Arabic-L:LING:Meaning of 'near-native-speaker' discussion

[Dilworth Parkinson]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arabic-L: Wed 10 Oct 2012
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
[To post messages to the list, send them to arabic-l at byu.edu]
[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to
listserv at byu.edu with first line reading:
           unsubscribe arabic-l                                      ]

-------------------------Directory------------------------------------

1) Subject:Meaning of 'near-native-speaker' discussion

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 10 Oct 2012
From:Benjamin Geer <benjamin.geer at gmail.com>
Subject:Meaning of 'near-native-speaker' discussion

It's certainly not the case that highly educated native speakers of Arabic
can necessarily speak MSA well. I have quite a few Egyptian friends who are
native speakers of Arabic, and have degrees from Egyptian state
universities, but have very low proficiency in spoken MSA. As far as I can
tell, for most educated Egyptians, there is simply no socio-linguistic
context that calls for "correct" spoken MSA. Even in the most formal
situations, highly educated native speakers can always speak a form of
Arabic that includes a great deal of colloquial syntax and morphology. Of
course, some native speakers are indeed proficient in MSA, but I think
these are a very small minority, perhaps consisting mainly of "professional
MSA speakers" such as Arabic teachers.

Ben
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Arabic-L: 10 Oct 2012
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/arabic-l/attachments/20121010/bbc85c8c/attachment.htm>