dialectal features of Akçaabat dialect. It also contributes to the corpus of regional dialects with natural speech samples since dialectal data collected in various speech events are significant to observe preservation/transformation of the living dialects of a language.

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