Dialect Prestige and the Effects of Linguistic Insecurity on Migrant Arabic Speakers in the UK
This project looks at the role linguistic insecurity plays in the language practices and attitudes of Arabic-speaking migrants in the UK. Considering the language attitudes of 123 Arabic speakers from 4 main dialect groups: Levantine, Gulf, Egyptian and North African, the questionnaire data point to a rough hierarchy in the prestige of the dialect groups, and a clear discrepancy between self-perceived prestige and outsiders’ perceptions. There is also a noticeable acknowledgement that the dialects closest to classical Arabic are the most prestigious.
The project then focuses on North African Arabic speakers, a dialect group which has previously been labelled as an unprestigious variety in various dialect contact situations (Sh’iri 2002; Chakrani 2014; Hachimi 2013). This dialect group reported the lowest self-perceived prestige relative to the other groups, and reported feeling very self-conscious speaking their dialect with other Arabic speakers, often switching to another dialect to be more comprehensible, using Levantine or Egyptian Arabic to do so. Despite these clear indications of linguistic insecurity, this group report feeling very positive attitudes towards their own dialect, exhibiting covert prestige. When asked about the desire to teach Arabic to their children, these participants wholeheartedly expect to teach their children their own dialect, and would prefer to pass on French over any other colloquial Arabic dialect.
This project has visible implications for the future of spoken Arabic in migrant Arab communities, especially for second generation Arabs. The lack of mutual intelligibility between the North African dialect and other Arabic dialects, alongside the absence of any other taught dialect as a form of intermediary, would lead to further linguistic isolation of this community from other dialect groups. It may also be the case that feelings of linguistic insecurity may pass on to future generations of North African speakers in Arabic-speaking communities, leading to language shift of the next generation to English or French, a process which has been seen to take place in other speech communities (Abtahian and Quinn, 2017).
Although the project is still in its intermediate stage regarding analysis and evaluation, these data offer a new insight into linguistic insecurity framed within diglossic migrant communities. As one of the first known studies of self-reported prestige of Arabic dialects, this project hopes to point out the overarching misconception of standard language ideology in colloquial Arabic, and how this can lead to linguistic insecurity, and subsequent linguistic isolation or language shift.
References
Abtahian, M. and Quinn, C. (2017). Language Shift and Linguistic Insecurity. Documenting Variation in Endangered Languages, 13, pp.137-151.
Chakrani, B. (2015). Arabic interdialectal encounters: Investigating the influence of attitudes on language accommodation. Language & Communication, 41, pp.17-27.
Hachimi, A. (2013). The Maghreb-Mashreq language ideology and the politics of identity in a globalized Arab world. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(3), pp.269-296.
Shiri, S. (2002). Speak Arabic please! Tunisian Arabic speakers’ linguistic accommodation to Middle Easterners. In A. Rouchdy (Ed.), Language contact and language conflict in Arabic (pp. 149–174). London: Routledge Curzon