ACADEMIA Letters

A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its

Effects on ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and
the Mental Lexicon
Zeinab Ibrahim, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar

The Arabic language and Diglossia

Arabic is a Semitic language and it is the formal language of twenty-two Arab countries, mem-
bers of the Arab League. More than 422 million people1 in the 22 Arab countries and their
mother tongue is one of the Arabic dialects. Arabic is a diglossic language. According to Fer-
guson (1959 and 1991), it has two varieties, Low(L) and High(H). The H is the one learned in
school and is the variety used in formal settings. The L is the mother tongue acquired at home
and is used for daily informal settings(Functions). Ferguson in 1991 revisited his opinion that
there were clear cuts between both varieties and considered an existing continuum.
This case of Diglossia is referred to as “Classical Diglossia” While there is another case
of Diglossia referred to as “Broad Diglossia” Fishman 1980 & Fasold, 1984). Fishman (1980)
explained Broad Diglossia as a state of two different languages performing the different func-
tions, while Fasold (1988) stated that it could me more than two languages.
Although linguists working on the Arabic language agreed on the functions, however, they
disagreed on the relatedness of the two varieties; some authors claimed that Arabs learn the
H form as a second language and others authors claimed that Arabs learn it as a different va-
riety of the same language. For example, Ibrahim & Aharon-Peretz, (2005, Pp.64-65) stated
1
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/world-
arabic-language-day/retrieved October 24,2017

Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
1
while examining semantic priming on both Arabic and Hebrew that “…, the hypothesis that
LA constitutes a second language for the native Arabic speaker was supported by outcome of
this experiment.” Khamis-Dakwar &Froud, (2006, P.12) wrote, going along the same lines as
this perception, “To summarize, our findings reveal that native Palestinian speakers process
switching between the two language varieties similarly to switches between two different lan-
guages. Additionally, our data indicate that PCA is represented as a first language and MSA
as a second language, for these participants.” However, these same authors ( Khamis-Dakwar
et al P.85) revisited their perception in 2012 by saying “In the case of the diglossic Arabic
situation, skillful readers are those who can effectively shift between skills and knowledge
gained in their oral language to reading and writing in MSA. “ It is important to discuss a
term they have used which is “shift.” Could it be “code shifting” or “code transfer”, although
both in a way could be the same process.
Although a previous study I have conducted (Ibrahim & Attia ,2010) actually proved that
the educational system plays a huge role in providing false information about the language it-
self. The study was interested in discovering the amount of knowledge educated native speak-
ers have on the relatedness between the two varieties. The respondents were asked to state
if the sentences that were given included dialectal words. Almost all indicted that they are
dialectal and not MSA, although they were all MSA. A good example is the verb /HaTT/, ‘to
put’, which was replaced by all with /waDa9a/, another verb for ‘to put’. The actual situa-
tion that takes place is that the child goes to school using /HaTT/ in her/his dialectand s/he
is immediately corrected with/waDa9a/. Thus indirectly indicating to the child that one is
right and the other is wrong and one is dialectal and the other is MSA. Eventually a process in
which the child experiences through the curriculum itself throughout the educational process
leaving her/him under the impression that there is no relatedness between the two varieties
and that the dialect words s/he knows are no MSA.
These studies have been and are still going on attempting to clear this point. Some of these
studies were mainly concerned with the mental lexicon which is the next point discussed.

The Mental Lexicon

Defining the Mental Lexicon

The field of psycholinguistics concerns the mental processes involved in language

use, such as language acquisition, perception, comprehension, and production.
The study of the mental lexicon (or the internal lexicon) is a subfield of psycholin-
guistics that focuses on the organization of word knowledge in one’s permanent

Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
2
 memory (Carroll, 2000). Gui (2000) expands on Carroll’s characterization of
the mental lexicon by nothing that it encompasses not only how words are stored
in one’s memory but also how they are retrieved during the act of speaking and
writing. (He, H., & Deng, Y., 2015, Pp. 40-41).
Although this definition was used when examining the English language mental lexicon,
it can be extended to many languages. This paper is adapting this definition as in the examples
provided in the paper, it depends on how the words are being retrieved from the Arabic speaker
memory.
Few years earlier, Allport & Funnell (1981, P. 183) while examining the components of
the mental lexicon mentioned “we shall be concerned with some elementary question about
the internal organization of the mental lexicon. In the psychological study of language much
of the scientific effort of the past 10 years has focused on two levels. The first of these concerns
the problem of word recognition or ‘lexicon access’, that is the marvelously rapid and efficient
processes by which a spoken or written word evokes an appropriate and, if successful, unique
lexical code (see example, Allport 1979; Henderson & Chard 1980; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler,
this symposium)”.
Actually the following two quotations explain that the main interest is how the mental
lexicon works between lexical codes “lexicon access” (Allport & Funnell 1981, P.183) or
“how they are retrieved during the act of speaking and writing” (He & Deng 2015, P.41). A
case that is noticeable to all educators of Arabic to native speakers.
Although this paper is not involved in the multilingual mental lexicon transfer as in the
works of Wei (2003 & 2006), it can make benefit from the following explanation that “…lem-
mas in the multilingual mental lexicon are language-specific, and they activate language-
specific sets of morphosyntactic procedures in the speech production formulator” (Wei, 2006,
P.93).
Since lemmas are language specific, therefore, they can also be code specific whatever
that code is.

The Mental Lexicon and the Arabic Language

Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson (2013, P. 1470) mentioned “Finally, because MSA and dialec-
tal Arabic fulfill distinct sociolinguistic and communicative functions, it is inappropriate to
describe one as a first and the other as a second language. They are two varieties in overlap-
ping but partially complementary distribution” while they were examining the morphological
structure in the Arabic mental lexicon between standard and dialectal Arabic. They also re-
ported that (ibid, P. 1470) “The results reported here show that MSA and STA are treated in

Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
3
similar ways with word patterns and roots acting as linguistic units whose effects are distinct
from the effects of form and meaning in both varieties. This is the case despite the differences
underlying the two varieties in terms of the productivity of their morphological systems, the
age at which they are acquired and sociolinguistic context in which they are experienced. “
Leikin et al (2014, P. 744) state that:

The most interesting finding of the present study relates to the fact that pre-school
have already acquired literary Arabic to an extent that allows them to retell co-
herently the story read to them in LA (literary Arabic). The children also demon-
strated very good comprehension in literary Arabic, as well as knowing many
literary words, and were able to retell a story presented in LA (see table 4). Thus,
it may be suggested that despite prominent differences in all linguistic aspects be-
tween literary and spoken Arabic (e.g. Ibrahim, R. 2009; Saiegh-Haddad, 2008)
and despite the lack of formal education of literary Arabic at preschool age, the
children had definite opportunities for mastering LA.

Although the previous experiment was concerned with literary Arabic, was with a more
complicated variety, Classical Arabic(CA). In a previous research on teaching children age five
to six, in the listening part, the story of Aladdin was used which was taken from an original
text (with deletion and simplification) as the listening part of the curriculum. I remember the
first day in the listening class, and after listening to the first episode, I thought that choosing
this text was inappropriate as the level of the language was very high and expected that the
children will not understand. Amazingly, they did understand and recounted the episode.
The most possible explanation is that these children hear the prayers listen whether directly or
indirectly to the religious sermons and that was the reason behind their understanding (Ibrahim
et al, 2018).
Moreover, one of the effects of Diglossia was noticed clearly by me when investigating
lexical variation in MSA. It was found through the study that if a word is used in the dialect,
a different word would be used in the MSA, i.e. /yaHSal/ and /yaHduth/, ‘to happen, or take
place. ‘In the Egyptian dialect, /yaHSal/ is used so the MSA is /yaHduth/, while in the Mo-
roccan dialect, /waqa9/
(also MSA word) is used, so /yaHSal/ is used as the MSA word. This happened with
almost most of the words tested (Ibrahim, Z. 2009). I referred to this phenomenon at two
separate domains. “All respondents neither felt nor saw the relationship between the dialect
and MSA and so, didn’t realize that they are interlinked. This is a phenomenon that definitely
needs further investigation. One of the possible reasons behind this phenomenon is that native
speakers always read in newspaper articles written by Arab linguists about the deterioration

Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
4
of Modern Standard Arabic and the negative role the dialect plays. Likewise, Arab linguists
have never touched upon the relationship between both varieties to the ordinary reader who is
not aware of the link. Another reason might be that Arabs tend to be more aware of synonyms
rather than variations” (Ibid, Pp. 149-150).
Furthermore, I referred to the split happening between the two lexical items as a

Discussion
From all of the above, we need to clarify what is the effect of Diglossia on the MSA lexical
variation and the mental lexicon.
Effect of Diglossia on Language Variation: In my opinion, the educational system is
strengthening the divorce between the two varieties of Arabic. The point discussed earlier
mentioning the two different domains in lexical processing which can be referred to as the
mental lexicon. The educated Arab speaker since kindergarten is trained to separate the lexical
items as one for the dialect and the other for MSA. In my personal experience throughout the
past eight years, whenever a Qatari student says/abbii/ (meaning ‘I want’, which is in MSA/
abghi/, in which the sound/gh/ changed to a /b/) and I ask them to repeat it in MSA, they
immediately change it to /?uriid/. Every time I ask them why did they change the word and
they report that they have used a dialectal word and this is the correct MSA one. No one ever
told them that what they are producing is a dialectal word in pronunciation and if the sound
change takes place it is a correct MSA word. The same happens with the word /9aqib/ meaning
‘following’ which they pronounce as /9ugb/, and they immediately correct it to /ba9d/.
Actually my study in 2010 which included 25 words Classical Arabic words which are
used in the Egyptian dialect were perceived by all native speakers as dialectal words and the
respondents provided their MSA equivalent.
In 2013, I have reported that Arabs after finishing their educational system leave it without
any knowledge about the relationship between the two varieties. The same was emphasized by
Boudelaa (2014, P.747) when he wrote,” The findings of the study indicate that the linguistic
distance hinders the development of morphological knowledge in MSA throughout elementary
grades. Despite the exposure and the systematic learning of standard language, gaps between
the SAV and MSA have not been bridged. “
It can be deducted then that the mental lexicon of the native speaker is fed with incorrect
information about the origin of some words, indexing some words as dialectal and wring
while they are originally MSA. Therefore, in my experiment in the kindergarten (2018), the
fine lines between the dialect and MSA were bridged in order to help the children figure out the
relatedness between the varieties, i.e., in Qatar, the sound/q/ is pronounced /g/ and therefore,

Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
5
they pronounce /Qatar/ as /gatar/. The same happens with the work ‘pen’ /galam/. Children
were told that this sound/g/ is said at home and is replace by/q/ in school. In a later class,
one child said /gaal/, ‘he said’, so another student told him “this is said at home, here we say
/qaal/.” I also trained them to change /abbii, / ‘I want’, to / abghi/, and later in the semester
introduced / uriid/.
In other words, native speakers of Arabic are not aware of the relatedness. The educational
system itself widens the space between the varieties, thus affecting the perceptions of native
speakers eventually causing language variation in MSA (Ibrahim, Z. 2009).

Conclusion and Recommendations

All the previously mentioned observations can be tested by carrying out an experiment in
which the educated speakers are given a timed quiz , in which they are given a word and are
asked to either provide the MSA or dialectal equivalent. The main importance of the findings
would suggest to curriculum developers to build on MSA words that exist in the dialect and
add to it other synonymous in the curriculum rather than excluding these words and adding
new ones, thus suggesting that the words used in the dialect are not MSA.

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Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
6
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Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
7
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Academia Letters, May 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Zeinab Ibrahim, zeinab@qatar.cmu.edu

Citation: Ibrahim, Z. (2021). A reflection on the relationship betweenDiglossia and its Effects on
ModernStandard Arabic Lexical Variation and the Mental Lexicon. Academia Letters, Article 143.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL143.
8