The Arabic Language

13.3 Language choice
When hybrid texts are analysed at a global level, the focus shifts from the 
syntactic constraints to the extralinguistic factors determining language choice, 
that is, factors that are not linked to the structure of the language, but to the 
speech situation. The most relevant factors in the speech situation are the inter
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locutor, the topic and the setting. These factors can be ordered along a scale that 
goes from the private to the public domain. At one end of the scale, we might 
have officials, talking on a public topic in a formal setting, for instance, in a radio 
interview: they will be forced to use a variety approaching Standard Arabic as 
much as possible. At the other end of the scale, friends talking in a pavement café 
about private affairs will use colloquial language, with a minimum of interference 
from the standard language.
The influence of these factors manifests itself when in a given situation one of 
them changes. When the minister in the radio interview is asked about private 
matters (rather unlikely in the Arab media!), the speech pattern will change 
accordingly into the direction of the dialect. When the friends talking in the 
cafe switch from private matters to a discussion about politics, their speech will 
immediately betray interference from the standard language. Since language 

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Diglossia 
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choice takes place on a continuum, these changes do not take the form of code-
switching from one variety to another, but manifest themselves in a larger 
percentage of features from the opposite variety.
One of the characteristics of the diglossia situation is the effect that speakers 
have on each other. Hardly any data are available on this topic, but in Diem’s (1974) 
transcription of radio dialogues an impression can be formed of the way in which 
speakers accommodate to each other’s level. In one conversation, for instance, a 
reporter is interviewing the secretary general of the Cairene Language Academy. 
At the beginning, he still uses phrases like 
yaʿni, nifham min kida ʾinnu ʾabl ʾinʿiqād 
l-muʾtamar is-sanawi bitibʾa fīh ligān bitabḥaṯ qarārāt 
‘that means, we understand 
from this that before the opening of the yearly conference there are committees 
that investigate proposals’, in which colloquial /ʾ/ for /q/, continuous marker 
bi-
and colloquial expressions like 
min kida
are freely used. But when his interviewee 
keeps talking using more or less Standard Arabic, within the space of one minute 
this same interviewer ends up saying things like 
law ʾaradna ʾan naʾḫuḏ namūḏajan 
li-zālik
‘if we might take example of this’ (Diem 1974: 76), which is almost absurdly 
Classical in its phonology and morphology.
A reverse example may be found in a Lebanese interview between a reporter 
and a literary critic, in which the reporter stubbornly uses colloquial Lebanese, 
whereas the critic says things like 
bi-ṣūra ʿāmmah ʾal-mawsim kǟn ʾ ižābī – ižābī 
ʾawwalan min ḥays il-kammiyyi wa-sāniyan min ḥays ʾan-nawʿiyyi
‘generally speaking 
the season was positive, in the first place positive as to quantity, in the second 
place as to quality’ with exaggerated Classical style (note the glottal stop in the 
article and the realisation of the Classical interdental /ṯ/ as /s/). But in the end he 
cannot resist the colloquial style of the reporter, and after a few minutes he talks 
like this: 
fī taʾrīban ši miyyit maʿriḍ bi-s-sine
‘there are approximately one hundred 
expositions each year’, with /ʾ/ for /q/ and dialectal 
ši
and 
fī
(Diem 1974: 77).
These two examples show that the level of speech of each of the participants 
in a discourse event affects the speech of the others: speakers have a tendency 
to accommodate to the other’s level and feel obliged to upgrade or downgrade 
their speech. One difference between most Western speech communities and the 
Arabic-speaking world is the much larger linguistic distance between colloquial 
Arabic and the standard language, which forces the speakers to make decisions 
much more frequently than in Western speech communities. Since the colloquial 
and the standard language are not discrete varieties, but abstract constructs at 
the extremes of a continuum, linguistic choice does not involve a two-way selec-
tion, but rather a mixture of variants.
The discourse factors that determine language choice do not operate mechani
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cally: in conversations, people may talk to each other on a different level for an 
extended period of time, without bowing to the level of their interlocutor. To a 
certain extent, they select the variety that one uses in a specific speech situa-
tion by correlating the formality of the situation with the choice of linguistic 

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The Arabic Language
variants. But it is equally true to say that the speakers’ linguistic choices also 
reflect their own evaluation of the speech situation. With their choice of variants, 
they indicate to the other participants how they see their role, what they think 
about the topic, what kind of setting they wish to take part in. In a larger context 
this means that the speakers can use their choice to manipulate their audience. 
They can do so because people are exposed to linguistic variation, and on this 
basis they form certain associations between language choice and the outside 
world. Skilful speakers can use these expectations in manipulating their audience, 
be it for political, ideological or religious purposes.
In many cases, the selection of a few markers suffices to convey the attitude of 
the speaker. In radio programmes, for instance, the speakers usually start from a 
written text in Standard Arabic, but in reading it they let themselves be influenced 
by the target group. In programmes for housewives or farmers, the structure of 
the Standard Arabic text remains unchanged, but at irregular intervals colloquial 
markers are inserted, such as the realisation of the standard /q/ as /ʾ/, the posses-
sive particle