Giuliano Lancioni & Laura Garofalo, Roma Tre University

A Formal Account of Diglossia in Egyptian Arabic as a

Unified System
Traditional accounts of the linguistic reality in Egyptian Arabic capitalize on the
concepts of diglossia and code-switching or mixing: according to most models,
Arabic is represented by two varieties, a higher, formal one and a lower, spoken one.
The two variants are mixed by speakers that switch between them according to a
variety of linguistic, psychological, social motives.
However, this picture shows a number of inadequacies: (i) the pure versions of
both the higher and the lower varieties are rarely, if ever, met in real discourse; (ii)
mixing of varieties is explained away as a more or less casual process, which does not
account for the relatively high degree of systematicity that shows up (as convincingly
argued for by Hary, 1996); (iii) the two varieties largely overlap, with as much as
85% of words being identical, apart for possibly partially different phonetic
realizations, which are not more important than what is found within other,
presumably non-diglossic, linguistic systems.
A short sample from the an Egyptian blog shows the degree of commonality
between standard and spoken Arabic in a typical informal text:

Standard
interpretation

( ha)

Dialectal interpretation

da

ba(/)

min
anw
at-tasult

Original form

1
wa(/i)l-istirbt

( allat)

ill

( tarid)

bi-tiwrid

al(/a)

bl

 HB register the verb itsil but, of course, not a madar tasul (whose form is clearly
standard).

A different path has been convincingly argued for by Hary (1996), who advocates
the possibility of a unified grammatical description of Arabic as used by speakers in a
variety of contexts. The pedagogical feasibility of such an approach has been
practically shown by Ryding (1990), Ryding & Mehall (2005).
Our approach pushes this idea forward by devising a formal grammar of informal
Arabic which generates both standard and spoken forms, possibly with specific usage
markers. The model proposed is within the framework of Combinatory Categorial
Grammar (Steedman, 1996, 2000; Steedman & Baldridge, 2011), according to lines
developed by Lancioni (2014). The paper will present a sketch of a formal grammar
which is able to generate a number of real sentences attested in a corpus of Egyptian
informal texts.

References
Hary, Benjamin (1996). The Importance of the Language Continuum in Arabic
Multiglossia. In: A. Elgibali (Ed.). Understanding Arabic. Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 69-90.
Lancioni, Giuliano (2014). VS/SV Order in Spoken Arabic: a Categorial Grammar
Account. In: O.Durand et al. (Eds.). Alf laha wa laha. Wien/Berlin: LIT, 225236.
Ryding, K.C. (1990). Formal Spoken Arabic: Basic Course. Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press.
Ryding, K.C. & D.J. Mehall (2005) Formal spoken Arabic: Basic course. 2nd Ed.
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Steedman, Mark (1996). Surface Structure and Interpretation (Linguistic Inquiry
Monographs, 30), Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Steedman, Mark (2000). The Syntactic Process. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Steedman, Mark and Jason Baldridge (2011). Combinatory Categorial Grammar. In:
R.D. Borsley & K. Brjars (Eds.). Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and
Explicit Models of Grammar, Malden,MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 181224.