Fuṣḥá, ‘āmmīyah, or both?: Towards a theoretical framework for written Cairene Arabic

The Arabic language is a complex, diglossic language, with varying written (fuṣḥá) and spoken (‘āmmīyah) forms. While the study of mixing between fuṣḥá and ‘āmmīyah in spoken Arabic has received some scholarly attention, far less attention has been paid to mixing in writing, which this study seeks to address. Badawi’s (1973) landmark study of Egyptian Arabic use identified five language levels, assuming naturally that written Arabic exists as either Classical or Modern Standard Arabic, while mixing between written and spoken forms is reserved as a feature of Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA), despite the proliferation of mixed literary works by renowned writers such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris and Yusuf Sibai at the time. Since Badawi’s (1973) study, studies of mixed Arabic have centred around ESA (Eid, 1988; Bassiouney, 2006), uncovering to some extent the type and degree of, and motivations for, mixing, which have been used as a backdrop for the examination of mixed writing in this study. More recently, Høigilt & Mejdell (2017), Mejdell (2014), Ibrahim (2010), and Rosenbaum (2000) have identified occurrences of mixing in written Arabic. The aim of this study therefore, is to take a holistic view of Arabic writing, across different times and media, towards establishing a theoretical framework for Egyptian Arabic writing, including fuṣḥá, ‘āmmīyah and socalled ‘mixed’ forms. The catalyst for this study, as well as for the proliferation of mixed and ‘āmmīyah writing, has been the expansion of the internet and the rapid increase in online writing. For Arabic at least, the Arab Spring and social media within it, have played an important role in the widespread use of ‘āmmīyah in writing, which this study aims to place within the wider context of Arabic writing

Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages

We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists’ construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database. © The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.co