Ramifications of diglossia on how native Arabic-speaking students in Israel write

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of diglossia in Arabic on the writing behavior of native Arabic-speaking high school students in Israel. Participating in this study were 30 students in the 12th grade. Each participant wrote an essay that was a part of the matriculation examination in the Standard Variety (SV) required for graduation by the Ministry of Education. The essays were analyzed for deviations from SV. The data used for this paper consisted of deviations from SV caused by interference of the participants’ Arabic vernacular. The findings clearly show that the linguistic distance in the two domains that were investigated – the syntactic and the lexical – significantly affected the writing behavior of the participants, who used structures and lexical items that are characteristic of their mother tongue, the Palestinian variety.