Arabic-L:PEDA:Teaching Colloquial with MSA

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 07 Jan 2009
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Teaching Colloquial with MSA

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1)
Date: 07 Jan 2009
From:Joseph Norment Bell <joseph.bell at if.uib.no>
Subject:Teaching Colloquial with MSA

Sometimes we must face the facts. While we all know that knowledge of a
dialect or of MSA alone is not sufficient, we seem to disagree on the
choice of dialect or whether we might use a blend of dialects.

The point in learning to speak Arabic well is to be able to play on the
full range of levels and nuances that Standard Arabic and your dialect
make available, according to the situation.

Few can be asked to do this with more than one dialect. Which one? Well,
if you know where you are going and where you are likely to stay, then
the best choice is most likely the prestige dialect of that area. But
most students of Arabic don't know where they are headed until they have
more or less finished their formal language training. (The French
experience is something of an exception here.)

So we ask whether there is a dialect that practically from one end of
the Arab world to the other might be in competition with MSA as a lingua
franca, even if often at different levels of formality. It would seem to
be there is, and pretty much everyone knows the answer.

Illiterate Arabs who may still understand some MSA, will also understand
you if you speak to them in Cairene Egyptian. Often they will even be
able to answer you in something resembling Cairene.

I don't know where this leaves the partisans of "blending." One speaks
of "leveling," and how Arabs from different countries, when together,
will leave out expressions they consider to be too dialect-specific to
be understood by the others. But at least in _middle level_ Cairene
there is little that needs to be left out for such reasons.

Other Arabic dialects cannot be imitated for the same reasons over the
same wide geographic area. A Jordanian imitating an Egyptian is very
likely doing it to be understood (the popularity of Egyptian jokes
notwithstanding), whereas when he imitates a Lebanese, for example, he
is indeed most likely telling a joke.

Telling jokes makes you popular. Maybe our dialect-blending students
will reap that benefit.

Joseph Bell

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