Formation of Arabic Theatrical Speech Culture in the Context of Language Situation

Abstract

The Arabic world’s language situation is characterized by bilingualism (diglossia), as alongside the written language (Fusha), there exist many spoken languages. This situation rai­ses important theoretical and methodological issues before the theatre in general and theatrical pedagogics in parti­cular. The article deals with the problem of orthoepic norms’ lacking in spoken Arabic, which affects both the teaching methods in theat­rical high schools and the speech culture in ge­neral. In this context, the author gives a short review of language development in Arabic theatre and considers some points of view of Arabic theatrical directors and playwrights of different periods. The article represents a table of phonetics’ compa­rison of Arabic literary and spoken languages. Furthermore, the article raises the problem of spoken language codification and also considers the issue of theatre language. Emphasizing the importance of both the written and spoken langua­ges, the artic­le concludes on the ambivalent approach to forming the theatrical speech teaching methods in the Syrian theatrical school, provided that local dialects are standardized and actors-students master the capital dialect along with the literary language. In practice, teachers have to combine the written language acquisition basing on the rules, and that of the spoken language using audio samples.