No abstract

This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, use of null subjects, selection of prepositions, agreement, and possession. The degree of codeswitching in their narratives was also investigated. The goal was to gain some insights into the Arabic linguistic competence of this group of speakers. The results show that although Arabic heritage speakers display significant competence in their heritage colloquial varieties, there are gaps in that knowledge. There also seems to be significant transfer from English, their dominant language.

Previous research on Arabic heritage speakers points to notable variability in the language proficiencies of Arabic heritage speakers, both as individuals and as groups (Albirini & Benmamoun, 2012; Albirini, Benmamoun, & Saadah, 2011). This study examines the language proficiencies of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers, assesses the relationship between their L1 proficiency levels and other linguistic, socio-affective, socio-contextual, and demographic factors, and explores the relative significance of these factors in determining proficiency in heritage Arabic. A total of 20 Egyptian and 20 Palestinian heritage speakers completed an oral narrative that was used for assessing three dimensions of their language proficiencies, namely fluency, grammatical accuracy, and syntactic complexity. In addition, the participants filled in a 182-item questionnaire about the factors potentially influencing their heritage language skills, including language input, language use, language attitudes, ethnic identity, family role, community support, school, and demographics. The study also involved follow-up interviews with a sample of five Palestinian and five Egyptian participants. The results showed that the Palestinian speakers outperformed their Egyptian counterparts in terms of language fluency, accuracy, complexity, and overall proficiency. Pearson and Spearman correlations indicated that language use, language input, family role, community support, and parents’ language correlate positively with language proficiency. Multiple regression analyses showed that language use (in terms of frequency, range, and contexts) is the only significant predictor of the variability in heritage language proficiency. Lastly, the interviews revealed that the Palestinian heritage speakers’ linguistic advantage over their Egyptian counterparts might be attributed to their commitment to Arabic as a main marker of their heritage and identity, the encouragement of their families to maintain their heritage language, and the wider social networks to which they had access. The implications of the study are discussed.

The nature and extent of the impact of language transfer in majority-minority language contexts have been widely debated in both second-and heritage-language acquisition. This study examines four linguistic areas in three oral narratives collected from Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers in the United States (namely, plural and dual morphology, possessive constructions, and restrictive relative clauses), with a special focus on how the second language (English) influences the structure and use of these areas in connected discourse. In addition, the study examines the relationship between second-language transfer and the incompleteness and attrition of heritage Arabic. The findings show that heritage speakers have various gaps in their knowledge of the examined areas, particularly in forms and patterns that diverge from their counterparts in their dominant L2. The results also suggest that transfer effects are restricted to specific forms that are marked (e.g. broken plurals), infrequent (duals), or characterized by processing difficulty (as seems to be the case with the dependencies in the relative clauses). Moreover, transfer effects are intimately related to both the attrition and incomplete acquisition of the speakers' knowledge of the four areas under study. The implications of the study for heritage language research are discussed.

This study examines the social functions of codeswitching (CS) between Standard Arabic (SA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The data came from thirty-five audio and video recordings in the domains of religious lectures, political debates, and soccer commentaries. The findings suggest that speakers create a functional division between the two varieties by designating issues of importance, complexity, and seriousness to SA, the High code, and aligning less important, less serious, and accessible topics with DA, the Low code. The CS patterns therefore reproduce the unequal socialvaluesand distribution of SA and DA in the Arabic sociolinguistic landscape and simultaneously call for a reconceptualization of the notion of diglossia as presented in Ferguson's (1959) work. Other functions of CS as a marker of speakers' attitudes and as an index of pan-Arab or Muslim identities are discussed. (Arabic, bidialectal codeswitching, High/Low dichotomy, functional diglossia, identity, language attitudes)*