Untitled

saxelmwifo enis swavlebis sakiTxebi:
problemebi da gamowvevebi
Issues of State Language Teaching;
Problems and Challenges
variety either. Along with territorial dialects and Literary Arabic, there is also a third linguistic conglomerate: the
so-called Standard Arabic” (N.Ejibadze, 2010:22-23, in Georgian).
Along with this, it is of fundamental importance here that Literary Arabic, despite the fact that exactly it is
the form of the high status, is not the native language of any Arab, it is never spoken during informal conversations.
At the time of bilingual situations there are two linguistic forms, often belonging to different linguistic spaces,
having an equal status towards one another. In case of Egypt, in the diachrony of the last centuries, this was,
on the one hand, Arabic and, on the other one, with respect to changes of historical realia, - Turkish, French, or at
present, English. The history of Egypt has witnessed periods when the local population, already Arabicized for
centuries, more precisely, its aristocratic part, did not even know Arabic, received an education e.g. in Turkish,
and spoke Turkish. This fact posed a great problem at the time of communication between representatives of different
social strata of the population, as its low, uneducated part (and such can be found abundantly in Egypt of
the 21 st c. as well) spoke only its native Egyptian dialect. The situation changed after the reforms of Muhammad
Ali. Representatives of the high social stratum as well as talented youths of modest means were educated in Europe,
mostly, in France, and later – in England. As a result, a new linguistic format penetrated into the Egyptian
reality.
From the position of the present reality, it would not be exact to note that the situation in entire Egypt is bilingual.
But for one stratum of the population the situation is indeed complex: on the one hand – bilingual, and on
the other one – diglossic as well. This is the part of the population, which receives a European, according to the
present-day situation, English-language education. As a result, a youth brought up in Egypt has a perfect command
of English (and sometimes of other European languages), also speaks the Cairo vernacular (a certain standard
variant of the Arabic dialect of Egypt), which in synthesis with one another results in a bilingual situation. On
the one hand, these youths have to live in a diglossic society, where a factor defining diglossia is opposition of
this dialect and Literary Arabic. Practice shows that the majority of these youths speak Literary Arabic very poorly,
because this is the language which the Arab children study at school, and this part of the Egyptian youth studies
at school European languages at a higher level than Arabic. They continue studies in European and American
universities, and if these higher educational institutions are on the territory of Egypt, during the university years,
they have to study Literary Arabic, which presents great problems for them. Those who speak with the status of
the native language one form of the Arabic language – a dialect (in particular, mostly, the Cairo vernacular),
practically are not familiar with the other form of Arabic – the literary language, and often start to study it from
the beginning, in the same way as speakers of another language.
It should be taken into account that Arabic diglossia, being a natural co-existence of literary and spoken languages,
manifests a specificity in the fact that if on the one hand there is a great number of dialects, on the other
one (that of the literary language) there are two languages – classical (fuóçā) and modern (standard). The first is
only a written language, and the other has the full function, but its communicative purpose is very restricted by
the dialects. Another difficulty is that the literary standard-language does not have its own graphic and orthographic
system and when it uses the classical one, it does not/cannot mark its own peculiarities (the Arabic alphabet
is consonantal). Finally, in place of the literary language there is one graphic system, i.e. one language in
the graphic expression, which has two representatives. One might say that we have certain heterography when
one and the same text (graphic language) is read/deciphered in two ways. “In the graphic expression there exists
only one language, not two. The standard-language is completely based on the classical graphic system (along
with this, in principle – on the classical grammar as well, if we do not take into consideration some changes, not
very difficult to describe). Hence, only the speech representation creates a fundamental difference between the
classical and modern languages…” (A. Silagadze, 2010:8, in Georgian ) . .
For working in the Arabic world, management of business correspondence, working with documentation,
etc. it is necessary to know Literary Arabic, namely, grammar. How, with the help of which language do these
youths study the grammar of the Literary Arabic language?
A characteristic phenomenon of any segment of the Arabic society is the so-called code switching, in which
it is implied that during speech an Arab uses different forms of Arabic, from the dialect to Literary Arabic – different
variants of language gradation, which depends on the change of the situation, the status of the thought to be
expressed, the qualification of the relation with an interlocutor, and other parameters. In this regard, special studies
were carried out even during public speeches of Presidents of Egypt. For example, in public speeches of Pres-
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