Expressing Specialized Knowledge in Arabic: A Sociolinguistic Study of fu??a and Moroccan d?ri?a

Abstract

Human knowledge is a stratified system of ideas about subjects and objects. Some strata entail common, practical knowledge, embedded in daily practices of social interaction and related to basic necessities such as food, clothes, and traditions; others are specialized, involving, inter alia, conceptual reflections on scientific notions, visions of future destinies, and positions on intellectual controversies. Given that language and its colloquialisms constitute the primary medium through which human knowledge is conveyed, it remains unresolved, based on mere intuition and limited evidence, whether standard language or colloquial is more instrumental in articulating the higher strata of specialized knowledge. This study investigates this question through the lens of Arabic, focusing on Standard Arabic (fu??a) and the Moroccan colloquial variety (d?ri?a). The methodological framework comprises two complementary techniques; first, a structured interview is conducted with 15 graduate students of Arabic Studies, who are asked to respond to a set of specialized questions related to language, history, physics, religion, artificial intelligence, and media initially using d?ri?a, then fu??a. The data, drawn from the recorded and written responses, are collected for comparative corpus analysis with particular focus on lexical and syntactic dimensions. The findings of the study reveal that although participants are native speakers of d?ri?a, they find it significantly challenging to express specialized knowledge using a unique colloquial variety, as their lexical content is heavily influenced by fu??a structures. While fu??a demands more cognitive effort and time, it yields output that is lexically specific and dense. Also, in d?ri?a function words and short-length structures are dominant, which allow the speech to expand at ease, and linguistic creativity is notable. The present study seeks to enrich the sociolinguistic discussion on the role of Standard Arabic and Arabic colloquial varieties in their speakers’ cognitive and communicative practices, particularly in regard to the expressibility of specialized knowledge.