Arabic Uniglossia: Diglossia Revisited

Abstract

Diglossia is primarily concerned with displaying sociolinguistic diagnosis of linguistic duality or even multiplicity that can result in evident sense of exaltation of one language or variety and its subsequent prejudice against other varieties within the same speech community. This has been unfortunately the case and the trend in most studies that have approached Arabic over the past six decades, evidently driven by Fergusonianism as a commensurate corollary of pan-Arabism, which thrived and mushroomed under totalitarian regimes and dictatorships in 1950s & 1960s. However, this paper primarily aims at rebutting such predominant assumptions and thereby disambiguating their consequential implications in various linguistic, cultural and pedagogical disciplines. This study, therefore, argues in principle that such linguistic variation in the Arab World results in a state of unity and convergence instead of any presumed divergence by virtue of opting for Standard Arabic cross-regionally; thus, its socio-cultural manifestations may prove how this sociolinguistic phenomenon can be best perceived as uniglossic rather than being diglossic.