Palestinian Students' Attitudes Towards Modern Standard Arabic and Palestinian City Arabic

Abstract

This study investigates Palestinian students' attitudes towards Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian City Arabic (PCA) in the context of two extralinguistic factors: speakers' educational level and setting. The speaker's level of education is defined by the academic degree he/ she holds. Accordingly, the speakers under consideration fall into two groups: highly educated and less educated. The former consists of members holding a four-year-university degree or higher, while members of the latter have not attained such a degree. Setting is defined in terms of formality and informality which are used to differentiate between structured and unstructured situations in conversational interactions.

Twenty-two male and female undergraduate Palestinians studying in San Francisco State University, California, USA, participated in the study and expressed their views on the use of the varieties under discussion in different language situations. Those views came in the form of responses to a 32-item questionnaire on the basis of two tape-recorded passages; one in MSA and another in PCA. The responses elicited from the participants form the corpus for the present study.

This paper attempts to address two major concerns:

1. The setting for which each variety is considered appropriate.

2. The purposes/functions for which the educated and less-educated groups use each variety

The findings indicate that

1. Generally, MSA is deemed more appropriate for formal settings, and PCA for their informal counterparts.

2. In formal settings, the highly educated group mainly uses MSA, while the less educated group uses PCA.

3. In informal settings, the highly educated group employs MSA at a higher rate than the less educated group. However, there is a slight tendency, among members of the less educated group, in favour of using MSA for formal settings.