Research question 1: Which linguistic elements are

Based on the literature review, a considerable use of MSA would occur in any cross-dialectal conversation between educated Arabic NSs and based on the numbers of MSA borrowings stated in Abu-Melhim’s study, hundreds of MSA borrowings were anticipated by the researcher to occur in the present study which would be sufficient for linguistic analysis and for presenting solid findings regarding the linguistic elements that are borrowed from MSA in cross-dialectal interaction.

However, the conversations analysis showed much less use of MSA than had been anticipated after the literature review. A total of 53 instances in 193 minutes were observed with a rate of 0.3 MSA borrowings per minute. The number of

borrowings is quite small even though they included elements which might not even be borrowed from MSA. As mentioned in section 3.2.3, all these instances were labelled as MSA borrowings even though it was not possible to ensure that they are purely in MSA and not influenced by other dialects.

Another observation was the complete absence of MSA borrowings by some of the participants. As presented in table 4.1, 7 (33%) out of the 21 participants did not make any MSA borrowings in their conversations and these 7 participants were not observed to be of specific category of dialect speakers, age, or level of education. According to the previous studies, every participant made use of MSA in their cross-dialectal conversations with a variability in the extent of the MSA use of which certain dialect speakers – such as the Tunisians – made more borrowings from MSA than other dialect speakers (Shiri, 2002). The results in the present study confirm what has been stated in the previous studies reviewed in chapter 2 regarding the absence of a specific form as a lingua franca and that MSA is not purely used in cross-dialectal communication but a mix of elements form MSA and the dialects. What the results of this study add is that MSA has a more limited presence in cross-dialectal communication in comparison with previous studies. A considerable percentage of the participants did not resort to any use of MSA in their cross-dialectal communication and even for those who borrowed some elements from MSA, they were limited to few instances per participant.

The findings here – although showing a much lower rate of MSA borrowings – do not serve to discount or contradict the findings of previous studies but to highlight that there are possibly sociolinguistic factors that have affected the language use in Arabic cross-dialectal communication within the last few decades. Such factors could be the emergence of globalisation and the strong presence of the media which might have made the Arabic dialects more accessible to different dialect speakers around the world, and due to a better awareness of other dialects, some Arabic speakers, consciously or subconsciously, may resort less to MSA in order to ensure they are understood.

The participants in this study, although all were residents or visitors in the United Kingdom, most of them stated that their familiarity with various Arabic dialects was not a consequence of their life away from the Arab homelands but it started in childhood with the exposure to the media from different Arabic countries and the increasing migration of certain Arab communities to other ones. Familiarity with a range of dialects as well as personal reasons are explanations for this limited MSA use. Two of the participants who maintained their own dialects throughout the conversations were Egy3 in his conversation with Alg1 and Kwt1 in her

conversation with Lib4. Egy3 stated that he was confident that his Cairene dialect is easily understood by other dialect speakers and that he does not see a need to modify his language when speaking with non-Egyptian NSs. Kwt1 who maintained her dialect including the localised words that are not common outside the

Mesopotamian region stated that she prefers to stick to her Kuwaiti dialect as she feels shy and not confident enough to borrow utterances from another variety except from English in which she is very fluent. She added that her MSA was not very good due to her education in non-Arabic schools and that she had very little exposure to other Arabic dialects while growing up in a non-Arab country.

The limited number of MSA borrowings that were observed in this study did not provide enough instances for a linguistic analysis that can provide a straight answer to the first research question and present solid claims about how MSA is used in cross-dialectal communications. Out of the 53 instances, no specific linguistic elements of phonology, morphology or lexis were observed to be dominant. Most of the phonological borrowings were not purely phonological but phono-lexical such as the use of the MSA qaaf and the hamza sounds. There were also a number of morpho-phonological borrowings such as the use of MSA negation particles and the MSA passive forms of verbs. One observation regarding the type of non- cognates that were borrowed from MSA was the extent of localisation of certain lexical items. These were avoided by some of the participants and were replaced with either MSA or other more common dialectal equivalents. There were 14 (26%) out of the 53 instances that were classified as localized words limited to a certain variety and these were from the Iraqi and North African dialects. This observation agrees with Abu-Haidar’s statement about the Iraqi speakers replacing

some localized words with other equivalents more familiar to non-Iraqi speakers (Abu-Haidar, 1994).

4.2.2 Research question 2: Are there any linguistic or non-linguistic