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  • 7 - Diglossia, Variation, and Structural Complexity

  • from Part II - Arabic Variation and Sociolinguistics
  • Edited by Karin Ryding, Georgetown University, Washington DC, David Wilmsen, American University of Beirut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics
    Published online:
    23 September 2021
    Print publication:
    30 September 2021, pp 155-180

  • Summary

    Samira Farwaneh interrogates the largely unquestioned and untested assumption in linguistics that languages are all equally complex. Again, the indelible mark of diglossia in Arabic on theorizing about language colours the analysis, specifically with the notion that the formal Arabic of writing and declamation is necessarily more complex than the natively spoken varieties of the language. Starting from the assumption, shared by native speakers of Arabic and many linguists studying Arabic alike, that spoken varieties are simplifications of a more structurally complex and presumably chronologically older Arabic, represented by the Arabic of classical writing and its modern written descendant, she demonstrates that Arab dialects are in some ways more structurally complex than the Arabic of writing, specifically respecting the tense, mood, and aspect systems of spoken Arabi, the manifestations of indefinite noun constructs and object marking, and specifically in the so-called ‘dialectal tanwin’, co-referential and ethical dative marking, and in negation.