Varieties of Arabic - Language Mixing and Change

Language Mixing and Change

Arabic is characterized by a wide number of varieties; however, Arabic speakers are often able to manipulate the way they speak based on the circumstances. There can be a number of motivations for changing one's speech: the formality of a situation, the need to communicate with people with different dialects, to get social approval, to differentiate oneself from the listener, when citing a written text, to differentiate between personal and professional or general matters, to clarify a point, and to shift to a new topic, to name but a few.

An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect. This refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities, depending on the context. This is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a prestige variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the prestige dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities. Moreover, in certain contexts, a dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language - this is the case in Bahrain, for example.

Language mixes and changes in different ways. Arabic speakers often use more than one variety of Arabic within a conversation or even a sentence. This process is referred to as Code-switching. For example, a woman on a TV program could appeal to the authority of the formal language by using elements of it in her speech in order to prevent other speakers from cutting her off. Another process at work is 'leveling', the "elimination of very localised dialectical features in favour of more regionally general ones." This can affect all linguistic levels - semantic, syntactic, phonological, etc... The change can be temporary, as when a group of speakers with substantially different Arabics communicate, or it can be permanent, as often happens when people from the countryside move to the city and adopt the more prestigious urban dialect, possibly over a couple of generations.

This process of accommodation sometimes appeals to the formal language, but often does not. For example, villagers in central Palestine may try to use the dialect of Jerusalem rather than their own when speaking with people with substantially different dialects, particularly since they may have a very weak grasp of the formal language. In another example, groups of educated speakers from different regions will often use dialectical forms that represent a middle ground between their dialects rather than trying to use the formal language. Take, for example, this case of a recorded conversation between educated Arabs from the Persian Gulf, Baghdad, Cairo and Jerusalem. To express the existential 'there is' (as in, 'there is a place where...'), Arabic speakers have access to many different words:

• Persian Gulf: /aku/
• Baghdad: /aku/
• Cairo: /fiː/
• Jerusalem: /fiː/
• Modern Standard Arabic: /hunaːk/

In this case, /fiː/ is most likely to be used as it is not associated with a particular region and is the closest to a dialectical middle ground for this group of speakers. Moreover, given the prevalence of movies and TV shows in Egyptian Arabic, the speakers are all likely to be familiar with it.

Note that sometimes a certain dialect may be associated with backwardness and will therefore not carry 'mainstream prestige' - yet, it will continue to be used as it carries a kind of 'covert prestige' and serves to differentiate one group from another when necessary.