Prestigious Oral Arabic (POA), the substandard but nevertheless non-colloquial oral medium of the present-day Arab intellectual elite, is an unstable and highly variable linguistic entity. In structural models of very various architecture, POA or what may equal it under various names, begins to appear in the form of teaching devices designed for the instruction of a vaguely defined noncolloquial Modern Arabic. The following inquiry aims at providing a tentative clue to the identification and classification of the main structural features of this unstable linguistic entity in terms of their deviation from the synthetic norm of Standard Arabic and their representation in three different, arbitrarily selected descriptive models designed for teaching purposes.
Prestigious Oral Arabic, the substandard non-colloquial oral medium of the present-day Arab cultural elite, is an unstable linguistic entity with diffuse structural contours. The following inquiry aims at creating a tentative structural model of this emerging linguistic medium in terms of its deviation from the synthetic norm of Standard Arabic. It aims at defining its position in the recent system of diglossia.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.