An Investigation into the Use of Endangered Languages in Different Domains in the Southern Society of Oman (Published)
This paper aims to investigate the languages used in various domains (different settings) in the southern society of Oman and explores the possibility to what extent these languages will be preserved in the future. A number of 40 people from different age groups from the southern Omani society were involved in this study who speak Arabic, Jibbali, and Mehri. Through using a questionnaire and following a thematic analysis, the findings revealed that found both Jibbali and Mehri are used in informal domains within most age groups. Some younger participants were found to already be shifting their language use towards Arabic, even with their family and friends, which is an indication of a gradual shift from these minority languages to Arabic in the southern community which are unlikely to be maintained. Based on these findings, it is recommended that the Omani government take proactive actions to protect minority languages in Oman as encouraging and enabling their use in classrooms, as well as by creating linguistic corpora of these languages that can be used as learning resources.
Citation: Al-Amri M. (2022) An Investigation into the Use of Endangered Languages in Different Domains in the Southern Society of Oman, International Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research, Vol.10, No 4, pp.19-32
Keywords: Arabic, Endangered languages, Jibbali, Mehri, Minority languages, Oman
Developmental Stages Of the Production of Passive Voice by Children Native Speakers of Jordanian Arabic (Published)
This study aims at investigating the children’s production of passive voice in Jordanian Arabic. It sheds light on the factors that may influence the children’s production of some passive forms in Jordanian Arabic. The sample of the study consists of thirty Jordanian children who belong to five age groups from 3; 0 – 7;11 years old. Each of these groups includes six children with equal number of males and females chosen randomly from an elementary school in Jordan. A production test was given to the children using six pairs of pictures that illustrate the contrast between the active and passive sentences. The findings indicate the nature of the construction of passive in Jordanian Arabic does not have that complexity which may pose difficulties for the Jordanian children in their production of passive voice. The increase in age is accompanied by improvement in the child’s linguistic abilities necessary for the production of passive voice.
Keywords: Acquisition, Age, Arabic, Passives, Production
An HPSG Approach to Free Relatives in Arabic (Published)
This paper describes free relative constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth, MSA) and aims to provide an HPSG analysis for them. MSA has two types of free relative constructions. One, which is introduced by the complementizer ʔallaði , looks just like a relative clause. The other, which is introduced by the elements man and maa, which also appear to be complementizers, does not look like a relative clause. Both types can be analysed in term of unary-branching structures (as NPs consisting just of a CP). In ʔallaði free relatives, the NP and the value of SLASH can be coindexed via the value of MOD on the CP. In man and maa free relatives, the NP and the value of SLASH must be coindexed directly.
Keywords: Arabic, Free Relative, HPSG, SLASH
TOWARDS RAISING CONCEPTUAL AWARENESS: ENGLISH-ARABIC IDIOMS OF EQUIVALENT LINGUISTIC FORM AND DIFFERENT CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS (Published)
According to many studies on idioms, the most difficult ones are those that are linguistically equivalent but conceptually different. The researcher has collected a number of idioms from English and Arabic that belong to this type with a view to detecting the sources of this conceptual difference based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, 1980, 2003) and the subsequent cognitive literature. The source of difficulty is proven to emanate from cultural encoding, including cultural experience, perspective, range, and gesture. The differences in the connotative load of the idiomatic words can also be a reason for the conceptual variance. The study stresses the need for raising conceptual awareness to support language learning
Keywords: Arabic, Conceptual Metaphor, English, Idioms