issues of linguistics - Tbilisi State University

Nino Ejibadze
The Bilingual Education and Multiglossia in the Egyptian Society
Summary
The linguistic situation in the Arabic world and in the Egyptian society, in particular, is
usually considered as diglossical (conditioned by confrontation of the dialectal and literary
forms of Arabic), but the real situation is more complicated _ multiglossal.
For a certain part of Egyptian society the linguistic situation is bilingual as well. Some
Egyptian families give their children the European (generally with orientation on English)
education. As a result, this part of Egyptian youth speaks, on one hand, English (sometimes
other European languages as well) fluently and, on the other, the Egyptian colloquial
Arabic _ as a native language. In synthesis this gives a bilingual situation. The practice
shows that their knowledge in the literary Arabic is very weak, because this is the language
which Arabic children learn at school, but at their schools these youths have studied
European languages, not Arabic; and at their Universities they are pushed to start studying
the literary Arabic (if it is in Arabic countries) from zero-level, as non-native speakers.
At the American University in Cairo lectures in the grammar of literary Arabic are
delivered against the background of bilingualism, in the regime of permanent interlingual
code switching, where the Egyptian colloquial enjoys the status of the basic spoken
language (of course, Cairene speech as the standard variety of the Egyptian dialect) and the
object of the code switching is English. This event has its reasons, which are not always
sociolinguistic: a) non-unique character of the Arabic grammatical terminology, b) more
convenient and more simplified methods of western orientalism in approach to some
themes of the Arabic grammar, c) in some cases _ the more economical character of the
English language in comparison with the Arabic.
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