Modern Arabic Language and Arabic Dialects Variations - Essay Example

Arabic language Arabic language is one of the great languages in the world. Its elegant script, brilliant style and rich lexis give it an exceptional character and flavor. Arabic language is one of the largest members of the Semitic language family, which also comprises of languages like Aramaic and Hebrew. Just like many other Semitic languages, Arabic language is written from right moving to the left. Arabic is currently spoken by virtually 250 million people across the world. Arabic is the official language of an estimated 22 countries. Additionally, Arabic language is a very important language in many nations that border the Arab world. Some of these countries include Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Mali, Chad and Niger. There are also Arabic speakers in some parts of southern Turkey, as well as Iran. With the immigration of Arab citizens to states outside of the Arab speaking countries, the Arabic language has spread to virtually all corners of the world. Arabic has been the official language in the United Nations ever since 1974. Arabic language is extremely valued all over the Muslim countries because it is the language of the Quran. A lot of non-Arab Muslim children begin to learn Arabic at very early age in order for them to read and comprehend the Quran (Wright, 2005). Modern Standard Arabic is the formal Arabic language in most Arabic speaking countries. It can be spoken or written. There are no significant differences between the spoken and written forms. In the written form, Modern Standard Arabic is used in various sections such as literature and the mass media. Magazines, newspapers, books, private, official documents, commercial correspondence, street and shop cryptograms also use Modern Standard Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic is learnt at various levels of academic institutions. There are no known local variations of Modern Standard Arabic. The language is precisely the same all over the Arab world. Modern Standard Arabic originates from Classical Arabic, which is regarded as the language of the Quran. Throughout the epoch of the caliphate, Classical Arabic language was widely used for all religious, traditional, governmental and academic purposes. Modern Standard Arabic is spoken in television news, government, parliament, conferences, seminars, official occasions, Friday prayers and national debates. Because Modern Standard Arabic is a regular language, it is the spoken form used as a lingua franca all over the Arab speaking countries and some parts of the world. Speaking in Modern Standard Arabic makes it easier for Arabs of diverse populations to understand one another. Using Modern Standard Arabic makes it possible to avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings that may arise as a result of many dialects. Wright (2005) also states that learning Modern Standard Arabic necessitates more effort than any other Arabic dialect. Nevertheless, it is an effort which will benefit the learners more than other dialects. The knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic literally unlocks the doors to the whole Arab World. Consequently, Modern Standard Arabic is the backbone of Arabic language. Modern Arabic is type of Arabic language that is uncommon because it is characterized by Diglossia. Carter (2001) advances that Arab colloquial dialects are usually spoken languages and most Arabs use the colloquial entirely in their everyday communications. However, when they meet a condition that calls for greater formality, they use Modern Standard Arabic so as to appear formal. In every Arabic speaking zone in the world, this language state of affairs exists. It is called colloquial language meaning that the language spoken more commonly and which Arabic speakers learn as their first language. Modern Standard Arabic is more or less the same all over the Arab speaking countries, while there are huge variances between the several colloquial dialects in existence. Furthermore, certain dissimilarities are so great that many dialects are generally incomprehensible (Ryding, 2005). MSA and many other Arabic dialects variations are popularly known for being an archetypal example of a phenomenon of Nonconcatenating Templatic morphosyntax. This typology is also known as Root-And Pattern Morphology. In such a morpho-sytanctic system, vocalic infixes are discontinuously inserted between members of a 2 to 4 consonantal root. The latter comprises of the lexical content of the word and appears in many different derivationally forms. Grammatical Relation also abbreviated as GR can be well-defined as a linguistic relation established by grammar, where language relation is an association among the linguistic forms or constituents. Essentially the Grammatical Relations regulates grammatical comportments such as the placement of a word in a sentence, verb arrangement and the passivity states. The Grammatical Relations of Arabic language is an essential precondition for many natural language processing applications such as machine translation and info recovery (Carter, 2001). In Arabic, just like sentences in other languages, the sentence is a chronological arrangement of words that make sense. Arabic has relatively flexible syntactical rules. Consequently, Arabic syntactical structures will most likely have diverse sorts of word orders such as: VOS, SVO and VSO. Additionally, Arabic sentences can also be created without verbs, such as subject + predicate. In terms of the clausal structure arrangement, the rule of the formation in Arabic is the same for English. The following is an illustration of the constituents of one of the clauses. X­______ {NP______ (X____NP______Y)} Z NP S S NP In Standard Arabic, the relative clause succeeds certain nouns that are viewed as adjuncts and thus referred to as ‘sila’ attachment. The characteristic which influences the syntactic comportment of the relative clause is determination which incorporates a/syndesis to yield related relative clauses or unconnected ones. Some of the structures in the clauses are shown in the following examples (Gully et al, 2004). Definite head plus syndetic clause = relative structure (Jalas -r-rajulu alldii yatahadathu). Sat the-man who talk. Second there is Def. head plus asyndetic clause = circumstantial structure/ (hal Jalasa r-rajulu yatahaddathu or mutahadithan) Sat the-man talk. Third, Indefinite head NP plus asyndetic clause = adjectival clause (Jalasa rajulun yatahadathu) Sat man talk. Fourth, Indefinite head plus syndetic clause is empty and there is no structure of this type in Arabic, like (Jalasa rajulun alladii yatahadath) A man, the one who talked, sat (Gully et al, 2004). In Modern Standard Arabic, there are two kinds of sentences. There is a simple sentence and complex sentence. The simple sentence can be created with the subject and a predicate or a verb with a subject. Complex sentences comprise of more than one subject, predicate as well as the verb. The following diagrams explicate the grammatical relations in Modern Standard Arabic (Abu-Rabia, 2002). Modern Standard Arabic is a Verb Subject Object language. This distinctive feature differentiates it from the colloquial dialects, which is Subject Verbs Object. Nevertheless, there are many settings in which the Subject Verb Object order is used. For instance, a neutral word-order for a sentence like ‘Ali read a book’ is Verb Subject Object. In Arabic, qara'a (Verb) Ali (Subject) kitaaban (Object), but when embedded in the clause qaalat 'inna ‘she said that,’ the SVO order is used: qaalat 'inna muHammadan (Subject) qara'a (Verb) kitaaban (Object). Just in like other Semitic languages, a lot of vocabulary comprises of words fashioned by the use of templates to tri-literal roots. For instance, from the tri-literal root k/t/b a lot of words formed are connected to the conception of writing; kitaab ‘book,’ maktaba(t) ‘library,’ maktab ‘desk, office,’ kaatib ‘writer,’ kataba ‘he wrote.’ The following diagrams show some of the structures in Modern Standard Arabic (Abu-Rabia, 2002). In Modern Standard Arabic affixes are referred to as “extra letters” or morphemes. These morphemes are h, a, ? (theglottal stop), s, w (oo), w, t, n, m, l, y (i), and h. They might be used individually or in permutation as infixes, prefixes and suffixes. For instance, musta-in mustarjil “behaving like a man” in rajul 'man' is three in one: viz., /m/ to show present tense and past participle tense forms, /s/ for reflexive act, as well as /t/ for creating predicates. Most MSA words are analyzed comprising of two main morphemes. They are a root and a pattern which interlock to form a word. An Arabic root or pattern can never be used alone or in isolation. So as to create real words, they must link with each other. For instance, a writer in Arabic is ‘kaatib’ and this word has two morphemes bound together. These are lexical root k-t-b and _aa_i_. In MSA, the suffix I or y converts nouns into adjectives or vice versa, for instance, jabal and jabaly' hill, hilly, Arab and Araby to denote Arab and Arabic. In order convert these adjectives or nouns into adverbials, the suffix a(n) is linked to the end of the word. Changes can also be made on in a similar nature. For example jara and jary “running.” Nouns denote names of things (objects, people and places). Suleiman (1994) states that nouns in Modern Standard Arabic are either feminine or masculine. If a singular noun ends in a ‘ta marbuuTa’ it is feminine, and if it does not end in ta marbuuTa, it is masculine. Nevertheless, there are exceptions of this rule in Arabic. There are some words that do not end in a ta marbuuTa and yet they are feminine. Some of these words include naar (fire), sama (sky), ard (land), sams (sun), riiih (wind), ein (eye), iid (hand), ruuh (soul) and harb (war) among others (Suleiman, 1994). Arabic has dual nouns. If a person has two items, they need to use the dual noun. They need to add the suffix ein (ـين) to the masculine singular form of the noun. For instance, book (kitaab) becomes kitaabein, window (sibbaak) becomes windows (kibbaakein). In the event the singular noun ends in a taa marbuuTa, it should be changed to a ت before the ـين suffix is added. While it is possible to use the suffix (on two individuals) habitually it is better to state ‘اتنين’ (itnein) + plural noun (Suleiman, 1994). If it is a pair of shoes or socks the singular form of the noun is used. If it is one item in a pair, say فردة من (farda min), exactly ‘an individual from.’ لازم اشتري جزمة جديدة (laazim ašteri gazma gdiida) أنا مش لاقية فردة من شرابي (ana miš la'ya farda min šaraabi) This sentences states, ‘I cannot find one of my socks.’ Of note, that ‘šaraabi’ theoretically means ‘my sock,’ but it is understood to denote a pair. There exists broken plural in Modern Standard Arabic. Most Arabic nouns have broken (irregular) plurals. Singular Plural Book كتاب (kitaab) كتب (kutub) Child/boy ولد (walad) أولاد (awlaad) Sentence جملة (gomla) جمل (gomal) There are also regular masculine plurals in Arabic. Virtually all masculine nouns that have regular plurals fall under the class of job titles among others. And they can refer to either men or a mixed group of men and women. To make one of these nouns plural, the suffix ـين (-iin) is added (Ryding, 2005). The following are good examples. Singular Plural Teacher مدرس (mudarris) مدرسين (mudarrisiin) Engineer مهندس (mohandis) مهندسين (mohandisiin) Actor ممثل (mumassil) ممثلين (mumassiliin) Artist فنان (fannaan) فنانين (fannaaniin) Similarly, there are regular feminine plurals. In order to create a feminine noun (that does not have broken plural forms) the taa marbuuTa is dropped and the suffix ـات (-aat) is added. The following are illustrations. Singular Plural Car عربية (3arabiyya) عربيات (3arabiyyaat) Word كلمة (kelma) كلمات (kalimaat) Jacket جاكيتة (žakitta) جاكيتات (žakittaat) Case endings in MSA are small marks (حركات Harakaat) that are placed on the ends of words to show their grammatical role. For instance, if a certain word is the Subject, the case endings are used to show that it is actually the subject of the sentence. A different case ending is used to show that a certain word is the object of the verb. The use of case endings appropriately necessitates one to have a good knowledge of Arabic grammar (Carter, 2001). There are three grammatical cases in Modern Standard Arabic. These are raf (nominative case), jarr (genitive or ablative) and nasb (accusative, dative or vocative). ‘Raf’ used in nouns that work as the subjects in a sentence. ‘Nasb’ are cases with numerous uses but mainly used to indicate the objects of the sentence. ‘Jarr’ is used to indicate possession or even the object of a preposition. The table below summarizes the use of case in Modern Standard Arabic (Ryding, 2005).   Singular Dual Masculine plural Feminine plural ‘Raf’ markers -u -aa -oo -aatu ‘Nasb’ markers -a -ay -ee -aati ‘Jarr’ markers -i References Abu-Rabia, S. (2000). Effects of exposure to literary Arabic on reading comprehension in a diglossic situation. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13 (1–2) (2000), pp. 147–157 Carter, Michael (2001). ‘Arabic.’ In: Facts about the World's Languages: An Encyclopaedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present. Jane Garry and Carl Rubino, editors. Pp. 23-27. New York: H. N. Wilson Company. Gully, A., Badawi, E. M. , and Carter, M. (2004) Modern Written Arabic : A Comprehensive Grammar . Routledg : U.K. Ryding, K. (2005). A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suleiman, M. (1994). ‘Arabic Linguistic Tradition.’ In: Asher, R. E., editor-in-chief. The Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics. Vol. 1, pp. 194–202. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Wright, W. (2005). Arabic Grammar. New York: Dover Publications. Read More