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The Call for Colloquialisms: Origins and Remedies
Abstract
This research aims at discovering the gap between Standard Arabic and the current spoken varieties of Arabic due to social, educational, political, colonial, and media factors. The researcher will try to also analyse the causes of the current gap and suggest remedies.Standard Arabic (SA) or FuSha (the Arabic term for 'standard Arabic') is the language used for recording intellectual output in general, while spoken varieties or colloquialisms are used for everyday needs. SA has relatively fixed governing rules, whereas colloquialisms are relatively spontaneous and are subject to change according to the change of generations and the surrounding circumstances. This existence of dialects next to the standard is a general phenomenon in all living languages (Arabic spoken varieties are inherent for more than 1500 years). Hence, the existence of spoken Arabic varieties is not odd among languages. This research tries to highlight the colonial, educational, political and media factors that deliberately intensifies the gap between SA and spoken varieties as well as being behind the call to adopt spoken varieties instead of SA.
Keywords: Arabic Colloquialisms: social, educational, political, colonial factors
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