The language ecology of the Middle East: Jordan as a case study

The Middle East is geographically, historically, linguistically and culturally diverse in ways that do not permit simple generalisations about its language ecology. This is true of the Arabic‐speaking part of this region where, in spite of shared cultural commonalities, a mosaic of historical, political and socio‐economic conditions has created diverse language situations with their own special characteristics. Thus, although Arabic is shared as a common code by most people in the Arab world, the language largely exists in a diglossic situation consisting of the standard and many dialectal varieties, some of which are hardly intelligible to the speakers of other dialects (Ferguson, 1959, 1996). Even the standard, which is assumed to be constant by Arabs, does exhibit phonological and lexical variation from one dialect area to another. This variation is most apparent in the oral medium, but it also exists in writing, especially between the Mashreq (Eastern part of the Arab world) and the Maghreb (North Africa). These variations are due to, mutatis mutandis, historically deep contact situations between Arabic and other indigenous languages and, in more recent times, to pervasive contact with the major European languages, mainly English and French (Abu‐Absi, 1997; Shaaban, 1997). Hybridised intermediate forms of Arabic, embodying features of the standard and the dialects, are generated in inter‐dialectal and other situations (El‐Hassan, 1977; Hary, 1996) through classicistion, colloqualisation and dialect koenisation/levelling (Ibrahim, 1989). In the Gulf region, owing to the influx of large numbers of workers from the Indian sub‐continent in the last two or more decades, a pidgin form of Arabic is emerging for use in restricted spoken domains and, in some cases, in the press in cartoons and other humorous writings (Smart, 1990). To overcome these difficulties of scope, this chapter focuses on Jordan using it as an example to point to similar trends in the linguistic ecologies of other parts of the Arabic‐speaking Middle East. The paper also concentrates on the dialectal varieties—with little reference to the standard except in the field of education—whose position as the official and dominant language of culture is assured in the ecologies of the Arab Middle East.