The Arabic Language

kbǝt
instead of 
qbǝṭ
‘he caught’, 
ḍaġṣa
instead of 
ḍaṛṣa
‘tooth’, or 
msa
, 
saf
instead of 
mša
‘he went’, 
šaf
‘he saw’, showing substitution of marked phonemes 
/q/, /ṛ/, /ṭ/, /š/ by unmarked /k/, /ġ/, /t/, /s/. They also fail to produce the 
correct plural patterns for such common words as 
tǝʿlǝb
/
tʿalǝb
‘fox’, 
qǝṭṭ
/
qṭuṭ
‘cat’, 
ḥmar
/
ḥmir
‘donkey’, resorting instead to general strategies of plural formation, 
for example, 
qiṭin
, 
ḥmarin
, or completely garbled forms such as 
tǝʿblitat
. One infor
-
mant consistently used Dutch plural endings, producing forms such as 
tǝʿlǝbs
, 
qǝṭṭs
and 
ḥmars
. When forced to speak Moroccan Arabic without code-switching, these 
adolescents frequently have to pause, searching for words, and their speech is 
marked by a simplified lexicon and sentence structure.
The process of language shift may partially be countered by the fact that 
the governments of some Western European countries developed a new policy 
towards the linguistic minorities in their countries, which involved the right of 
these minorities to be taught and educated in their ‘own’ language. In countries 
such as Sweden and the Netherlands, this right was realised by the large-scale 
establishment of a curriculum for Arabic in primary and secondary schools. A 
specific problem in the case of Moroccan immigrants was the fact that a large 
majority of them are Berber-speaking, so that it was not immediately obvious 
which language they should be instructed in. Besides, the issue of whether the 
High variety of the language (Modern Standard Arabic) or the vernacular should 
be the focus of instruction was never solved.

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The Arabic Language
The institution of home language instruction in primary and secondary 
schools was short-lived, at least in the Netherlands, where it was abolished 
entirely in 2004. At its heyday, around 70,000 school children followed (parts) 
of the programme. The main reason for this political decision was a shift in 
policy towards minorities, and an increasing focus on integration rather than 
the right to be educated in one’s own language. Additionally, the effectiveness of 
the programme was doubted. In Sweden, for the time being, the system of home 
language education (
modersmålundervising
) continues to operate.
For many of the immigrants’ children, code-switching has become a normal 
mode of speech, somewhat like the Franco-Arabe that was mentioned above 
(Chapter 14); in some countries, one might even say that it constitutes a more 
or less institutionalised variety in the speech community of the immigrants, as 
in the case of Beur Arabic in France. In general, whenever languages of different 
status meet within one speech community, such patterns are bound to arise. 
Within this mode of speaking, switching between the two languages takes place 
not only between sentences (intersentential code-switching), but also within 
sentences (intrasentential code-switching). Such switches are found at many 
syntactic positions, for instance, between verb and object, as in (23):
(23) 
žib-li-ya
/
een 
glas 
water
bring.IMPER-to-1s 
/ 
INDEF.ART glass 
water
‘Bring me / a glass of water’
They can also occur between verb and subject, as in (24):
(24)