Because the main part of this book focuses on theoretical linguistics, this appendix summarizes research interests and traditions of three other majorfields of linguistics: applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics, as they relate to Arabic.
1 . A P P L I E D L I N G U I S T I C S A N D A R A B I C
The core of applied linguistics is the connection between theory and practice. The field of applied linguistics is concerned with real-world issues that involve language, such as language teaching. It also includes disciplines such as lexicography (dictionary design and compilation), language and the law (forensic linguistics), interpretation and translation, second language acquisition research, language testing, and language planning. As it applies to Arabic at the current time, applied linguistics has been heavily weighted in the direction of language teaching and learning, textbook and curricular design, proficiency testing, and teacher training. The practical needs and professional demands of teaching a greatly expanded number of students have necessitated a critical professional focus on language teaching resources and approaches.
There are no dedicated journals or other periodicals that specialize in Arabic applied linguistics. Articles on Arabic do appear in applied linguistics journals and foreign language teaching journals (Elkhafaifi2005aand2005b; Al-Batal 2006; Ryding 1991; Alhawary 2009), in Al-Arabiyya, the journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, and in edited collections (e.g., Al-Batal 1995, Elgibali 1996 and 2005, Wahba, Taha, and England Owens 2013a2006).
A key issue in applied Arabic linguistics is diglossia, the systematic disparity and coexistence of spoken and written Arabic variants in the Arabic speech community, and the effect of this disparity on language use and language teaching. The foundational work on this topic is Ferguson (1959a). Diglossia has since become a widely discussed topic and has devel- oped into theories of discourse continua, interpersonal discourse pragmatics, and many more fine-grained analyses. This topic can raise resistance among
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some native speakers, who perceive the Arabic language as a unified whole and who consider the study of spoken variants trivial, divisive, and distract- ing. This attitude has strongly privileged the study, analysis, and teaching of written Arabic and discouraged the formal study and teaching of colloquial Arabic discourse.
For many years, the sole topic of study considered legitimate in formal learning situations has been Classical Arabic (CA) or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the written language. Formal study of vernacular Arabic has been neglected in academic curricula and in government-based training programs– even programs that claim to be teaching full communicative competence. With pressing real-world needs for interactive skills, the profession has had to turn its attention to spoken Arabic, but there is as yet no consensus on the timing, amount, proportion, or varieties that would best serve English-speaking learn- ers. Recent articles by Choueiri (2009), Ryding (2006a, 2006b,2008, 2009), and Younes (2009) deal explicitly with this issue. This area of study is inter- woven with deeply felt attitudes and ideologies having to do with the social, cultural, and religious values attached to written and spoken varieties of Arabic.
2 . S O C I O L I N G U I S T I C S A N D A R A B I C
Sociolinguistics, the study of language use in social contexts, has emerged as one of the central fields for the study not only of Arabic language, but of culture, nationalism, and identity in the Arabic speech community. Discourse of all kinds and at all levels provides the raw data for sociolinguistic analysis (see Haeri2003, for example), but much of the work thus far has been done on political discourse (Dunne2003, Bassiouney2006,2009) and other forms of public discourse (Suleiman2003, 2004), especially as seen through various forms of media (Eid2007; Bassiouney2010).
Studies of Arabic language in society and the relationship between the written and spoken variants have been done by Badawi1985; Ferguson1959aand1959b; Parkinson 1991, 2003; Haeri 2003 and 2006; Hary 1996, Mejdell 2006, and Rosenbaum 2008, among others. These studies have focused on discourse in both formal and informal situations, on the different registers or levels of Arabic in use, on the mixing of language registers, and on attitudes toward language that characterize the Arabic speech community. MSA borders on vernacular Arabic in many situations and native speakers easily cross and re-cross those discourse borders as they see necessary and fit for rhetorical purposes within different contexts and different genres. Thus there is, especially in more formal spoken Arabic situations, a tradition of code-mixing or hybridization that occurs on a regular basis. Code-mixing (the mingling of language levels and registers) has become more and more commonplace and conventionalized in the broadcast
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media and in relatively formal contexts, such as university lectures, classroom discussions, conferences, and official receptions, for example.1 Progress of research in Arabic sociolinguistics is key to understanding how spoken and written Arabic are calibrated in actual discourse situations, and in forming the foundation for unearthing the inherent regularities in ordinary spoken Arabic discourse. Particularly in relationship to code-mixing, sociolinguistic research has begun to document the contextualized practices of Arabic speakers and the cultural prag- matics of language use.2
3 . C O M P U TAT I O N A L L I N G U I S T I C S A N D A R A B I C
Computational linguistics refers to the use of computers in the analysis of language, in data collection, and in machine translation. Arabic language computa- tional resources have developed slowly compared with other languages, but there has been accelerated progress in the past few years. One of the most important contributions of the growingfield of Arabic computational linguistics has been the compilation of authentic corpora for linguistic analysis such as frequency counts and occurrences of lexical collocations. The Arabic corpus project at Brigham Young University (BYU) currently provides a key source for researchers needing to examine language in context. According to the BYU digital humanities website, “ArabiCorpus is a free, untagged, 30-million-word corpus with a user-friendly interface. Maintained by Dil Parkinson, professor of Arabic, this corpus allows users tofind larger structures and grammatical patterns through frequency analysis, regular expression searching, and other advanced interface features. The ArabiCorpus is a highly regarded tool for both researchers and advanced Arabic students, and can be found at http://arabicorpus.byu.edu” (Brigham Young University,2013).
Other uses of corpora include syntactic and morphological parsing and compilation of lexicons. With the advent of reliable computational resources, searching various corpora for particular structures and usages has been rendered far easier and Arabic linguistics researchers can now process considerably more data than before. Most of the corpora are in MSA, but the development of spoken Arabic corpora is also well underway. Ditters (2006and2013) provides an over- view of Arabic computational linguistics, including an extensive bibliography. The recent publication of A Frequency Dictionary of Arabic by Tim Buckwalter and Dilworth Parkinson lists the most frequent 5,000 words based on“a corpus of 30 million words of which 10 percent was made up of spontaneous (unscripted) speech data. . . [and] the remaining 90 percent of the corpus came from written sources” (2011: 3). This new and important resource will undoubtedly improve the targeting of key vocabulary in the development of Arabic language teaching materials and in classroom interaction, and is just one of the results of computa- tional linguistics research in Arabic.3
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Notes
1. See Mejdell (2006), for a close study of code-mixing in Egypt, as well as Bassiouney (2006). See Eid (2007) for a stylistic analysis of hybrid Arabic used in the media. See also Al-wer (2013) for a cogent current overview of Arabic sociolinguistics, and Suleiman (2013) for an astute analysis of diglossia and Arabic folk linguistics.
2. See Rosenbaum 2008 for a lively discussion of what is termed“fuşħaamiyya.” 3. For a critical overview of contemporary Arabic lexicography, see Buckwalter and
Paokinton (2013).
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