Abstract
The diglossic context of Arabic refers to the use of two language varieties within the same speech community in everyday life. Spoken Arabic (SA) is acquired first and used for everyday informal communication, while Literary Arabic (LA, referred to also as Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA) is acquired mainly at school and is used for reading, writing and formal functions. One question that has been raised relates to whether LA functions as a second language and whether diglossia represents a particular form of bilingualism. This chapter reviews some of the previous experimental psycholinguistic findings in this field of research. In addition, it presents new behavioral and brain research data and discusses recently published findings supporting the claim that brain-based language dominance in the diglossic situation is modality-dependent. The results and discussion presented here suggest that literate native speakers of Arabic who master the use of both SA and LA function as if they had two first languages: One in the auditory modality (SA) and one in the visual written modality (LA). During language production tasks, SA and LA might behave very similarly, although competitively as two first languages. The fact that SA and LA exchange places as dominant and less dominant language variety as a function of the modality and that they compete similarly in the oral modality do not allow to conclude that they represent two separate linguistic systems. Because the conclusions presented here might not seem warranted at this stage of research in this field, we propose that further research will be needed to better understand the representation of, and the interactions between, the two varieties of Arabic.
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Notes
- 1.
Because SA serves strictly for oral communication, it did not exist in the written form, until the recent emergence of “electronically mediated communication”. The ability to exchange messages that tend to be of an informal nature has resulted in the emergence of written messages in SA. In the beginning and due to technical limitations, electronic communication used Roman characters (e.g., Palfreyman & Khalil, 2003; Warschauer et al., 2002), a phenomenon, referred to as “Arabizi”. In recent years, thanks to the advent of smart phones which enable writing messages using the Arabic keyboard, this phenomenon has almost completely disappeared.
- 2.
Although the formal exposure to the standard language occurs when children go to school, they are however exposed to various extent to LA through media and TV programs for children and through oral storytelling by parents at home and by educators in kindergartens (see a discussion on this issues in Saiegh-Haddad & Spolsky, 2014).
- 3.
There are also words shared by SA and LA, and there are others which are characterized by variable degrees of relatedness between the two forms that ranges from identical phonological representation in both varieties, to a phonological distance that alters both the phonemic and the syllabic structure of the words.
- 4.
Of note is the fact that we initially relied on Arabic speakers to rate also the Hebrew words, but because this is formally their second language, the average frequency for each of the words appeared a little low. Since it is a well-known fact the in the average second language words are of subjectively lower frequency than first language words, we passed the questionnaire to 10 Hebrew native students who rated them again and the frequency values reported here come from the Hebrew speakers and as seen indeed they compare to their equivalents in Arabic.
- 5.
It is worth noting the re-analysis of the 23 subjects’ behavioral data yielded very similar statistics on the RTs (not included here).
- 6.
These points determined from around 100 ms onwards refer to the first highest positive value around the P100 component (~100 ms) and its time latency, then successively the most negative for the N170 (~170 ms), then for the P2 and the N2.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (Grants no’ 623/11 and 2695/19) and by the Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities. We thank all MA and PhD students who contributed to the data collection and their analysis and thank more than two hundreds participants for having volunteered to the different behavioural, EEG and fMRI studies discussed here.
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Appendix 1: Examples of Words Used for LA, SA and Hebrew and Their Phonetic Translation
Appendix 1: Examples of Words Used for LA, SA and Hebrew and Their Phonetic Translation
LA | SA | Hebrew | Referent |
|---|---|---|---|
/ʔanf/أَنف | /xuʃum/ خُشُم | /ʔaf/אף | Nose |
دَلو/dalw/ | /sat̪ˁel/ سَطِل َ | /dli:/דלי | Bucket |
نَافذة /na:fiða/ | /ʃubba:k/ شُبَّاك | /ħalo:n /חלון | window |
/miʕt̪ˁaf /مِعطَف | /kabbu:t/ َكبوت | /miʕi:l/מעיל | coat |
سرير َ/sari:r/ | /taxet/ تَخِت | /mita/ מיטה | bed |
/θiya:b/ ثياب | /ʔawaʕi:/ أَواعي | /bgadi:m/בגדים | clothes |
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Khateb, A., Ibrahim, R. (2022). About the Neural Basis of Arabic Diglossia: Behavioral and Event- Related Potential Analysis of Word Processing in Spoken and Literary Arabic. In: Saiegh-Haddad, E., Laks, L., McBride, C. (eds) Handbook of Literacy in Diglossia and in Dialectal Contexts. Literacy Studies, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80072-7_10
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