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* I would like to thank Pierre Larcher for giving an initial orientation to this article.

ARABIC SOCIOLINGUISTICS

by

JONATHAN OWENSUniversity of Bayreuth

In the 1960’s Sociolinguistics emerged as a semi-autonomous disci-pline, a core methodology and theory developing around the work

of William Labov, and adjunct perspectives being added by variousscholars.* Arabic sociolinguistics has grown up largely in the wake ofthis development, though in certain respects was present, as it were, atthe founding of the discipline. At the same time, what can, on a nec-essarily post hoc basis, be identi!ed as central sociolinguistic issues havebeen a part of Arabic linguistics from its very inception.

Taken broadly, any aspect of language which correlates with socio-logical categories may be included in sociolinguistics. An exhaustivecoverage thus entails not only a consideration of the behavior of speci!clinguistic forms relative to social constructs, but also the embeddednessof holistic concepts like ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ in a social matrix, viasuch linkages as language planning and language politics. Rather thansay a little about many topics, I will attempt to focus on what I consider(as of 2000) the core areas of sociolinguistics, namely the associationbetween linguistic forms and social categories. Above all the status oflinguistic variants is a central issue, for each variant, supported by asocial scaVolding, conveys information about the society it is used in.Furthermore, in the Labovian paradigm, understanding linguistic vari-ation ideally gives insight into language change, which is seen not asabrupt, but as spreading outwards from various loci of social innova-tion. Linguistic variation is seen as an index of the spread, mainte-nance or regression of linguistic features.

Embedded in the modern linguistic tradition, sociolinguistics has con-centrated on the spoken word. It thus stands in close relationship todialectological traditions, though in contrast to dialectology, the main

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001 Arabica, tome XLVIII

1 Nearly half of Egypt’s 60 million inhabitants, for example, are urban dwellers.

420 jonathan owens

focus of variational sociolinguistics has been on urban areas. These areecological niches which are hard to de!ne with traditional dialectolog-ical methods, though given the high degree of urbanization in theArabic world,1 indispensable to an adequate coverage of Arabic. In allthese respects, Arabic sociolinguistics has followed the broader devel-opments of the discipline. The concentration on the spoken word hashad the eVect of creating a distance from the traditional (mainlyEuropean) Arabicist philological tradition, with its focus on the writtentext. While there are, doubtlessly, unbridgeable diVerences between thetwo foci (e.g. by their very nature, written traditions tend to suppressthe type of variation found in spoken language), one can attempt tomediate the diVerences.

I will suggest in section 1 that sociolinguistic readings of the Arabicgrammatical tradition are compatible with the analysis of written texts.The rest of the article focuses on the status of variational phenomenain modern Arabic.

1. Proto-sociolinguistics

While the standard Western grammars of Classical Arabic (e.g. Wright,Reckendorf, Blachère and Gaudrefroy-Demombynes) describe the lan-guage eVectively and exhaustively, they approach the language as aproduct to be packaged, described, and consumed by the interestedpublic. Such is the nature of descriptive grammars. What is singularlymissing from them, however, is the recognition that Classical Arabicas it has become known to us today, is itself the result of an evalua-tive process whose input was a considerably wider and more disparateset of linguistic values than is commonly recognized today. Probablythis heterogeneity is nowhere more in evidence than in the work ofthe father of Arabic grammar, S“bawayhi. The question of heterogeneityin S“bawayhi is one which has hardly been broached in the Arabicistliterature, and it is hardly the place here to attempt a summary. Oneillustration may be oVered, however, indicating that the Arabic lan-guage which S“bawayhi ‘constructed’ (a grammar by de!nition is a for-mal construct) was a variable object, one parameter of whose variabilitywas de!ned by the social categories which S“bawayhi drew on to ori-entate his thinking.

In his Kitˆb, S“bawayhi described a good deal of linguistic variation.

This may be broadly divided into variation of two types, internal andexternal. The internal variation, which is probably the dominant cate-gory, derives from S“bawayhi’s linguistic theory. A topicalized noun,for example, appears in nominative case, but, according to the logic oflinguistic rules, it may equally be accusative (e.g. I: 31 V., see Owens,1998a). The external derives from variation which is legitimized throughits association with groups of various sorts. By way of example, in the!rst 100 pages of the Kitˆb I count 26 such references, which mayroughly be grouped into seven diVerent categories, as in (1), (all refer-ences are to Book I).

(1a) Areal ~ tribal variation (h°i[ˆz“ vs. tam“m“),2 e.g. mˆ al-h

°i[ˆziyya

(21.20, 94.9)(b) Tribal variants, e.g. Ban! Sulaym (51.6)3

(c) General group, e.g. “Bedouins”, ‘arab (62.13, 95.15)(d) Unspeci!ed groups, e.g. “some”, “some Arabs”, “someone whose

Arabic I trust” (62.14, 97.16)(e) Groups de!ned by other linguistic characteristics, “those who

say x also say y”, e.g. “those who say "akal!n“ al-barˆgo“t” (30.17) (f ) Majority groups, common knowledge, e.g. a form is “better known”

("a’raf ) or “more common in speech” ("aktar al-kalˆm) (66.9, 90.10)(g) S“bawayhi’s evaluative criteria, e.g. “good Arabic”, “eloquent

Arabs” (21.15, 66.11, 91.15)

Each of these in its own way re"ects the social embeddedness ofS“bawayhi’s linguistic thinking. In all instances S“bawayhi legitimizesthe citation of a particular form by associating it with various types ofunits that must have been recognized in the late eighth century Abbasidempire. In (1a, b) the groups have a geographical or social basis. (1c)attests to the normative value of Bedouin speech (see Blau 1963). (1d)shows that the ideolect may have normative value and (1e) indicatesthat bundles of features may be associated with another feature stereo-typically associated with a particular group (unfortunately in this case,never speci!ed more closely by S“bawayhi). (1f ) suggests that degree ofnumerical extension can be a basis for preferring one form or another.Finally, (1g) draws attention to the institutionalized role of the linguistin deciding what is good and bad in the language (see Carter 1972).4

2 h°i[ˆz“ is a geographical designation; tam“m“ is tribal, though eponymously may serve

as a designation of an eastern variety.3 Here, and often elsewhere, S“bawayhi’s reports are mediated by other language experts.4 Carter emphasizes the socially-orientated metaphorical vocabulary which S“bawayhi

arabic sociolinguistics 421

uses to describe utterance acceptability (e.g. “good, upright”), not the institutionalizedsocial role of S“bawayhi as linguist, a role which Carter in fact would probably deny(Carter 1985).

5 See Daher (1987 part 1) for further sociolinguistic interpretations of Arabic in theclassical period.

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If S“bawayhi’s Kitˆb is a work which a sociolinguistic reading wouldhelp elucidate, there are other segments of the Arabic grammatical tra-dition where variation was institutionalized by the grammarians them-selves. Notable in this respect are the diVerent Koranic reading tradi-tions, the qirˆ"ˆt. The canonization of certain reading traditions, theseven of Ibn Mu[ˆhid (d. 924) for instance, represents a formal cate-gorization of a !xed set of variants which in and of itself is mainly ofgrammatical and perhaps exegetical interest. The existence of the vari-ants, however, re"ects a socio-political tension in early Islamic societywhose history has been traced in the work of Beck (1946), Kahle (1948),JeVery (1948) and others. They show that Arabic Koranic readers weresubjected to ever tighter strictures in their choice of Koranic variants,culminating in the oYcial proscription of the readings of Ibn Miqsamand Ibn Óanab!Å in the early part of the tenth century. Crucially, ascholar like Ibn Óanab!Å argued that he was, within the limits set bythe consonantal mus

°h°af (Koranic text), free to use certain readings so

long as they represented good Arabic. This viewpoint was challengedby the authorities of the time, who forced him to bow to general con-sensus of the Koranic readers ( "i[mˆ’, ’ˆmma; see Gilliot 140) in hischoice of variants.

It is thus clear that the Arabic grammatical tradition itself gave explicitrecognition to the existence of linguistic variation in the language, avariation which was tolerated, legitimized or proscribed according tosocial and political institutions with which the variation was associated.5

2. Variation and language history

Both in the Arabic grammatical tradition, and in its western reception,variation was either channeled into categories which eVectively reducedit to formal linguistic variants, as with the qirˆ"ˆt described above, orignored. The latter was the favored approach of many Western Arabicistsand Semiticists. Thus, the work of Beck (1946), Kahle (1948), Vollers(1906) and Spitaler (1953) among others, which emphasized old tradi-tions parallel to or even interacting with standard, orthodox ones, was

overshadowed by that of Brockelmann (1908, 19822) Nöldeke (1910),Bergsträßer (1928, 19772) and Fück (1950). Although these latter writersrecognized the existence of varieties of Arabic, in particular old ‘dialects’,contemporary with Classical Arabic, they never developed a concep-tual framework explaining the functional co-existence of and linguisticinterrelationships between these varieties, nor their historical development.

A crucial step in this direction, a step which probably marks thebeginning of Arabic sociolinguistics as an academic entity in its ownright, was made by Ferguson in his well-known article “Diglossia”(1959a). In the article Ferguson gave theoretical "esh and comparativegeneralization to a situation which had long been recognized anddescribed, in particular by French linguists working in North Africa(e.g. Marçais 1930, 31). In an idealized model diglossia is a socio-polit-ically regulated linguistic situation, where one linguistic variety has ahigher status than another (or others), and in which linguistic functionsare partitioned between the two in complementary fashion.6 In what Iterm ‘classical diglossia’ (following Fasold 1984), the H and L varietiesbelong in some sense to the same language, yet are distinguished byclear structural diVerences.7 High functions include the use of the lan-guage in formal occasions, and literary and religious functions, whilelow functions include language activity in the home, talk between friends,and the marketplace. One important element of the high variety is itslink to a valued cultural past. In the instance of Arabic, of course, itis the Standard language, a variety whose grammar is largely derivedfrom Classical Arabic, which is the high variety, and the so-called dialect(see n. 7) the low.

The appeal of Ferguson’s model is that it provides an explanationfor the maintenance of more or less structurally divergent forms in oneand the same speech community. It is notable that Ferguson’s modelincorporated the spoken language, thus marking a shift away from thephilological Arabicist tradition orientated mainly towards the interpre-tation of written texts.

6 Dichy (1994) characterizes the Arabic situation as ‘pluriglossie’, understanding thisterm to refer to diVerent lects of the same language. This allows one to distinguishArabic from diglossic con!gurations where diVerent functional domains are !lled bycompletely diVerent languages (see n. 7).

7 Opposed to classic diglossia would stand both Fishman’s functional diglossia (1971:74), where diVerent languages may !ll diVerent functional niches, and register-basedvarieties, where in both structural and functional terms diVerences between H and Lvarieties are not so sharply delineated as in Arabic.


424 jonathan owens

Although there is not the space here to develop the argument inany detail, it may be suggested that Ferguson’s undeniably elegant syn-chronic characterization of the status of linguistic variants in Arabichas not had desirable consequences for a diachronic interpretation ofthe language, especially the Labovian integration of modern variation-ist studies with questions of language change. In particular, Fergusonnot only described contemporary diglossia, but also projected its ori-gins back into the time of the early Arabic diaspora in the seventh andeighth centuries. Ferguson (1959b) argued that the dialects developedout of a koine which arose in the military camps of the Arab con-querors. Contact (see section 8) produced a degree of simpli!cation andleveling among the dialects, while a variety akin to Classical Arabiccontinued to be spoken, for a time at least, among Bedouins.

Developments of Ferguson’s koine hypothesis, in the sense that thedialects are viewed as being derived from and innovative with respectto Classical Arabic, are Versteegh’s (1984) proposal that the dialectsunderwent a stage of pidginization before stabilizing in the form ances-tral to the modern dialects and Blau’s model (1966/67, 1981) wherebythe synthetic language of the Bedouins, close to Classical Arabic, gaveway to an analytic Middle Arabic, under the in"uence of widespreadArabicization of non-Arab urbanites.8 In this perspective, the clear diglos-sic dichotomy Standard Arabic vs. dialect is projected back to the earlyorigins of the language, with the modern low variety, the dialect, beingseen as derivative from and a corruption of, Classical Arabic (seeVersteegh 1983 for origins of this idea). Since the dialects are perceivedas being younger than Classical Arabic, whatever interest their studymay have for modern Arabic society, they can make only a temporallylimited contribution to understanding proto-Arabic.

If, on the other hand, Classical Arabic is itself the endpoint of adevelopment (as argued for by Corriente, 1976), which is shared byother varieties of Arabic (e.g. Rabin’s 1951 dialects), it follows that themodern dialects themselves represent a heritage as old as that of ClassicalArabic. In this perspective the ancestors of the modern dialects did notarise diglossically after c. 700 AD, but rather existed contemporane-ously with and contributed to the development of Classical Arabic.Logically, they derive with Classical Arabic from a common ancestor

8 Notwithstanding Blau’s more recent interpretation of Middle Arabic as a stylistic“Mischsprache” of Old and New Arabic (1982), his earlier interpretation continues toserve as one possible model for the conceptualization of the history of Arabic.

in a yet to be reconstructed proto-Arabic. In other words, one mustdistinguish between the social construct of diglossia and the individuallinguistic histories of the entities constituent of diglossia.

It may be suggested, for lack of space without exempli!cation (seeOwens 1998a), that adopting Corriente’s perspective will have conse-quences for evaluating modern linguistic variation, particularly that dis-cussed in 4.2 below, for, assuming Labov’s (1994: 21) uniformitarianprinciple, the variation associated with diVerent contemporary groupsmay allow insights into the earlier development of the language, eventhose prior to the Arabic diaspora of the seventh century.

3. Spoken Arabic: Levels and Gradients

Ferguson’s diglossia model is valuable not only for its heuristic valuein de!ning language varieties in terms of two idealized types, StandardArabic and dialect. It is also important for the fact that only with theintegration of the two types within a single conceptual framework couldserious comparative work between the varieties begin. This took twodirections. On the one hand purely structural studies were carried outde!ning similarities and diVerences between the two (e.g. Altoma 1969).On the other, a more fruitful line of research was opened up in theattempt to de!ne the use of the two in contemporary Arabic society.Observation of the spoken language quickly revealed that in practicenative speakers of Arabic who had access to both the standard lan-guage and the dialect in any given stretch of speech rarely used purelyone or the other variant. The initial approach to this descriptive prob-lem was to posit a series of discrete levels ranging between the idealStandard/dialect poles. This, for instance, is the approach followed byBlanc (1960). He de!ned !ve levels of speech, (1) plain colloquial, (2)koineized colloquial, (3) semi-literary, (4) modi!ed classical, (5) standardclassical. Each of these levels is characterized by linguistic traits. Thekoineized colloquial, for instance is a “plain colloquial” into which lev-eling features have been introduced, which is to say highly character-istic colloquialisms, such as the f sg object suYx -c such as is found inJordan, southern Iraq and western Arabian varieties, are replaced bycommon koine forms (see below), such as f sg -ik. “Modi!ed classical”is Classical Arabic with various dialectal admixtures. Badawi (1973)develops a typology along similar lines. Similar characterizations havebeen applied to the written language as well, notably Blau (1981: 25)who distinguished three main levels of Middle Arabic, Classical Arabic


9 In fact, I believe the term ‘native Arabic’ = ‘NA’ is a better designation for thisvariety than ‘dialect’, and is the term I henceforth adopt. Conventionally, the regionalvariant of NA will be indicated with a pre!xed letter or letters signi!ying the region;E-NA = Egyptian native Arabic, for example.

10 In a recent work, Holes (1995: 279 V.) also adopts a levels approach to the descrip-tion of Cairene Arabic. The fact that Holes’ work has a pedagogical orientation sug-gests that the levels approach is more appropriate as a broad summarizing tool thanas a precise categorization of linguistic variation.

426 jonathan owens

with Middle Arabic admixture, semi-Classical Middle Arabic and clas-sicized Middle Arabic.

The discrete levels approach ran into problems of two sorts (seeOwens and Bani Yasin 1991). One was the sheer methodological problemof dealing with variation across features which ranged over the entirelanguage, from phonology to semantics. As Blanc realized from thebeginning (1960: 85), assigning a given text to one level or another wasdiYcult simply because it might be variously classi!ed according to theclassi!catory criteria used or the stretch of text chosen (Tarrier 1991: 7).

A second problem pertains to the relative status of the two idealpoles, Standard Arabic and dialect. While the two may be presentedas structurally opposed to each other, in terms of actual competencethey are not of equal status. Whereas the dialect is a native variety ofArabic9 and hence, by de!nition perfectly learned by all Arabs, theStandard language is a variety learned as a second language (see 4.1).The recognition of this state of aVairs is of conceptual and descriptiveconsequence. Diem, for instance, in his description of Lebanese, Syrianand Egyptian Arabic texts operates with a simpli!ed levels classi!catorysystem. He describes the speaker in one text (1974: 76) beginning indialect with SA interference, then switching over to SA. Given the non-native nature of the Standard, however, it is not clear in what senseone can speak of interference from the Standard in a dialectal text.The notion of interference in second language learning usually pertainsto the appearance of traits from a speaker’s native language in the tar-get. Furthermore, while theoretically interference from the dialect inthe Standard may be recognized, it is not self-evident what preciselythe nature of the Standard is that educated Arabs speak when theytarget this variety (see below).10

The problem is not solved by terminology from within Arabic itself.While an ideal contrast, analogous to Ferguson’s H-L exists in Arabic(’ˆmmiyya ~ dˆri[a etc. vs fus

°h°ˆ), Parkinson (1991) points out that there

is no consensus within the Arabic world (or Egypt, Parkinson’s locus

of research) as to what, in particular fus°h°ˆ stands for. Parkinson illus-

trates his point on the basis of a matched guise he carried out withseven diVerent versions of a nearly identical text, the only diVerencesbetween them being a gradually decreasing degree of SA features.Versions 1-3, for example had full !nal short voweling, version 1 =t, = [dz], version 2 = t, = [ g] (note, Egyptian [ g]), and so on,each lower version adding, relative to the SA prescriptive rules, moreE-NA traits. Asked to rank the versions on a “fus

°h°ˆ” scale from 1-7,

generally the rankings followed the structurally-planned sequences.Version 1, for instances, had the “best” fus

°h°ˆ ranking (though version

7 ranked better than 6, 4 better than 3). Such consistency suggests thatat least according to the variable traits picked out by Parkinson, Egyptiansdo react consistently to stereotypes of what fus

°h°ˆ is. On the other

hand, the large majority of all evaluators considered all seven versionsto be fus

°h°ˆ. The boundaries where fus

°h°ˆ end are enigmatic.

It is in the mid-70’s that an alternative approach to the analysis oflinguistic variation in spoken Arabic emerged. In addition to the ide-alized poles, SA and dialect, T. F. Mitchell developed the idea ofEducated Spoken Arabic (ESA), the variety of Arabic spoken typicallyby educated Arabs consisting of elements from both SA and the dialect,and possessing hybrid forms unique to the ESA level.11 Mitchell’s maininterest was in an interregional koine which he and his co-workers stud-ied in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The actual model used todescribe ESA varied from scholar to scholar. Mitchell himself (1976,1980, 1986) continued to work with discrete levels. He argued thatspeakers chose from a range of comparable forms according to para-meters set by stigmatization and degree of formality. His presentationstend to be rather programmatic and at times hard to generalize. Thenotion of stigmatized forms is not de!ned, though they appear to bethose which are associated exclusively with one dialect, and which areclearly distinctive from SA, Jordanian hˆd

o“this m”, for example.

11 Two earlier works adumbrate Mitchell’s approach. Bishai (1966) speaks of “mod-ern inter-Arabic”, ostensibly CA without case endings, though in fact a more mixedvariety. The account, however, does not generalize beyond a summary of the data intwo texts. Kaye’s (1972) characterization of spoken Modern Standard Arabic as an ill-de!ned system is similar to Mitchell’s ESA in the sense that both authors describe asystem open to variation along a range of parameters. Talmoudi (1984: 143), basinghis study on a short text produced by speakers from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco,speaks of classicization, interdialectalization and colloquialization of features, descrip-tively adequate terms from a structural perspective perhaps, but barring more subtlediVerentiation open to the criticisms directed against a levels approach.


12 Meiseles worked within the ‘levels’ framework, and suVers from all of its short-comings (see Owens and Bani Yasin 1991 for criticisms). Mitchell continues to employa basic formal/informal dichotomy in a largely formal account of tense and modalityin Arabic (Mitchell and El-Hassan 1994).

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Unstigmatized forms themselves are divided between formal and non-formal. Syrian Arabic kab“r “big” (without case ending and hence partof ESA, not SA) for instance is classi!ed as formal, whereas kb“r (dele-tion of a) is informal. The problem with Mitchell’s approach is thathowever much his examples in isolation appear to be intuitively cor-rect (though see Abd-el Jawad and Sulaiman 1990: 296), his classi!catorycategories are not always readily discernible in complete texts, whereforms of potentially diVerent categories frequently stand cheek by jowl.

Papers by two of Mitchell’s co-workers, El-Hassan (1979) and Sallam(1980), gave a more detailed and elucidating account.12 El-Hassan stud-ied the occurrence of demonstratives in about 21 hours of recordedspeech by Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian Arabs. In the msg category, for instance, !ve forms were used with a high degree offrequency, hˆda, hˆza, hˆda, hayda and da “this”. The last two forms arelimited to one region, da Egyptian and hayda Lebanese, while hˆza ismainly Egyptian. hˆda and hˆda make up nearly 60% of the forms. El-Hassan began his analysis under the assumption that hˆ"a, nearly iden-tical to SA hˆdˆ, was the least stigmatized form, hˆda medially so, andlocally restricted forms, like Jordanian hˆd

o(hardly attested), most stig-

matized. He hypothesized that among the speech of educated Arabs,the less stigmatized forms would be preferred. His results, however,only partly bear out this assumption. Not only is hˆda nearly as fre-quent as hˆda, but there are also presumably stigmatized forms withhigh degrees of frequency as well. Egyptian da‚ a form restricted exclu-sively to the Egyptian speakers, makes up nearly 71% (94/113) of allm sg tokens among the Egyptian speakers. Following Mitchell, the studycarefully distinguishes between speech situations where a given nation-ality is speaking to his or her own nationality and where the speakersare of mixed nationality (cf. Bell 1984 on variation and audience design).Even when the Egyptians were speaking with other nationalities, how-ever, the percentage of da did not decrease (in fact, it increased slightly).El-Hassan (p. 42) explains this as a desire to “sound Egyptian”, thoughin fact, the equation: the further one moves away from SA, the greaterthe stigmatization, is not born out by the facts, which calls into ques-

tion the usefulness of stigmatization as an ordering category. El-Hassanfurther shows (p. 51) that the variants to not appear to be colloca-tionally determined either. He cites the three examples, all from thesame Syrian speaker, hˆda/hˆza/hˆda min nˆh

°yi “this is so from one

angle”, where the collocation min nˆh°yi, an expression of SA origin, col-

locates equally with three diVerent variants.On the other hand, Sallam’s study does show clear instances where

the notion of stigmatized form is useful. His study concentrated on thefour variant realizations of *q found in the region, namely g ~ k ~ "~ q, a set of variants which reappears in many sociolinguistic studiesin the area. He notes (1980: 92) that speakers from Beirut, who varybetween the local k and the SA pronunciation q when speaking withnon-Lebanese show a markedly higher use of q than k, as if avoidingtheir local form.

The point that emerged from the study of spoken corpuses drawnfrom a cross-section of speakers is that the classi!cation of variantsaccording to a pre-set scala ranging between SA and NA was problematic.In some instances, as with Sallam’s Beirut speakers, discrete correla-tions do emerge, but with others, as with El-Hassan’s demonstratives,they do not. One of the central themes of Arabic sociolinguistics hasbeen the identi!cation of the parameters de!ning this variation.

4. Social Correlations

The use of linguistic corpora as the basis for de!ning Educated SpokenArabic brought Arabic sociolinguistics into the domain of quantitatively-based sociolinguistics, a tradition dating back at least to 1958 (Fischer1958), and which today is the dominant !eld of sociolinguistics. In thistradition an attempt is made to explain that part of variation which isnot explicable linguistically (e.g. phonological, morphophonological), interms of sociologically-de!ned variation, via statistically signi!cant cor-relations with various extra-linguistic categories. In the diVerent studieswhich have been carried out within this framework diVerent points ofemphasis have emerged, some inspired by the theoretical orientationof the researcher, some by empirical tendencies deriving from the data.In this section I will summarize the main parameters which have beenshown to correlate with variation in diVerent Arabic-speaking communities.


13 With heavy emphasis on ‘tends’; see Owens and Bani Yasin 1991: 23.

430 jonathan owens

4.1 Education and literacy

As already seen in section 3, education is one of the most importantelements contributing to variation in modern-day Arabic. Since WorldWar II education has expanded enormously in Arabic countries. Becausethe Arabic used in instruction is, in theory, Standard Arabic, this vari-ety has become accesssible to a large segment of the population in away it has never been in the history of the language. Its use in edu-cation is reinforced by its use in many public forums, including themedia, religious contexts and communication between Arabs of diVerentregional origin. I will adopt Mitchell’s ‘Educated Spoken Arabic’ (ESA)as the name for the variety which results from this variational parameter.

The type of variation engendered by literacy in SA has already beenillustrated in section 3 above. As an idealization, ESA is open to inputfrom its two constituent varieties, SA and native varieties of Arabic(NA), traditionally called dialects (see n. 7). However, these two opposedpoles are not of equal importance in de!ning the form of ESA. Rather,NA serves as the basic input, which, depending on any of a numberof factors, will be modi!ed in the direction of SA. While this assertionis uncontroversial for most who have experience in living and working(e.g. linguists) in Arabic countries, the distinction between natively learnednative Arabic and a formally learned SA is of such fundamental impor-tance that more clari!cation is necessary.

Three reasons may be adduced for this directional interpretation ofESA. First, the high variety, SA, is learned formally in school, whereasNA is learned at home (Ibrahim 1983).

In regards to the second point, at least two observed patterns of vari-ation suggest that NA serves as the base variety. One may !rst observean asymmetry in the morphemic distribution of the two varieties in thefollowing sense. There tends13 to be an implicational relationship betweenlexical stems and aYxes such that SA stems (see next paragraph) co-occur with NA aYxes to a greater degree than do NA stems with SAaYxes (Holes 1995: 297). Thus, in the production of hybrid forms atoken such as bi-yu-qˆl “it is said” (Meiseles 1980: 133 on EgyptianArabic), with Egyptian Arabic modal pre!x bi- pre!xed to SA prefor-mative vowel + passive verbal stem is more likely than the opposite,(?) yu-n"ˆl “it is said” with SA passive imperfect pre!x yu- attached tothe Egyptian Arabic passive stem -n"ˆl. Given that aYxal material is

generally regarded as crucial in the de!nition of ‘matrix’ language’ (seee.g. Meyers-Scotton 1993: 98 V.), the wider distribution of NA aYxesin ESA points to NA as the basis variety.

Further to this point, nearly all variationist studies have identi!ed alexically de!ned distribution in the occurrence of SA material. Forinstance, in a detailed study on uvular variation in Amman, q ~ " ~g ~ k (see section 3 above), Abd-el Jawad (1981: 205) shows that theSA phonological variant q strongly correlates with words of SA origin.Moreover, these words with the q variant tend to be those which belongto the ‘cultural domain’ of vocabulary (e.g. qˆ’a “lecture hall”, muÒtaqqˆt“derivatives”), words which tend more easily to be borrowed. Those inthe three NA variants, on the other hand, tend to be either basic vocab-ulary ( gadd#Ò “how much”, izra" “blue”) or belong to the less formal cul-tural domain (ibr“k “jar”, i’g!d “necklaces” 1981: 367 V.).14 It appearspossible here to speak of a borrowing of cultural words of SA origininto an NA core (see section 5 below).

Thirdly one may adduce emotional and physiological factors. Whenspeakers are excited or angry, they will tend to use NA variants (howoften does one hear a curse in SA; see Parkinson 1985: chapter 8),and fatigue tends to favor NA (Tarrier 1993: 104). NA is a refuge inextreme emotional and physical states.

Early studies focusing speci!cally on ESA concentrated on the dis-tribution of single linguistic features, without de!ning, other than inMitchell’s and Meiseles’ rather programatic terms15 the range of styleswhich may be found within it. Parkinson (1994) is probably the !rststudy which attempted to characterize the extent of variation found intexts of speakers who were speci!cally asked to produce oral texts infus

°h°ˆ. Out of a large corpus he chose four speakers with education

ranging between one year of high school and four years of university.While recognizing that a full study must range across a broad spec-trum of variables, Parkinson concentrated on the presence of SA short!nal vowels,16 both lexical (binˆ") and in"ectional ("i’rˆb). The four speak-ers display a great deal of variation in their use of vowels, the rate

14 See also Abd-el Jawad and Sulaiman (1990: 298).15 Meiseles (1980: 125) distinguished between oral literary Arabic (the spoken lan-

guage of educated Arabs attempting to approximate LA) and ESA, though his maindistinguishing feature (presence vs absence of case vowels) is, as Parkinson (1994) shows,more programmatic than a re"ection of reality.

16 Parkinson counted as SA vowels only those with a characteristic SA form. Theepenthetic Egyptian Arabic -i was excluded from the count.


ranging between 2 and over 50 per page (his unit of counting). Threeof the speakers, however, have only 12 occurrences or less. Generallythe use of the vowels was correct.17 Parkinson concludes that althoughthere are individuals capable of speaking "uently with SA !nal shortvowels, the lower percentages are more typical of Cairene ability gen-erally. While Parkinson notes, impressionistically, that degree of vow-eling tends to correlate with other SA features (1994: 184), his studymakes no attempt to teeze out correlations, even of a tendential sort,between !nal voweling and other linguistic structures.

Before moving on to the next section, the work of Eid (1982, 1988)may be mentioned as an alternative framework to the analysis of spo-ken Arabic in terms of a medial ESA variety. Eid is concerned withthe type of spoken Arabic treated in section 4.1 under the rubricEducated Spoken Arabic. She assumes two opposed varieties, NA andSA, with switching between the two. She herself is aware of the diYcultiesin this approach, noting that the form ra"-#t, for instance (1988: 56),consists of a SA stem, ra "- and an NA suYx, -#t (vs. SA -aytu), a typ-ical ESA hybrid form. Eid, however, must assign each token to one ofthe two varieties, here, for example, recognizing the stem ra"- as beingcriterial, hence SA. Eid is interested in de!ning structural constraintsbetween the two varieties. The interest in her work is not so much inthe proposed constraints,18 but rather in the very application of thecodeswitching model to her data. Her own data is based on Egyptianradio and television programs with panel discussions by learned par-ticipants. Such a group will probably come closer to ful!lling a usualprerequisite to codeswitching than do most Egyptians, namely that theyhave a "uent command of SA. Even if such an approach can be appliedto such a group—and the example of ra"#t above cautions that com-promises of uncertain theoretical status must be made—it is doubtfulthat it could be eYciently applied in less formal settings or with speak-ers with a lesser command of SA.

17 Unfortunately, Parkinson does not use a precise index, with actual occurrence ofvowel-!nal forms expressed as a percent of all contexts where a !nal vowel is expected.

18 As Daher (1987: 140) points out, the universality of Eid’s examples are limited toher own corpus. Contradictory examples can be found even within the corpus of ESA,as for example her constraint (1982: 69) that the structure “x = SA + tns = NA + y(verb) = SA cannot occur. In Meiseles (1980: 133) one !nds naúnu bi-naq!l "anna “wesay that . . .” with the Egyptian bi- tense pre!x sandwiched between SA material (see8.1 below and Wilmsen 1996 for recent discussion).

432 jonathan owens

These criticisms aside, the codeswitching approach is an interestingone. One may ask, however, that its theoretical underpinnings be moreexplicitly formulated than hitherto in regards to its application to twovarieties of the same language. Walters (1996: 180) points out thatMyers-Scotton’s (1993) markedness model of code choice, developed onthe basis of codeswitching between discrete languages, appears to makethe wrong prediction about the type of code switching (speci!cally intra-sentential) which one !nds in Arabic diglossia. Aside from the invoca-tion of such overly general parameters as ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ (seesection 3 above), there is lacking extensive research on the discourse/pragmatic and social19 framework of Arabic diglossic ‘switching’.

Two approaches to the study of spoken Arabic emerge here. On theone hand one can assume a variety which has been termed ESA andattempt to de!ne the range of structures which occur in it. Thecodeswitching model, on the other hand, proceeds on the initial basisof only two opposed varieties. Exploring the implications of adoptingone approach or the other or a combination of two would undoubt-edly enrich our understanding of spoken Arabic.

4.2 Ethnicity and nationality

The work of Mitchell and his colleagues referred to in section 3 abovetook broad-based nationality diVerences as an important independentvariable. In the data summarized in section 3, nationality is, potentially,one parameter explaining diVerential language behavior. Syrians, forinstance, switched to a far greater degree from their NA hˆda towardsSA hˆdˆ “this”, than did Egyptians, who by and large retained EgyptianArabic da. Clearly, El-Hassan’s parameter of stigmatization, the dialectalform being more stigmatized than the SA, does little to explain the dif-ferential behavior, since all speakers in the sample are educated. Rather,one may propose that Egyptians may be less reticent about maintainingtheir local norms in formal situations than are certain other nationalities.

However, interpreting variation in terms of nationality is diYcult forat least two reasons. First, in the above example, (hˆda ~ hˆda ~ da)internal linguistic diVerences may play a role. In purely structural termsit is a smaller step for a Syrian to switch from Syrian Arabic hˆda to


19 The former include factors cuing the ‘codeswitching’, for instance topic, entry ofnew interlocutor, hesitation, highlighting, emphasis, etc. Social factors include the symbolicvalue of the codes within the community, role relation between interlocutors and codechoice. Walters, oddly, makes no reference to Eid’s work in his discussion of codeswitching.

SA hˆdˆ, potentially nothing more than a phonetic substitution, thanit is for an Egyptian to change from da to hˆda, involving a completelexical change.20 Secondly, and more generally, ‘nationality’ may maska good deal of internal ethnic variation, a point I turn to now.

By ‘ethnic’ I understand any of a number of social parameters bywhich, non-national social groupings are distinguished, including reli-gion, shared history, skin color, kinship, lineage and place of origin.The relevant criterion or criteria de!ning ethnicity may diVer fromplace to place, so the present category is potentially a very large onewhich may eventually have to be broken up into !ner component parts.A classic instance of ethnic diVerence correlating with linguistic diVerenceis Blanc’s (1964) study of communal dialects of Baghdad, where heshowed that Arabic-speaking Muslim, Christian and Jewish communi-ties in Baghdad were marked by sometimes striking linguistic diVerences.Beyond the purely structural description of these diVerences, it is ofequal interest to know the manner in which they are distributed in thecommunity, and what the distribution tells us of the social relationsbetween the groups.

An enlightening study in the respect is Holes’ work on sectariandiVerences between the ’Arab and Baharna communities in Bahrain.These two groups are diVerentiated historically, the ’Arab being morerecent immigrants, and confessionally, ’Arab being Sunni, Baharna Shia.There are found considerable dialectal diVerences between the ’Araband three diVerent Baharna groups. Holes (1987) isolates 19 variables forcomparison. On the whole, I am being brief here and simplify the Baharnagroups somewhat, the contrasts mark ’Arab vs. three diVerent Baharna(Bah

°arna) dialects, e.g. ’Arab t, d, y vs. Baharna f, d, [,21 in the realm

of phonetics, or ’Arab drisat “she studied”, ykitb!n “they read” vs. Baharnadarasat ~ dirsat, ykitb!n ~ yiktub!n 22 in the morphophonogical realm.

Holes study shows two trends worthy of mention. First, Baharna tendto move towards ’Arab phonological variants, whereas the reverse doesnot occur. Thus, Baharna will switch from their own [ to ’Arab y tosome degree (e.g. ya ~ [a “he came”), whereas ’Arab make the reverseswitch to a far smaller extent ( ya, Holes 1986, 1987: 57 V.). This asym-metric movement is explicable through the fact that the ’Arab are the

20 Not to mention syntactic diVererences as well: both SA hˆda and Syrian Arabichˆda (Cowell 1964: 557) occurs pre or post N, whereas Egyptian Arabic da is exclu-sively post-nominal.

21 One of the three Baharna dialects (Bah°arna III) has y as the norm.

22 DiVering for the three Baharna dialectal groups.

434 jonathan owens

dominant political group in the country, and hence their variety com-mands a degree of local prestige (see below).

Secondly, variation is governed not only by communal norms, butby SA in"uence as well. In this respect both the ’Arab and Baharnacommunities display the same bifurcation, namely that educated speak-ers adopt SA forms to a far greater degree than do illiterates.

These two tendencies interact in ways which render a simple expla-nation of many variational phenomena diYcult. For instance, the ’Arabhave a diachronic guttural epenthesis rule of the form *CgutC CgutaC,hence *mag°rib mg°arib “west”. The Baharna do not have such a rule,hence mag°rib, identical to SA mag°rib. Holes observes (1987: 172) thatwhereas there is a slight tendency for ’Arab to move towards the SAform mag°rib,23 there is also a small tendency for the Baharna to adoptthe ’Arab mg°arib. In respect of morphophonological rules, generallyspeaking the Baharna move in two directions. Where the ’Arab andBaharna share a common form which contrasts with SA, the Baharnashow a stronger tendency to move towards the SA variant. Where, onthe other hand, the ’Arab and Baharna diVer, even where the Baharnavariant agrees with the SA form, there is a small though consistent ten-dency for the Baharna to move towards the ’Arab form (as in theexample above).24

One point which emerges from Holes’ study is that the ’Arab com-munity evinces a greater degree of linguistic security in that ’Arab speak-ers tend to move away from their native norms to a lesser degree thando the Baharna, and when they do it is in the direction of SA. TheBaharna deviance from native norms, on the other hand, goes in twodirections, towards ’Arab and towards SA. Why some Baharna featuresreact in one way and others in another is not obvious. The reasonsfor it are not discussed by Holes (see below). One eVect of the Baharnastrategy in those cases where their native forms potentially serve as theprestige target variant (e.g. mag°rib cited above, where Baharna = SA)is to ensure that their variants do not de!ne communal norms. If this

23 The reason this is interpreted as a movement towards the SA variant, not theBaharna, is that there are no instances where SA and Baharna forms diVer in whichthe ’Arab converge towards the Baharna. ’Arab mg°arib is realized phonetically as [mqarib].

24 A third trend suggested by Holes (1987: 146) is of potential signi!cance, namelythat (SA) literate speakers of both communities tend to move towards a set of commonvariants to a far greater degree than do illiterates, particularly in the morphophonologicalrealm of verb stems. Holes argues for a covert SA normalizing factor, though the datais too complex to allow for a simple summary, and may support diVerent conclusions.


is intentional, it would be interesting to know whether they do this tomaintain the ‘communalness’ of their own forms (see below), or out ofdeference to the dominant ’Arab group.

A second example of ethnically-based variation is attested in the fourre"exes of proto-Arabic *q in Jordan. The variation is particularly wide-spread in urban areas, where speakers of diVerent backgrounds havesettled. Abd-el Jawad has studied re"exes of this variation in Ammanand Irbid (northern Jordan). The variants are q ~ " ~ g ~ k (qˆla ~"ˆl ~ gˆl ~ kˆl “he said”). For the most part, q is associated with SA,25

" with speakers of urban origin, k with central Palestinian rural dialects,and g with other rural Palestinian and Israeli dialects (e.g. Galilee andNegev) and rural Jordanian.26 The " and k variants were brought toJordan largely by refugees from the Israeli-Arab wars. Each variant thushas speci!c socio-political associations, q the standard (see this sectionbelow), " urban Palestinian, k rural Palestinian and g largely rural Jordanian.

Leaving q aside for the moment, it appears that a bipolar prestigesystem is developing in urban areas, with " and g in competition. k, onthe other hand, seems to be regressive in urban Jordan, according toAbd-el Jawad’s data at least (see section 7). This emerges from Abd-elJawad’s corpus-based study comparing parents and children (1986: 56)where in both Amman and Irbid the following trends are discernible.Among k speakers there is a sharp decline in the usage of k from theparental to the children’s generation. Furthermore, no speakers of orig-inal g or " dialects use k forms. Both original " and g speakers main-tain the forms over two generations, " somewhat more than g, thougha signi!cant contrast is developing between younger men and women,with women strongly favoring ", men somewhat favoring g. There isalso a geographical contrast, with Amman showing a stronger " orien-tation than Irbid.

25 A very few dialects in the area have q as the native variety, Nablus town, forinstance (Abd-el Jawad 1987: 361), and the few rural Druz communities in Jordan.

26 Traditionally the g variant is referred to as Bedouin, though this is a misnomer.Bedouin applies to a very speci!c, nomadic lifestyle, though the majority of g speakersin Jordan are in fact sedentary farmers. Moreover, many nomads (e.g. eastern Jordanand on into Saudi Arabia) have further conditioned variants of *q, such as dz and dz.Ingham (1976) correlates the Bedouin-sedentary dichotomy with characteristic linguisticvariants among diVerent groups in southern Iraq and Khuzistan. He has some degreeof success in this exercise, though also describes groups who do not !t into the pro-posed language-lifestyle correlation at all (e.g. where long sedentary groups have classi-cal ‘nomadic’ features).

436 jonathan owens

It would appear that " vs. g have crosscutting symbolic political andsocial values. " represents Palestinian norms, though is also historicallyurban and hence may take on overtones of modernity, while g is orig-inally Jordanian, but also tough, slightly macho and rugged (Abd-elJawad 1981: 176, see section 7 below). Perhaps because it has no strongconstituency to represent—Palestinian interests are, as it were repre-sented by " and it never was an urban variety—k has established noniche in urban Jordan.

Tying together the two types of variation discussed in this and inthe previous section, education and ethnicity, in the course of the cor-pus-based study of Arabic a certain puzzle arose. Numerous Westernstudies have established that standard variants generally are prestigiousin various senses: change tends to work towards them; they are the tar-get of hypercorrection, they represent the norms of society at large asopposed to local, communal values of the vernacular variants, etc. Thismay be termed the standard-vernacular model. As early as Schmidt(1974, unfortunately not available to me) a diVerent sort of patternbecame evident in Arabic. This is particularly prominent in regards tothe present *q variable. In Bahrain, for instance, there are three val-ues for this variant, q ~ g ( [ ) ~ g ~ k

°(back velar k). q is the SA value,

g and [ largely phonologically conditioned ‘Arab norms, g (no variationwith [ ) the norms of one Baharna community, and k

°the norm of the

largest Baharna community (most ruralites). According to the standard-vernacular model one would expect movement towards the standard qvariant. Holes, however, encountered a more complex pattern of vari-ation. First, he found that there were some words where q alwaysoccurred. These are usually words of SA provenance (Holes 1987: 54;see section 3 above). A second set of words, termed ‘core items’, includesthose where q never replaces the local variant, and a third set showsvariation between q and a local variant (see section 6 below). Mosttelling for the standard-vernacular model, Holes found (1987: 70) thatthe dominant ’Arab tended to maintain their own native variants, bothg and the marked (in the sense that it is unique to the ’Arab) [ vari-ant to a high degree, while those literate Baharna speakers who havek°

as a native variant, if they switched at all, switched almost categor-ically not to SA q in the core vocabulary, but to ’Arab g.

In short, there are two tendential movements, one to a pan-nativevariety g, one to q. Ibrahim (1986) has given a name to this sort of bi-furcated variation, distinguishing between standard and prestige variants.


‘Standard’ refers to the codi!ed SA while ‘prestige’ describes the localnorm or norms which, constitute an alternative to the standard. Theprestige varieties derive from regional native Arabic varieties, in thepresent example the g variant. I will return to the standard-prestige dis-tinction in 4.4 and 5 below.

As a last topic in this section, I would like to switch the geograph-ical and socio-historical orientation to a new focus. Arabs have beenin the Lake Chad area since at least 1400. In present-day Borno inNE Nigeria they constitute an important minority of about 500,000.Between 20,000-50,000 of these (modern demographic statistics areimpossible to come by) live in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital, where theyrepresent the largest concentration of Arabs in Nigeria.

Whereas in the previous cases ethnicity was an intra-Arab aVair, inthe present one it is primarily an Arab-non-Arab one. The dominantpolitical group in the area are Kanuri, and Kanuri and Hausa themain lingua francas. In Owens (1995) it was argued that minority sta-tus played a decisive role in explaining the type of variation observedamong Arabs in Maiduguri. The issue may be illustrated on the basisof one particularly clear variable. Maiduguri has an Arabic populationwhich is no more than three generations deep. Generations one andtwo are comprised almost exclusively of immigrants from rural Nigeria,Cameroon and Chad, and from urban Ndjamena in Chad. These sourceareas are linguistically distinctive in various ways. One variable per-tains to the realization of the 1pl marker in the imperfect verb. In ruralNigeria it is almost categorically n-, n-uktub “we write”, while in Chadand parts of Cameroon, where the dialect boundary appears to lie, itis n- . . . -u, n-uktub-u. Via migration, both variants have established them-selves in Maiduguri. Migration follows certain patterns, one prominentone being the tendency of Arabs to settle among kinsmen and Arabsfrom the same source area. One thus !nds areas populated largely byimmigrants from the eastern Nigerian dialect region, from Ndjamena,and so on.

While the linguistic norms from the source area tend to get carriedover into the newly-settled urban areas, the correspondence is less thanperfect. Thus, in a sample of rural Nigerian speakers (N = 52) 99%of the speakers use exclusively the n- form. While there exist no corpora-based statistics relating to Chadian Arabic, all grammars of the language which I am aware of give only the n- . . . -u form.

On the other hand, in the areas of Maiduguri, areas settled largelyby Nigerian Arabs, those Arabs (N = 30 in the survey) of Nigerian ori-

438 jonathan owens

gin have only 82% use of the n- form (18% of n- . . . -u). Speakers inof Chadian origin in a ‘Chadian’ neighborhood have nearly the mir-ror image percentage, 17% n-, 83% n- . . . -u. It thus appears that thereis a two-way movement relative to the ancestral norms: speakers ofNigerian ancestry have increased the non-Nigerian n- . . . -u form, whilespeakers of Chadian ancestry have increased the Nigerian n-.

In contrast to the other cases examined so far, what this data showsis the lack of a clear de!ning norm controlling the direction of vari-ants. Speakers are aware of the existence of other variants, though noneof these have normative value in the way, for instance, the g variantof *q has in Bahrain, or the ’ and g variants of *q have in urban Jordan.Moreover, in Maiduguri SA has no signi!cant aVect on spoken Arabic.

It was argued in Owens (1995, also, 1998c) that the status of Arabsand Arabic in Maiduguri inhibited the formation of a single prestigevalue of this and other variables. Being a communal language, Arabicis not used widely in Maiduguri in public places, a situation whichrestricts the forums where single norms might be negotiated. Furthermore,Arabs themselves are aware of their minority status, and as such con-trast themselves with other ethnic groups (vs. Kanuri, Margi etc.). Itmay be surmised that this confrontation with other groups de"ects atten-tion away from internal diVerences in Arabic. It also appears to be thecase that Arabic dialectal diVerences do not correlate with political andsocial groupings, a fact which further lessens the potential symbolicimportance of the diVerent Arabic variants.

It may be noted that the variational status of Arabic in Maidugurifalls outside both the standard-vernacular paradigm, and the diglossicparadigm, which will be introduced and discussed in greater detail insection 5 below.

4.3 Style, context and interpersonal variables

Ferguson’s original formulation of diglossia described not only an idealdichotomy between linguistic varieties, but also an ideal socio-functionalmatrix into which these varieties are distributed. High varieties are usedin formal situations, for writing, between strangers, for example, whereaslow varieties are for informal contexts, not used in writing, and con-versation nor between friends. Just as the linguistic reality proved tobe more complex than could be accounted for by a simple H-Ldichotomy, so too do contextual factors correlate with linguistic usagein various ways.


Although Mitchell’s original conceptualization of ESA de!ned it primarily as stylistically-controlled variation, studies locating linguisticvariation along contextually-de!ned parameters are far fewer than varia-tion studied in terms of socio-demographic categories. This weightingis understandable in that logically it is necessary to de!ne what signi!canttypes of variation occur and with which sociological entities they areassociated with before detailing the use of one form or another accord-ing to diVerent interactional criteria. Nonetheless, such studies are necessary for the light they shed on the question of maintenance of the diVerent varieties, SA and NA, or diVerent ethnically-based NAvarieties. Furthermore, there are aspects of linguistic structure whichreadily lend themselves to contextually-de!ned study such as addresssystems, conversational structure and leave taking and greetings.

One of the earliest corpus analyses of spoken Arabic pertained to acontextually-delimited variety, namely Harrell’s (1960) study of EgyptianRadio Arabic news broadcasts. Harrell’s focus is basically the extent towhich this variety maintained SA norms, or introduced ENA forms toone degree or another. The study generally shows that the texts haveSA as their basis, with deviations largely, though not always, attribut-able to ENA. What is surprising in Harrell’s study is not so much theconsistent level of SA, but rather the fact that colloquialisms shouldenter at all into what basically is the recitation of written text.

Following traditional (though diYcult to verify) Labovian practice,Abd-el Jawad (1982: 152) divides his corpus into four styles, public,formal, semi-formal, and casual and suggests that the public style cor-relates with the greatest degree of SA traits, de!ned largely in phono-logical and lexical terms, the casual style with NA traits.

In a short study, Schmidt (1986: 60 V.) identi!ed no less than sev-enteen diVerent types of address forms used by a ticket collector on a20 minute Cairo Metro ride. In the same study, he sketches the wayin which telephone sequencing rules diVer between Egypt and the US.

The most detailed study of a contextually and conversationally de!nedlinguistic subsystem is Parkinson’s analysis of a large corpus of addressterms (some 6,000 tokens) collected over the course of a year in Cairo.With such a large corpus Parkinson was able to provide a statistically-based orientation to many of the terms of address. The address systemis based on a simple linguistic system, usually containing the vocativeparticle ya and/or a second person independent pronoun plus either aproper name and/or a simple noun ( ya ’amm iÒÒ#¢ ’ali ). Parkinson sum-marizes his data in terms of semantic (e.g. kinship names as terms of

440 jonathan owens

address) or illocutionary categories (to abuse, show respect). Statisticalsummaries for diVerent terms yield diVerent contextual pro!les. Thehighly formal term afandim (1985: 155) for instance will tend to be usedby upper class speakers addressing middle aged or older speakers whereas"a¢i, a¢!ya, u¢ti are often delivered with a slightly impatient or angrytone to coevals or those lower in the social hierarchy. Parkinson illus-trates the statistical tendencies with the use of the various terms inactual speech. It is noteworthy that few of the terms in the large cor-pus derive directly from SA.

Holes (1986b) approaches address terms from a slightly diVerentangle, relating usage to the communal diVerences discussed in 4.2 above.Following Brown and Levinson (1979), Holes distinguishes three typesof address contexts, ‘solidary’ (based on Yassin 1977), ‘ritual’ and ‘deictic’.His focus is on the use of second person pronouns in these three con-texts, which fall into three diVerent, though overlapping systems, oneassociated with the ’Arab dialect, two with diVerent Baharna groups(B1, B2). On the basis of corpus material, he examined usage accordingto whether the addressee belonged to the same dialectal/social groupor not. The least amount of variation occurred in in-group contexts. The’Arab (A) and B1 never deviated from their local norm. The B2 groupvaried only in the ritual and solidary reference, though even here sub-conditioning factors are identi!able. B2 tended to use 2msg -k in ritualformulae which are widely used throughout the region, e.g. h

°ayyˆk allˆh

“May God preserve you”.27 Formulae speci!c to the B2 community,however, (cabb-cim alla “May God destroy you pl”) usually appear in theB2 variant (-cim rather than A, B1 -kum). In inter-group exchanges aclearly asymmetric pattern is evident. A and B1 always maintain their ownsystems, regardless of whom they are addressing. B2, on the other hand,shifts completely to the A system in all types of reference when address-ing ’Arab speakers, and shifts variably to that of their B1 co-religionists.

It is clear that there are two factors involved in these patterns. Oneis intra-linguistic. A and B1 diVer only in the 2fsg (A -c vs. B1 -Ò ),whereas B2 with -c, -Ò, -cim diVers by two or three features from theother two groups. The B2 group has the linguistically most marked sys-tem. A second factor is social status, where it appears the B2, beingmainly rural and uneducated, represent the least prestigious social group.Taken in conjunction with a remark in Holes 1983, the present dis-cussion relativizes in an important way the variationist data which forms

27 As if the B2 speakers have borrowed the set of formulaic expressions.


the basis of Holes’ (1987) description of language usage in Bahrain.Holes notes (1983: 452), that the same Baharna speakers who showeda movement towards ‘Arab norms in his interviews, would switch toBaharna norms in informal contexts, as when speaking among friends.He unfortunately does not have extensive corpora to illustrate this,though the diVerential use of address forms, particularly by B2 speak-ers, appears to exemplify this point, with B2 norms much stronger inin-group than in out-group contexts. A rather complex diglossia is appar-ently operative here, reminiscent of what Fasold (1984: 48) has termed‘double-nested’ diglossia.28 The Bahrain community at large is markedby a H-L, SA-native Arabic diglossia. Within this diglossia is a morelocal diglossia, with Baharna norms to a greater or lesser extent sub-ordinate to ’Arab ones in public exchanges.

Holes (1993) has also investigated the choice of SA and ENA in thepolitical speeches of Gamal Abd Al-Nasir, showing that Nasir wouldmove between the SA and NA poles, sometimes discretely, though oftenin the murky area of ESA, for various rhetorical purposes. Use of NAvs. SA varieties marks solidarity with the audience vs. authority overthem, the explanation of practical day to day politics vs. the expressionof abstract, all-embacing ideals, of local nationalism vs. pan-Arabism.Stylistic choices are here seen as means to rhetorical ends. In a simi-lar, though more ambitious study, Rabie (1991: 305 V.) the interactionof linguistic varieties and speech act type of various Cairene radio pro-grams. Topic, for instance, clearly determines the use of a pure ClassicalArabic in the call to prayer, while other segments of speech, as markedby the relative use of SA ~ NA, may be decisively in"uenced by therelationship between participants or genre of speech act. It may beremarked, however, referring to the caveat expressed at the end of 4.1,that both of these studies ultimately depend on an impressionistic setof technical terms (e.g. “mixed style, colloquialism, lack of case end-

28 Though a better metaphor here might be the ‘L box within the H box diglossia’:In contexts where the H box is not operative, another type of diglossia may be

switched on in the L box.

B2 = Bah°arna 2 dialect, A = ’Arab dialect, SA = Standard Arabic. The deeper inside one

goes, the more L the variety is.

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B2

A

SA

ing”), which detracts from a rigorous treatment of the relationshipbetween language form and type of speech act.

In functional terms, these studies bring out the social and symboliclinkages which underlie the diVerent varieties and variants, thereby‘explaining’ their maintenance within the society.

4.4 Sex and gender

Quite early in Arabic sociolinguistic studies it emerged that there weresigni!cant sex-based diVerences. In an instrumentally-based study, Kahn(1975), for example, showed that in a sample of Saudi Arabian speak-ers, women tended to diVerentiate more sharply than did men betweenemphatic and non-emphatic consonants,29 to a degree greater than phys-iological diVerences can account for. Beginning with Schmidt (1974,1986: 59), a number of studies carried out mainly on Egyptian andLevantine Arabic showed a bifurcated usage of the *q variable: mentend towards greater usage of q whereas women tended toward " (Sallam1980: 93, Abd-el Jawad 1981: 171 V., Bakir 1986, Haeri 1991, Daher1998). Indeed, it was just this diVerence which led Ibrahim (1986, see4.2 above) to distinguish between ‘standard’ and ‘prestige’ variants inArabic. Palatalization of Cairene dentals (Royal 1985, not seen by theauthor but summarized in Haeri 1991, 1997b) is a further sex-basedstudy from this region.

While numerous studies have documented sex-based diVerences, aunitary interpretation is diYcult. One reason is that not all variablesnecessarily show signi!cant sex-linked diVerences. Parkinson’s study ofaddress terms in Cairene Arabic, for instance, both in terms of sex ofspeaker and addressee, generally reveals that such signi!cant diVerencesas exist are of a smaller magnitude than variables like age, tone ofvoice, and status relationship between interlocutors (see n. 31). In Owens1995, sex-based diVerence were insigni!cant for all 6 variables treated.A second reason pertains to the fact that suggestions, interesting inthemselves, proposed for one region do not generalize to, or are evencontradicted by data from other areas. A good example of this is Haeri’srationalization for the consistently documented preference of Cairenewomen for using the local prestige " rather than standard q. She suggeststhat the female orientation towards non-SA variants re"ects a symbolic

29 The women had a greater diVerence between !rst and second formants than didmen.


rejection on their part of traditional Islamic values and an orientationtowards a secularly-based economic order.30

Studies from other areas de!ne diVerent patterns of female linguis-tic behavior, however. In Iraq, Bakir found that men tend to use moreSA features than do women in Basra (1986: 4), including a greaterusage of the SA internal passive, but Abu-Haidar (1987), using a Baghdadcorpus, found precisely the opposite, that women used a greater per-centage of SA forms, including higher percentage of the internal SApassive (1987: 476).31

The puzzle is extended by Dekkak’s (1979: 96) study of sex diVerencesin Tlemcen in western Algeria, unfortunately ignored by sociolinguistsworking in Egypt and the Levant. Though his study lacks quantitativerigor, as a native of Tlemcen Dekkak has an insider’s perspective. InTlemcen " (< *q) is strongly associated with female speech, men usingit only in informal situations. Unlike Cairo, where " is the city-wideNA prestige variant, in Algeria, Tlemcen is one of the few places inAlgeria where *q = ". The usual A-NA re"ex, and the variant of gen-eral prestige, is g. Women in Tlemcen therefore appear to favor nei-ther the standard q nor the variant of wider prestige, g. Rather, theirusage is emphatically local.32

A frequently invoked explanation for these divergent patterns hasbeen in terms of the linguistic marketplace (SankoV and Laberge 1978).Thus Abu-Haidar (1987: 479) commenting on the diVerences betweenher results and those in other parts of the Arabic world (see above)notes that women in Iraq, or at least Baghdad, historically are profes-sionally active outside of the home and therefore have access to SA.When they are confronted with this variety, they will use it to a greaterdegree than do men (see also Haeri 1997a for further variations onthis perspective). The problem with attributing explanatory status tosuch suggestions is the diYculty in developing an independent measureof ‘linguistic marketplace’, as opposed to invoking it for a post hocexplanation of a statistical trend.

30 Haeri, however, oVers no extra-linguistic matrix by which the use of non-SA vari-ants can be correlated with particular world views.

31 Facts such as these tend to make nonsense of Chambers’ attempt to incorporateArabic sociolinguistic data in explaining frequently observed sex-based diVerences. Hisgeneralization is that women tend to use more standard forms than do men (by whichin the Arabic context Chambers means ‘local prestige’, not SA, 1995: 142 V.), whichmakes sense only if he is willing to circularly allow that whatever forms happen to pre-dominate in women’s speech in any community are by de!nition the standard ones.

32 On comparative grounds, Dekkak’s data may suggest that sex-based variants like areof considerable historical depth, that the association predates more recent H-L variation.

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4.5 Social class

In contrast to western sociolinguistics, analyses in terms of social classare conspicuously absent from most sociolinguistic studies. For a num-ber of address terms studied by Parkinson, social class is an importantvariable,33 though hardly ever the most important one, and Haeri (1991:57 V.) suggests that upper middle class women are the dominant groupin introducing weak palatalization of dental stops. However, her sam-ple is not evenly distributed across social classes (e.g. only 2 upper classfemales vs. 9 upper middle class women), and the variation interactswith education (type of school attended), which may play an equallyor more important role than class.

One crucial problem with de!ning class as an independent variable,seems to be how it can be de!ned in Arabic-speaking societies. Oftenlacking hard economic and social data, researchers must build theirown socio-economic pro!les. These are useful, but suVer from a nec-essary make-shiftness which renders cross-study comparisons diYcult. Itmay also be suggested that much class-based variation is re"ected notonly in use of Arabic, but use of prestige foreign language varieties aswell, French in North Africa, for instance (sections 7, 8), and increas-ingly English in the Middle East. Such is certainly the case in the spo-ken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, where the communal language Arabicinteracts in the wider society with various African lingua francas (Hausa,Kanuri), and the pan-Nigerian standard, English. It may be the casethat in diglossic sociolinguistic pro!les (see section 5) education and eth-nicity play a more decisive role in de!ning language variation withinArabic than does socio-economic class.34

33 For instance, respectful address terms such as úad°ritak “your presence” and siyad-

tak “your mastery” are highly sensitive to the perceived social class of the addressee(though not that of the speaker, 1985: 21). Parkinson correlated 14 address terms with9 diVerent social categories. The average ranking of the !rst 10 terms shows relation-ship, tone of voice and addressee age to be the most important correlates. Addresseesocial class comes in fourth, tied with acquaintance. The three lowest ranked categoriesare sex of speaker, sex of addressee and speaker’s social class.

34 Haeri (1991, 1997a) introduces the notion of linguistic market to describe thebehavior of two phonological variables in Cairene Arabic. This is noteworthy for itsattempt to combine political ideology, education, social class, and access to linguisticvarieties as extra-linguistic variables in"uencing linguistic usage. However, lacking anoverall index of linguistic market, such as developed in SankoV and Laberge (1978), theexplanatory thrust of her discussion is considerably diminished.


4.6 Written Arabic

To round out this section, it may brie"y be noted that variation occursin modern written Arabic. It is premature, at this point in research tosuggest that it is variation situated along a SA-NA continuum parallelto that de!ned above for spoken Arabic. Walters (1996: 171) wouldappear to see such a development. Certainly the tension between anon-standardized and non-taught native variety and an oYcial stan-dard language learned in schools will be re"ected in similar structuralcontinua such as are found in the spoken language. It should expected,however, that the greater expectation that norms for correct writtenSA norms be reached will generate a quantitatively, perhaps qualita-tively diVerent set of variational patterns than are found in the spokenlanguage. Indeed, whereas in the spoken language it is the native vari-ety which is the basis form (see above), in the case of the written lan-guage it is the written form which provides the model. Moreover, theuncertainties inherent in the imperfect learning of orthographic con-ventions (Meiseles 1980: 127) will add further sources of variation.

5. The Variants

What features vary will diVer from region to region and even ostensi-bly identical types of variation may derive from diVerent sources. Forexample, the *q variable is a rich source of variation throughout theLevant, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula, with variants, depending onregion, q ~ " ~ g ( [ ) ~ k. In Nigerian Arabic, on the other hand, g isnearly the only value for this variable. There does exist a q ~ " vari-ation in Nigerian Arabic, though this derives from a diVerent etymo-logical source, via the series of changes, *g q q ~ " (e.g. qasal ~"asal “wash”). Variational features studied35 have included the *q vari-able discussed above (+ Amadidhi 1985 for Qatar), dental stop palatal-ization (Cairo), emphasis (Cairo), k ~ c variation (Amman, Irbid), f ~t, d ~ d (Bahrain), ! ~ ˜ ~ [aa] (Korba, Tunisia, Walters 1992), all in the realm of phonology. Morphological variation has received lessattention, though studies in Bahrain (Holes cited above) give a richdescription of stem form variation, in Nigerian Arabic n- ~ n- . . . u 1plmarking, b ~ ø imperfect verb marking, ba- ~ n- 1sg imperfect verbmarking and a ~ i preformative vowel variation have been scrutinized

35 I cite the sources only where they have not yet been mentioned.

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and the passive verb form has been used as a variable in Basran andBaghdadi Arabic. Syntax has received the least attention. Agreementin Jordanian Arabic is one such study, and a similar study was carriedout for Cairene Arabic (Belnap 1991). El-Hassan’s study discussed insection 3 may be considered lexico-syntactic.

Among all the variants and potential variants a basic question per-tains to the form and status of the diVerent variables. The question hastwo aspects. In the !rst instance it is necessary to determine what vari-ables are subject to variation. For instance, in a study of 13 variablesin Damascene Arabic (Tarrier 1993), it is apparent that not all vari-ables have the same degree or pattern of variation. The sample is basedon the speech of eight Syrian doctors, the purpose of the study to deter-mine to what extent SA or NA variants were used. The range of val-ues is considerable, ranging from categoricness of NA variants (e.g. NA#, ˜ to the exclusion of SA ay aw) to near categoricness of SA (SA qvs D-NA ").

What has been lacking to date are studies de!ning the relationsbetween the diVerent variables. In the initial state of investigation onedescriptive mechanism will be the establishment of tendential varia-tional hierarchies. It was noted above in 4.1, for instance, that therewas a greater tendency for an SA stem to occur with an NA in"ectionthan an SA in"ection with NA stem. Parkinson’s preliminary study onthe occurrence of short !nal vowels (1994: 185, 189, 197) showed thegreatest tendency towards !nal voweling of verbs among 3msg perfectverb forms (kataba “he wrote”), followed by the occurrence of a !nalvowel before a pronoun ending ( yaktub-u-ha ~ yaktub-a-ha but also yak-tub-ha),36 with voweling of the 1sg perfect suYx and suYxless imperfectverb least likely to be voweled (e.g. katab-t more likely than katab-tu).As an initial descriptive step, the three observations discussed here maybe summarized as follows.

Given a mixture of SA and NA forms, then:q will be standardized before (the SA re"exes of ) ˜ and #in"ection = NA, stem = SAa !nal vowel will tend to occur in the order:37 3msg perfect > stem + V + object pronoun > 1sg perfect ~ suYxless imperfect verb

36 A further parameter Parkinson summarized was whether or not the chosen vowelwas grammatically correct or not, according to the prescribed SA rules.

37 This is a perhaps unwarranted extrapolation from Parkinson’s data. It is safer tosay “a !nal vowel will occur to a greater degree in the order” rather than, “added inthe order of ”.


As they stand such summaries are a necessarily happenstance collec-tion of observations, too few studies having been conducted to warrantmodels accounting for the structural variation leading from NA to SA.Nonetheless, consideration of such hierarchicalizations may !nd reso-nance in theoretically orientated accounts of second language learning,codeswitching (cf. 4.1 above and 8.1 below), as well as having a homewithin the general framework of diglossia.

Ideally these hierarchies will be established not only in terms of text-based analyses, but also by perceptual tests. For example, a short studyby Owens and Bani Yasin (1991) explored the hierarchicalization offeatures via a matched guise test. Two identical mixed tests were pre-pared and recorded, where one had the SA variant q and the Horanfpl agreement (see above), while the other had Horan g and the SAfsg agreement pattern (e.g. ’alˆq-ˆt s

°ˆr-an “relations became” (SA q +

Horan fpl) vs. ’alˆg-ˆt s°ˆr-at (Horan g + SA fsg). Using a modi!ed

matched-guise format (see section 7 below), power and solidarity ques-tions were posed. The q variant scored higher among the ‘power’ questions’ whereas the g variant scored higher among the ‘solidarity’questions. The diVering agreement patterns appeared to have no in-"uence on the responses, supporting the conclusion that the speakersresponded to the q ~ g variants to the exclusion of the agreement varia-tion. In the Middle East at least, the use of q, and perhaps q alone,appears to move the discourse to a more formal SA level, where othervariants, agreement or diphthongs for example, lack such strong symbo-lic character (see also Parkinson 1991, discussed in section 3 above).38

There has been no convincing explanation, to my knowledge, as towhy some features !gure more prominently in variation than do others.

6. Variation and Change

Before addressing the question of variation in terms of language change,the naive question may be posed, why one of either SA or NA does notsimply become the unique norm in the Arabic world, or phrasing thequestion in terms of language maintenance, why both varieties continue

38 Parkinson (1991: 58) suggests that phonological variables play a particularly im-portant role in de!ning text level. Before appealing to global domains, phonology vs.morphology, however, it appears necessary to de!ne hierarchies within each as well(pronunciation of *q vs. diphthongs, for instance; see Parkinson 1991: 40 V. for evalua-tion of SA/NA in mixed, written texts).

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to exist. It is easier to explain the maintenance of SA. In the !rst instance,SA is structurally identical in most respects to Classical Arabic, whichis the language of Islam and a link to classical Arabic culture. SA issustained through this cultural association. Secondly, SA is arguably themost prominent vehicle symbolizing Arabic unity in the modern world.In contrast to the relatively weak and disunited national states, a mod-ernized SA symbolizes a uniform standard throughout the Arabic world.39

The reasons for the maintenance of the NA varieties are more com-plex, as they cannot be subsumed under the rubric of oYcial policy.40

To the contrary, NA (alias dialects) has no oYcial status or recognitionin the Arabic world. Brie"y, the diglossia, SA-NA dichotomy has existedat least since the eighth century, when Classical Arabic was codi!edby the Arabic grammarians (i.e. S“bawayhi), producing a variety diVerentfrom rural and urban dialects. The situation today, though more wide-spread than in the past as access to SA increases, is thus inherited. Asecond reason may be termed ‘mechanical compatibility’. The basicphonological and morphological structure of SA and NA are very sim-ilar. Lacking compelling reasons for switching to SA, the average Arabcould well ask what the necessity is of changing one’s native variety toanother, similar one. However, the key reason relates ultimately not tolanguage structure but to general social and political motivation. Shouldthese become impelling enough SA would doubtlessly become the spoken norm throughout the Arabic world. Lacking such motivation,however, and at present there are probably as many reasons for maintaining NA as for adopting SA, diglossia will continue to prevail.

Turning to the question whether the variation described in sections3 and 4 can straightforwardly be interpreted as describing languagechange, a quali!ed answer needs to be given. The most importantquali!cation pertains to what the parameters of variation are, whetherde!ned by the introduction of SA material via, primarily, the speechof educated speakers, or by inter-ethnic variation. Additive change maybe opposed to replacive change, with Arabic exhibiting both types toa high degree.

39 These two linkages are partially independent variables. As Grandguillaume (1991:51) points out, the relative weighting given to the Islamic or the modernist legitimiza-tion for the use of Standard Arabic within the modern Arab state is a signi!cant indexfor a range of attitudes and policies relating to languages other than SA.

40 Hence maintenance of NA rarely receives the attention from political scientists and historians which Arab policy towards SA does (e.g. Holt 1996, where mainly SAis considered).


Beginning with the !rst, the degree of in"uence of SA on spokenArabic in modern Arabic countries can hardly be understated. Itsin"uence is, however, largely of an additive rather than replacive nature.That is, SA is integrated into spoken Arabic by adjoining it to the NAbase (see 4.1) rather than by displacing it. The linguistic mechanismby which this is accomplished is via the introduction of SA lexical struc-tures into the NA base, i.e. borrowing. If the introduction of SA mate-rial may generally be characterized as borrowing (Owens and BaniYasin 1991), it is borrowing of a special kind because the donor vari-ety, SA, is always present among a large population of speakers, andeducated Arabs with a reasonable knowledge of it may employ it forboth conceptual and stylistic purposes.

In the simplest case SA words, usually new concepts, are introducedin their SA guise.41 qˆ’a “lecture hall”, for instance, is a word moreprevalent in the Irbid region of Jordan since the opening of YarmoukUniversity in 1976 than before that date (see e.g. Abd-el Jawad 1981:352, Holes 1987: 49, Abd-el Jawad and Sulaiman 1990, Haeri 1991).The introduced lexical structures may also bring entire blocks of ruleswith them. Bani Yasin and Owens (1987), for example, show that pluralnon-human nouns of SA provenance almost categorically require fsgagreement, as in SA, as opposed to a mixed fsg or natural fpl agree-ment found in the native Horan Arabic of the region. Moreover, theagreement will often be imposed on words of purely NA form andmeaning, yielding a mixed syntagm, with noun of SA origin, SA agree-ment, realized on a word of NA form and meaning.

The in!ltration of SA into NA is diYcult to conceptualize preciselybecause it proceeds along two dimensions simultaneously. One dimen-sion, at least in its initial impetus, is straightforward, the borrowing ofSA lexemes encoding new ideas, described in the previous paragraph.The second, alluded to in sections 3 and 4.3, is stylistically and situa-tionally controlled and hence is always in a state of "ux. In part re"ectingthis multiple motivation, words may appear in a number of diVerentguises, even in the space of a single text from a single speaker, fromfairly pure SA form, to mixed forms having attributes of SA and NA.All studies which have given serious quantitative attention to the mat-ter suggest that the situation can be idealized in the following dichotomy,Sallam (1980: 79), studying the q variable (see section 5 above) beingamong the !rst to address the question. A given corpus will contain

41 Excluding certain SA features, like case endings.

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words which always occur in a certain SA guise. In his data, qura “villages” always has the SA variant q for example. Other words willalternate between SA and NA, both qˆl and "̂ l “he said”, for example. Following Mitchell, for Sallam the q ~ " alternation is sty-listically-controlled, with q being a formal variant, " a casual one. Thissituation may be represented as in (2), describing the realization of the*q variable in two lexical sets, according to two contexts.

(2) Formal CasualSet 1 + – (qˆl ~ "̂ l )42

Set 2 + + (always qura)

This, however, is an idealization, which rarely, if ever, admits of a cat-egorical classi!cation of lexemes into two discrete sets. Holes, for instance,divides his Bahrain corpus into three lexical categories in respect of qoccurrence (1987: 51 V.), those words which only have g (or one of itsmorphophonological variants), those only with q, and those varyingbetween q ~ g. gˆl “say” is listed in the !rst category, mustaqbal “future”in the second (only q). Abd-el Jawad (1981: 367 V.) has a more pre-cise listing, giving the actual percentages of SA q or NA " ~ g ~ k inhis Amman corpus. Here mustaqbal occurs with q in 55% of the tokens,one of the NA variants in 45%; qˆl occurs in 9% of the tokens as q,91% in the NA guises. The comparative Bahrain ~ Amman data issuggestive of diVerent explanations. It may be, for example, that inAmman a ‘nativization’ of certain words like mustaqbal, originally fromSA, is further along than in Bahrain. The higher percentage of q inqˆl in Amman may also suggest a greater degree of style shifting therethan in Bahrain. In any case, what this discussion shows is that bor-rowing and stylistic variation may dovetail in such a way that as (mainly)learned words introduced originally in formal contexts become morewidespread, they loose their exclusively SA traits. At the same time,most lexemes, of whatever provenance, may be formalized by deliver-ing them in an SA guise. The logic of this process is such that its inter-pretation in terms of linear historical development, such as for instanceLabov attempts (1994: 345-6) is by its very nature impossible.

The second type of variation, inter-ethnic variation, represents vari-ation which may point to replacive language change. Most of the data

42 Whether the q ~ " (and SA ~ NA alternation in the same lexical set generally) isa phonological or a lexical alternation, or a combination of the two, is a question need-ing greater research; see e.g. Holes 1987 chapter 8).


discussed in 4.2 may be given a diachronic interpretation in this light.It appears, for instance, that the rural Palestinian k variant of *q hasnot strongly established itself in Jordanian cities, and may one day dis-appear entirely. Such a development would not mean the disappear-ance of the k variant, since it continues in the rural West Bank andin Israel, though its disappearance in one area would represent a lossand regression for this one feature.

Arabic, with two diVerent patterns of variation, is unique enoughthat it deserves a special place in the typology of sociolinguistic varia-tion. Such a conclusion is not one followed by all sociolinguists. Chambers, for instance, a sociolinguist with no background in Arabic,would have it that “. . . literary Arabic does not form part of the lin-guistic continuum in Arabic communities but is removed from it by agap.” (1995: 142). Such simpli!catory summaries may make presenta-tion of the Arabic situation easier for the outsider to grasp, though atthe expense of distorting the sociolinguistic reality. Without developingthe components in detail (Owens, 1998c, 1999), it may be suggestedthat a typology of sociolinguistic variation is necessary to account forthe diVerences obtaining between the West and Arabic-speaking coun-tries. In the West (perhaps elsewhere) a single, well-pro!led standard(standard English, Hochdeutsch, Classical French) stands opposed tovarious local vernaculars, what was referred to in 4.2 as the standard-vernacular dichotomy. A second position on the typology is representedby Arabic, de!ned by three parameters, a standard variety = SA, alocal prestige variety (in Ibrahim’s 1986 sense, see 4.3, e.g. the ’Arabvariety of Bahrain), and other non-prestigious local varieties (e.g. Baharnavarieties). Arabic in Nigeria !ts neither position, which implies that thetypology will require further de!ning parameters, which I will not gointo here.

(3) standard = prestige vs. vernacular (western countries)standard vs. prestige vs. vernacular (Arab countries)no standard, no prestige (Arabic in NE Nigeria)

7. Attitudes and usage

Language variation is related to a set of attitudes and value judgementspertaining to the diVerent variants. Two approaches to studying thisrelationship are sometimes termed the direct and indirect. The !rst asksspeakers directly their evaluation of diVerent varieties, frequently in con-

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junction with questions about domains of language usage. In this veinof research, Diem (1974, 92 V.), provides a good overview about Arabwriters’ attitudes towards SA and NA.

Examples of the direct approach are Kahtany (1997) and Dweik(1997) who asked a sample of Arab students in America about atti-tudes towards and policies concerning the use of SA as opposed to NA,Kahtany’s study concentrating speci!cally on Damascene Arabic. Gener-ally speaking they found an attitude tolerant toward NA, and aware ofits broad functional spread, but also one agreeing that SA is a varietyof greater prestige whose dominance should be maintained in the mediaand education.

The indirect approach is often used in conjunction with a versionof a matched guise test, made famous by Lambert (e.g. 1967). In thistest versions of the same text diVering only in terms of the featuresunder scrutiny, often read by the same person, are played before anaudience, who answer questions about the personality of the speaker.The questions are often arrayed along scalar poles of solidarity (e.g.friendliness, honesty, neighborliness of speaker) and power (wealth, edu-cation, respectability of speaker). In addition, subjects are often askedto identify the variety being spoken, and under what circumstances (e.g.at home, in a mosque) it would be appropriate to use it. Two of theearlier studies in this second genre of Arabic sociolinguistics were car-ried out with Egyptian subjects in Cairo. El-Dash and Tucker (1975)presented subjects with !ve language guises (Egyptian Arabic, SA,Egyptian, British and American English). Generally the SA guise receivedthe highest scores on all counts (intelligence, likeability, religiousness,leadership) with the British English speaker (!) receiving the lowest. TheEgyptian Arabic guise achieved his highest ranking on the likeabilityscale. The subjects were asked to rate the suitability of each guise for!ve domains. The SA guise scored highest for school, work, radio andtelevision, and formal speeches. Only in the home domain did the SArank lowest of the !ve, with the Egyptian Arabic guise scoring highesthere. This, the !rst study of its kind in the Arabic world, showed thatArabic speakers diVerentiate consistently between diVerent varieties ofArabic according to domain and personality assignment.

Herbolich (1979) was interested in de!ning to what extent Egyptianspeakers could identify the speech of other Arab nationals, and whatthe associated character traits of each were. For this study subjects wereplayed tapes of Egyptian, Libyan, Saudi and Syrian speakers, plus


speakers from these countries trying to speak in an Egyptian manner.Whereas the subjects could identify the pure Egyptian with 86% accu-racy, they were quite poor in identifying the other three. The Libyanwas highest after the Egyptian, though with only 23% correct identi-!cation. Despite this, the guises did receive consistent and statisticallysigni!cant assignment of character traits: Egyptians were generally ranked best, followed by the Syrian guise, Saudi and Libyan. Herbo-lich further showed that perceived identi!cation of speaker, even ifincorrect (e.g. Saudi speaker perceived as Sudanese) may aVect thejudgement of personality characteristics. Saudi’s identi!ed as Sudanese,for example, rate slightly higher than Saudis identi!ed as Saudis. Bothstudies had evaluators from diVerent educational levels, with subjectstending to make more accurate judgements about the speakers’ iden-tity the more education they had.

The !rst two studies inquired about global reactions to diVerent lan-guage varieties, without keying in on which linguistic variables it wasthat served as identi!catory clues to a particular variety. In this respectthey are hard to integrate into the detailed, variable-based analysis ofCairene speech which characterizes the corpus-based approach. Twostudies in Jordan, on the other hand, concentrated on the question ofattitudes towards speci!c variables, Sawaie (1986) and Hussein and El-Ali (1989). In both, matched-guise tests were constructed around thevariants q ~ " ~ g ~ k. Both studies found the SA variant q consis-tently received the most positive scores. The situation is more compli-cated with the other variables, however. Since both studies were carried out among Yarmouk university students in Irbid (Horan dia-lect region), the !ndings may be compared directly.

Generally speaking, Sawaie found that among the three NA vari-eties, " received the most positive evaluation. The speaker of this guise,for example, was more likely to be assigned a higher professional sta-tus, like doctor or university teacher, than were speakers of the otherguises and the speaker was assigned a higher social class. At the sametime, other variants did not necessarily have negative associations. g, forexample, was associated with a masculine way speaking (see Abd-elJawad 1981: 335), and although " was considered the most “pretty” (of the the NA variants), it was also considered the most “pretentiousand aVected”. It is interesting to note that each variety had strong geo-graphical associations. g was associated with Jordan, k with Palestine,and " evenly divided between Jordan and Palestine. On the wholeSawaie’s attitudinal study correlates with the corpus-based study of

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Abd-el Jawad (1981, 1986). q and " appear as standard and prestigevarieties respectively, g perhaps a covert prestige form, these the threevariants which dominate in Abd-el Jawad’s corpus (see 4.2). Even moreso than in Abd-el Jawad’s work, " emerges as a geographically-neutralurban prestige variety.

This happy state of correspondence is disturbed, however, by Husseinand El-Ali’s study. In contrast to Sawaie’s, here the g variant emergesas the most positively-evaluated variant, while the " guise was rankedas lowest. Speakers of each variety tended to rate their own varietymost positively, except the k speakers gave the g variant a higher rating.

One can imagine a number of explanations for discrepancies betweenthe two studies: the actual respondents may have come from diVerentbackgrounds, the phrasing of the questions was diVerent and so on.Certainly the relatively positive evaluation of the k variants, variantswhich Abd-el Jawad’s data suggest are regressive in both Irbid andAmman (see 4.2), deserves closer scrutiny.

Such discrepencies underscore the importance of conducting inte-grated studies in which the same sample is evaluated according to bothself-reported information about language attitude and usage and on thebasis of actual textual data, preferably in a range of speech situations.To date, no study has correlated reported language usage with observed,corpus-based usage.

Thus far little has been said about Arabic in North Africa. The rea-son for this is the dominant position of French in North Africa, withthe result that the majority of sociolinguistic studies in the region includeFrench as one of the language variables. The dominance of French issuch that it often overshadows the SA-NA dichotomy,43 so that a num-ber of studies when contrasting French-Arabic either do not explicitlydistinguish between SA and NA, or concentrate on NA, as the spokenvariety, alone. There exist, I believe, no corpus-based studies of the typesummarized in 4.1 and 4.2 which have investigated the status of three(or four, with Berber) varieties simultaneously, French, SA and NA.

As an introduction to this geographical area, 7 studies on languageattitudes using both direct and indirect techniques may be brie"y sum-marized. The languages involved alone, French and Arabic, and Berber


43 It is interesting to observe how sociolinguistics themselves tend to be drawn towardsquestions of power in language usage. SA vs. NA !gures strongly in the EasternMediterranean, whereas French-Arabic dominates in the western. The more recent inter-est in Berber (e.g. IJSL 1997) appears to re"ect a Berber power base. Previously socio-linguistic studies in North Africa rarely included Berber.

in one of the studies give the reader a preview of the very diVerenttype of language issues which tend to occupy linguistic studies in thisarea. In Dichy’s (1994) ‘glossic’ terms the relation between the varietiesis complex. Ostensibly French and SA constitute H varieties, NA andBerber low. The reality is more complex, however, as will be seenpresently.

Bentahila (1981) collected a number of questionnaires enquiring intothe domains of Arabic (usually undiVerentiated between NA and SA)and French. Generally speaking, Arabic was the preferred choice inmore informal domains (home, grocery store, for joking, speaking withmechanics) whereas French was preferred in formal contexts (speakingto a doctor, attending lectures, !lling out a job application, most media).Bentahila similarly found that in matched guise tests using French andMoroccan NA guises, the French guises were generally given a morefavorable rating. In one variant of the matched guise test, Bentahilacontrasted a French and an Arabic with a codeswitched version, boththe French and Arabic guises receiving a much more positive rating.Chebchoub’s (1985) study focusing on French, SA, (irregularly, NA)and mixed French/Arabic in Algiers largely replicated the results ofBentahila’s study. French has a formal pro!le, both NA and mixedFrench/Arabic being favored in familiar contexts. In a matched guisethere is one notable point of diVerence from Bentahila’s. Whereas inBentahila’s Moroccan study there was no signi!cant diVerence betweenthe French and (Moroccan) Arabic guises for the category “patriotic”,in Chebchoub’s Algiers study the SA guise achieved a signi!cantlyhigher rating, perhaps a re"ection of the more overtly nationalistic roleof SA in Algerian politics (Grandguillaume 1983: 154). Brahimi (1993),using situated scenarios, studied attitudes among Algerian university students in Oran towards SA, NA, and French. Her !ndings run ac-cording to expectations: French is the preferred language of scienti!cdiscourse, modern culture, SA of religious discourse and law, and NAin the market. These tendencies were replicated for two groups of sub-jects, students in the medical faculty (Francophone) and students of law(Arabophone), with the former having a relatively more positive orien-tation towards French than the latter. Kühnel’s study (1995) basedmainly on questionnaires collected at universities in Fez, Oran andAlgiers, tend to complement Brahimi’s in that SA emerges as a vari-ety which has to share its domains, even oYcial ones, with other vari-eties. NA and French, depending on domain and city, are both oftenpreferred to SA.

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Brahimi (1995) adds Berber to the repertoire of North African lan-guages. Brahimi’s study centered on Berbers living in Tizi Ouzu, aBerber-dominated area SE of Algiers (in the Kabylei) and Arabs andBerbers living in Arab-dominated Oran.

Two !ndings of Brahimi were, !rst, that there was a marked eth-nically-de!ned diVerence between Berbers and Arabs to a range ofquestions about language use and policy. Whereas Algerian Arabs werehighly favorable towards SA, Algerian Berbers were not, while attitudestowards Berber took precisely the opposite attitudinal values among thetwo groups. In terms of positive evaluation, NA and French took amiddle ground, with much more agreement between the two groups.A simple diglossic model thus fails to capture the nuanced symbolicvalues which each variant may take for the diVerent groups. A second!nding was that Berbers living in Oran tended to have more positivevalues towards Arabic than those in Berber-dominated Tizi Ouzu.

A study which stands apart from all others methodologically is thatof Lawson-Sako and Sachdev (1996). They considered the phenome-non of convergence and divergence from the perspective of accommo-dation theory. In Sousse, Tunisia, strangers were asked in French andT-NA by Europeans, Tunisians and African Blacks for directions to thetrain station. Overall it was found that there was a high degree of con-vergence—interpreted as answering in the same language as the ques-tioner—though the greatest degree of convergence was recorded forEuropean questioners, whether they posed their question in T-NA orFrench. For Arab questioners, a second question would often producea codeswitched (T-NA + French) response. This brief study—it did notgo beyond a second turn—indicates that factors of personal identity,both of questioner and respondent, are important in language choice,not only language competence. This study adds a new ‘glossic’ factorto those summarized above. The fact that the European questionerscommanded the greatest degree of convergence suggests that so longas there is a dominant foreign group, the language of that culture (inNorth Africa it could one day be English), will represent a powerfulalternative to SA in the H domains (see 8.1).

Benrabah (1994) uses a matched guise technique to investigate therelative status of “a” variants in Oran. Unfortunately, the sociolinguis-tic status of the variants, a pharyngealized vs. non-pharyngealized a,the former said to be rural, the latter urban, is too vaguely de!ned(e.g. via quantitative studies) for the results to be readily interpretableto the outsider.


Finally, in a questionnaire-based study conducted outside of the Arabicworld, Shorrab (1986) sketches domains of language use among Arab-American families in BuValo, New York. Among children, Arabic usagetends to decrease with age, the home environment being the main onewhere it has currency.

8. Contact

Arabic is spread over a huge geographical area, coming into contactwith a large number of languages of various types. The synchronicworkings of this contact unfortunately have rarely been closely describedin descriptive work.44 This is somewhat surprising, since substrate in"uenceon spoken Arabic has been invoked to explain various phenomena inthe history of the language, including the purported development ofthe Classical language into dialects (see section 2). In this section I willdescribe contact under two non-parallel categories, code-switching andcreolization. A third category which could be included here, Arabic asa second language, including the role of Arabic in non-Arabic Islamicsocieties, is too large a topic to be included.45

8.1 Code-switching

As mentioned in the previous section, the interests of linguists workingin North Africa, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, have a diVerent focusfrom that in Middle Eastern countries. Whereas in the Middle East SAis the undisputed high variety, in North Africa it is only in post-independence times that SA began achieving parity with French as thelanguage of education and oYcial business.46

44 The lack of interest in this !eld in an interesting re"ection on the sociology ofArabic linguistic academia. The !eld of Creole studies, for instance, has been seizedupon by European language departments (especially English and French) to expand therange of languages studied within them. Creole Arabic, on the other hand, receiveshardly passing mention in Arabic department curricula and Arabic linguistic journals.In Germany, for example, the only two studies initiated from within the country whichI am aware of on East African Nubi were carried out by Africanists (Heine 1982,Khamis 1994).

45 Rouchdy (1992) is a collection of articles on Arabic in America, a number focus-ing on the role of Arabic among Americans of Arab descent. I do not referee most ofthe articles, as they tend to deal with matters of social history, aspects of Arabic viewedfrom a structural perspective (e.g. borrowing), or language teaching.

46 See Grandguillaume (1983) for an enlightening discussion of language politics inNorth Africa.

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Given its long history in North Africa, French is widely spoken andFrench-Arabic codeswitching prevalent. It is so ingrained in NorthAfrican linguistic habits that the codeswitched variety has a name ofits own, ‘Frarabe’, ‘’Aransiyya’ or ‘Franco-Arabe’. Bentahila (1981),Bentahila and Davies (1983) and Chebchoub (1985) have studied French-Arabic (NA) codeswitching in functional and structural linguistic terms.

In their 1983 study Bentahila and Davies examine internal linguis-tic constraints to codeswitching, showing that many structural constraintsproposed up to that time (1983) were found in their data.47 It appearsthat French-Arabic codeswitching is very "exible with few absolute lim-its on switch positions. Even the one general constraint which they pro-pose, that there be no violation of the subcategorization rules of eitherlanguage (1983: 321) is contradicted in their own data. The adjectivein dak l-warqa bleue “that blue paper”, for instance, lacks the de!nitearticle which a de!nite Arabic head noun requires on it.48 Chebchoub(1985) includes a similar, though less detailed study of French-Arabiccodeswitching in Algiers, which largely coincides with Bentahila andDavies’ !ndings.

Atawneh (1993) describes codeswitching among three Arabic chil-dren in the USA, showing, in the manner of Bentahila and Davies,that absolute structural constraints on switch positions are very diYcultto de!ne. Eid (1992) considers the same languages in terms of languageroles (language structure and competence of speakers), though her con-clusions are exploratory.

Thus far no studies have explored in structural and interactionalterms the coexistence of diVerent diglossic codes available in NorthAfrica, the classic diglossic H-L contrast implicit in the SA-NA dyadand the functional diglossia inherent in the presence of competing Hvarieties, French and SA.

8.2 Pidginization and Creolization

The special sociolinguistic interest of pidgin and creole phenomena liesin the social processes which give rise to pidgins and creoles, and ensu-ing processes of decreolization, all of which imply a intensive contact

47 For example, that a PP acting as complement to a noun or verb cannot be in adiVerent language from the head, disproved by the Moroccan, g°ady“n en ville “going intotown”, (1983: 314, similarly Chebchoub 1985: 168 on Algiers codeswitching).

48 As in dak l-warqa l-bleue, attested in Bentahila 1981 (p. 201; see also Nortier 1994:210 on Dutch-Arabic codeswitching).


between speakers of diVerent languages. Once formed, a creole likeNubi, a creole Arabic of East Africa, is a language as independent ofits Arabic source as is Hebrew from Arabic. One of the focuses of thissection will thus be socio-historical.

While there is evidence that simpli!ed Arabic-based trade languagesexisted as long ago as 1,000 AD (Thomason and El-Gibali 1986), theonly well-attested pidgin/creoles (p/c) come out of what is today Sudan,East Africa and Chad.49 So far as our knowledge of these varieties go,they arose in the turbulent southern Sudan of the second half of thenineteenth century. After 1850 there developed camps of ivory hunters,which within twenty years had developed into slaving camps. The south-ern Sudan at this time was broadly divided into a three-class society,two of them found within the camps (Mahmud 1983, Owens 1990,1997). At the bottom were the indigenous groups, who had, at best,"eeting contact with the camps, and at worst were the victims of theirpredations. At the top was a ruling elite of mixed origin. There weremany Arabs from Egypt and the northern Sudan, some Europeanadventurers, often in the service of the Egyptian government whichnominally ruled the Sudan, and Nubians from the Nile valley in north-ern Sudan. In the middle were southern Sudanese who had either vol-unteered or been forced to work in the camps. It was in the milieu ofthe camps that a creole Arabic arose. In the multilingual South therewas no single ethnic group dominant in political or economic termswhose language could serve as a lingua franca. Arabic, the prestige lan-guage, had too small a number of native speakers, 20% of the camppopulation at most, to provide an adequate model for the transmissionof a normal form of NA. Moreover, strained social relations betweenthe indigenous camp residents and northerners was not conducive tothe transmission of NA. What developed instead was a variety of pid-gin/creole Arabic (see next paragraph). The decisive factor in ensuringthe survival of this emerging variety was the attack in 1886 by theforces of the Mahdi on the southern Sudan, and the subsequent retreatin 1888 of Emin Pasha and many of the camp followers into NorthernUganda. Most of the followers never returned to the Sudan, settlinginstead in East Africa, where their successors are known as Nubi.

49 Versteegh’s (1984) original and overly criticized thesis that the modern dialectsarose via a stage of pidginization inter alia (Owens 1989) suVers from the lack of !rst-hand (seventh, eighth century) material detailing the pidginization of a classical Arabic-like variety.

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Completely cut oV from Arabic models, their language of creole ori-gin became their native language.50

Though lexically and phonologically Nubi is derivable from Arabicusing classical comparative methods (Owens 1985, Miller 1993), it hasalmost nothing of Arabic morphology and diVers in some respects inits syntax as well. It has lost the Semitic property of deriving grammaticalforms via ablaut changes, so that although a word such as aÒrubu “drink”may be derived historically from < *aÒrub-u “drink imp pl”, it appearsonly in one segmental form in all aspects and tenses. Verbs have noaYxal person marking. The language is not mutually intelligible withany form of Arabic. Nubi thus represents a case of contact producingchanges to such a degree that a completely new language results.

This language continued to survive in the southern Sudan despitethe retreat of the Egyptian government, and in recent years has establisheditself even as a !rst language in urban centers. In the Sudan it is knownas Juba Arabic,51 and is mutually intelligible with Nubi, having essen-tially the same structure. In the Sudan, however, it exists alongsidenative Arabic varieties, and comes under its structural in"uence. Mahmud(1979, see also Miller 1985, to appear for alternative analysis) repre-sents this in"uence in terms of a creole continuum, Juba Arabic becom-ing assimilated to NA via a series of medial varieties. He outlines aprocess, for example, whereby Juba Arabic tense/aspect pre!xes, likebi- “future”, gi- “progressive” are replaced by the S-NA verbal pre!xesya-, na-, ta- ( g-aÒrubu “prog-drinking” ya-Òrab “he is drinking”). Mahmud’s data, though suggestive, does not appear detailed enoughto con!rm the existence of a relatively stable continuum such as isfound in many Caribbean societies (basi-, meso-, acrolect, e.g. Bickerton1975). Miller and Abu Manga (1992) conducted a similar study in theTakamul squatter settlement of Khartoum North. This is an area pop-ulated largely by non-Arab migrants from the southern and westernSudan. Besides summarizing the results of a survey of language domains,a corpus-based study outlines preliminary hierarchies for the acquisi-tion of Sudanese NA phonological, morphological and syntactic features

50 Tosco and Owens (1993) argue that Turku, a pidgin Arabic of Chad, was origi-nally implanted in that country by the same social movements which produced Nubiin East Africa.

51 The present author (so long as his knowledge of Nubi was "uent) always was ableto converse with speakers of Juba Arabic. It is thus not clear to me on what basis theSIL (SIL Homepage, Ethnologue 1996, Creole Arabic) doubts the mutual intelligibility ofthe varieties.


among the non-Arab sample. In contrast to Mahmud, Miller and Abu-Manga do not use the creole continuum model. However, lacking anexplicit discussion of the point, one is not certain whether the diVerentapproaches are due to diVerent developments in Juba Arabic betweenthe southern Sudan and the North, or due to diVerent theoretical pref-erences of the researchers.

9. Prospects

Arabic sociolinguistics exists in the trivial sense that Arabic has beenstudied from sociolinguistic perspectives. It should come as no surprisethat the collection of studies summarized here lack the feel of an organicwhole. Added to the fact that sociolinguistics itself lends itself to quitediverse approaches in the study of the relation between language andsociety (see e.g. Figueroa 1994), is the reality that scholars approachArabic from the perspective of methodologies and theories developedin western academia, based largely on languages of the West. One mayregret this reality (Owens, 1998b), though reality it is. Of course, itneed not automatically be assumed that western theories will not beapplicable in the Arabic world. In many respects the well-pro!led con-trasts between diVerent varieties of Arabic, particularly those diglossi-cally and, in some cases, ethnically de!ned (4.1, 4.2) !nd analogies withwestern counterparts. Standard vs. Black vernacular English, for exam-ple, symbolizes a set of cultural and social contrasts diVerent perhapsin content from contrasting varieties in the Arabic world, but not inthe saliency with which they are perceived.

However, there are socially-de!ned aspects of Arabic so diVerent indegree from anything found in the West that they represent a type oftheir own.52 The typological signi!cance of these was outlined in sec-tion 6. Put pithily, where western sociolinguistics has to a great degree

52 Versteegh’s conclusion (1997: 193) that sociolectal varieties of H/L diglossic vari-eties in Arabic cannot be de!ned until correlations with socioeconomic class are avail-able, assumes on a priori grounds that western, class-based sociolinguistic parameters willprovide the best or most important or in some sense signi!cant social parameter fordealing with diglossic variation in Arabic. Without downplaying the danger of rein-venting the wheel in ignoring parallels outside of Arabic linguistics, the above conclu-sion represents an equally great danger of !tting Arabic diglossia into a mould it doesnot belong in.

A similar propensity to search for legitimacy on the basis of constructs developedwithin western sociolinguistics is in evidence in Haeri’s claim (1997a: 227) to have havebeen the !rst to document a change in progress in Arabic sociolinguistics, the palatal-

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been established on the basis of class-based variation, variation in theArabic world is de!ned by diglossia. Of course, just as class can be usedas a variable in explaining variation in Arabic (see 4.5), so too willdiglossia be available to western languages (Hudson 1994). Prototypicalinstances of diglossic or class-based variation, however, are representedby diVerent languages (e.g. Arabic for diglossia, English for class-basedvariation).

It would be a mistake for Arabic sociolinguistics to stop at diglossia,however, as diglossia is not the only concept distinctive of Arabic socio-linguistics. At this juncture, however, one may register a certain dis-appointment in the failure of Arabic sociolinguistics to adequately de!nefurther positions on a prospective typological scale. Admittedly, one rea-son for this is the fact that Arabic covers sociolinguistic landscapeswhose only coherency at times appears to be the almost accidental factthat the language used in each part happens to be Arabic. NigerianArabic, discussed in 4.2, is a case in point. It falls outside the proto-typical range of Arabic diglossia, though dialectically diverse, does nothave opposing prestige norms and non-prestige varieties, is not markedby class-based diVerences, and so on. In North Africa the social andsymbolic values attached to languages (Berber, French, Arabic) and vari-eties of a single language (SA, NA) appear to shift according to theperspective of the groups using them. As noted in 8.1, the intersectionof classic and functional diglossia (n. 7) in North African societies pre-sents an interesting research perspective. Clearly, a truly general Arabicsociolinguistics will ultimately have to deal with Arabic in all its guises,linking what till today have been regional biases, if necessary develop-ing models of sociolinguistic interaction for contexts which are unusualor even non-existent in the West.

It is not suggested that Arabic will represent a unique type in everyrespect. The sociolinguistic status of Arabic in Maiduguri will very likely be similar to that of other minority languages of comparable sizein various areas of Africa, and polyglossic North Africa will !nd paral-lels elsewhere.53 Orientating Arabic sociolinguistics within a broader

ization of dental stops in Cairene Arabic. What she apparently documents is a possi-ble correlation between social class and variation. Variation, possibly pointing to lin-guistic change, has been documented in a number of studies, for instance Abdel-Jawad(k ~ c and k ~ g ~ ’ in Amman) and Holes (inter alia, [ ~ y in Bahrain). In contrastto western studies, however, social class is not a signi!cant extra-linguistic variable here(see 4.2, 6).

53 For example, the multiglossic language situation in a Nairobi housing estate describedby Parkin (1977), where H and L varieties change according to context.


typology has twofold relevance. Sociolinguistic descriptions will contributeto a more detailed knowledge of the form and function of Arabic intoday’s world and in the past and in so doing Arabic sociolinguisticswill contribute to a broader understanding of sociolinguistics generally.

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Further reading

Farghal, Mohammad and Abdullah Shakir. 1994. “Kin Terms and titles of Address asRelational Honori!cs in Jordanian Arabic”. Anthropological Linguistics 36: 240-53.

Kraemer, Roberta, Elite Olshtain and Saleh Badier. 1994. “Ethnolinguistic Vitality,Attitudes and Networks of Linguistic Contact: the Case of the Israeli Arab Minority”.IJSL 108: 79-96.

Owens, Jonathan (ed.). 2000. Arabic as a Minority Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Rieschild, Verna. 1998. “Lebanese Arabic Reverse Role Vocatives”. Anthropological Linguistics

40: 617-641.Wahba, Kassem. 1993. A Sociolinguistic Treatment of the Feature of Emphasis in Egypt. PhD

Thesis, Univ. of Alexandria, Egypt.


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