Language Variation and Change in a Modernising Arab State by Clive Holes. Title Language Variation and Change in a Modernising Arab State. First published in 1987. He takes account of variability in the language of individual speakers both in the direction of the spoken dialects and in the direction of Classical Arabic and his approach takes into account factors of nationality, religious group affiliation, and occupational class in the selection of linguistic variables and is thereby squarely in the camp of the sociolinguists.