JKAU: Arts & Humanities, vol.12. pp. 3-28 (1422 A.H. 12002 A.D.)

Modern Standard Arabic:An Empirical Study on Saudis

HAMZA M.J. KHESHAIFATY

Associate Professor ofLinguisticsDepartment ofEuropean Languages and Literature

Faculty ofArts and Humanities

AlISTRACT. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has always been a con­troversial issue in soc iolinguistics. The findings of the present studysuggest that there are strong emphases on education to account for theobserved soeiophonological variation in the SMSA. This finding is inline with a number of sociolinguistic studies such as Coulmas' (1997),in which he stated that the concept of "educatedness" is fundamentalin sociophonology . It is interesting to note that the present studyshows no sex-differentiated patterns of variation . Such findings revealthat the higher the level of education of the speakers of SMSA, thehigher their tendency becomes to use the Classical Arabic (CA) var­iable s IQ/ , 1-&. and 1-8/) more frequently than the CHA variants I -q/,I-z), t-sl, 1-I/ .Therefore, it appears that the influence of education isevident and significant on language usages. As a result of the findingsof the present study. there are three discrete Arabic varieties to be dis­tinguished. I - First, IAI-'?arabiah AI-FuSha!. "FuSha Arabic" or"Classical Arabic" (CA) . Second, IAI-?arabiah Almi?yariah AI­hadi.Bah,', "Modern Standard Arabic" MSA. This Arabic variety com­bines linguistic aspects of both Classical and Dialectal Arabic, re­gardless of the nationality of the speakers of this Arabic variety.Third. IAlIahjah AI?a:mmi:yah AI'?arabiahl "Colloquial Dialectal Ar­abic" (CDA). which is applicable to all Arabic dialects. Consequently,the variety of the present study SMSA is deemed to belong to the sec­ond variety, namely. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

l. Introduction

Arabic speaking communities differ from formal to informal, and from writtento oral varieties. It would be appropriate to limit the linguistic domain of anystudy to only one variety. This empirical sociolinguistic study attempts to in­vestigate certain phonological variations in formal oral variety of Saudi Modern

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