The word play's the thing: Educated Spoken Arabic in a theatrical community in Cairo.

An examination of the variety of colloquial Arabic often called Educated Spoken Arabic was conducted among the theatrical community in Cairo using a participant observation technique similar to that developed by the Milroys in their network studies. It is argued that this technique is more appropriate to inquiries into conversational Arabic than are the Labovian techniques employed in other studies. It is found that features extraneous to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic enter into the professional jargon of Egyptian theatricians from literary Arabic and from various foreign languages. The influence of literary Arabic and of foreign languages comes largely from the borrowing of nouns; as a word is borrowed and assimilated, however, the derivative capacity of Arabic can come into operation wherein different parts of speech may be generated from the borrowed nouns. The process of loan shift as it works on borrowed words is examined, whereby words acquire new or specialized meanings as they gain currency in speech. It is speculated that features of specific professional jargons can spread into the broader educated colloquial Arabic and sometimes into the base level colloquial through diffusion. Some morphological and morpho-syntactic features of educated colloquial Arabic are examined. Discrepancies in gender and number agreement are discussed and the process of degendering is introduced; the mixing of elements of literary and colloquial Arabic are examined, specifically the use of the literary passive construction with colloquial affixes and the use of colloquial negation with verbs borrowed from literary Arabic. A distinction is drawn between code-switching and code-mixing. It is proposed that code-switching and borrowing in educated speech provides the vehicle by which literary forms may be presented for acceptance into speech, and that code-mixing constitutes the conversion routine whereby borrowed items become integrated into educated colloquial Arabic. It is then suggested that educated usage provides a channel through which certain literary features may gain wider currency in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Finally it is suggested that modern literary Arabic and educated colloquial Arabic are moving together to the point that diglossia is perhaps beginning to disappear in Egyptian Arabic.PhDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104884/1/9610267.pdfDescription of 9610267.pdf : Restricted to UM users only