In each Arabic-speaking country there are at least two linguistic varieties that occupy the linguistic space, Standard or Formal Arabic, and Colloquial or Spoken Arabic. Standard Arabic, which is acquired mainly through formal education, is relatively uniform across the Arabic-speaking world, while Colloquial Arabic, which is natively acquired in the home and within the community, displays a great deal of dialectal variation at the lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and discourse levels. For example, Standard Arabic has specific negatives for present, past, and future tense sentences, but most colloquial dialects have only one negative whose syntax and morphology may differ from one dialect to another.
The goal of this project is to provide a detailed parallel syntactic description of five Arabic varieties, representing the main geographical regions of the Arabic world from the Atlantic ocean in Africa to the Gulf in Asia: Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Kuwaiti Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic. Data will be collected on a large number of syntactic constructions and patterns, which will be described and analyzed for each of the five varieties of Arabic. In addition to data from electronic corpora, the PI and his assistants will collect, describe, and analyze additional data from print and audiovisual media and from native Arabic speakers. The project will provide graduate and undergraduate students with training in research in comparative syntax, Arabic language and linguistics, and data collection and analysis.
The comparative syntactic description will provide an additional resource for enhancing research on Arabic within various fields, particularly syntax, computational linguistics, and first and second language acquisition. It will be a resource to the Arabic language students and teachers that can be used to better understand how the dialects relate to each other and to Standard Arabic. The availability of such resource would help programs develop curricula that better reflect the diglossic reality of the linguistic situation in the Arabic-speaking world.
The project undertook a comparative study of five Arabic varieties (four spoken dialects and Standard Arabic) from different regions of the Arab world, each representing one major geographical area and linguistic grouping (North Africa/Meghreb; Egypt; Levant; and Gulf). It investigated a number of patterns, such as sentential and phrasal structures, and isolated areas of similarities and differences between Standard Arabic (the formal and official language of the countries of the Arab League) and the spoken varieties that are typically used as the main vehicles of communication on a daily basis in the Arab world, often in conjunction with or instead of Standard Arabic. The research team also developed parallel lexical, phrasal, and sentential databases which are critical for cross-dialectal comparisons. The descriptions and analyses were based on a variety of data sources such as elicited patterns and narratives from native speakers, published sources, and electronic corpora, some of which developed by our research team. For descriptive/theoretical and computational linguistics, investigating the similarities and differences between the Arabic varieties has the potential to shed important light on language variation within the Arab world, contribute to the growing field of language and dialect distance, and provide resources for research on the acquisition and teaching of Arabic as a first and second language.
