Negative Attitudes Towards The Arabic Language

1769 Words8 Pages
In addition, these sorts of attitudes are also common in the usage of the Arabic Language. Haeri (2003) and Ferguson (1956) demonstrate that Classical Arabic (CA) is highly regarded and considered to be the dialect of knowledge, science, inspiration, intellectualism, religion, etc., Also, the CA is said to own rich vocabulary and aesthetic syntactic structures. This is due to the fact that the Quran plays a significant role in making people always appreciate this variety. On the contrary, the local dialects are considered to be low, fractured, corrupted, and undeveloped dialects. That is, they are inferior to the CA. This has led people not to write their work in the local dialects as it will be regarded as undeserving and inappropriate. Interestingly, Cargile and Bradac (2001) maintain with this idea and maintains that these negative attitudes are not only available amidst speakers of one language, but sometimes speakers of other languages possess negative attitudes towards some local varieties found in other languages. For example, in a study conducted in two Japanese Universities. One hundred and thirteen undergraduates were asked to listen to AAVE on a tape-recording. This was to know about how they react to this dialect. It was discoveredthat the Japanese undergraduates have negative attitudes toward AAVE similar to that of the GAE speakers. Put another way, AAVE accent, grammar, vocabulary were downgraded and did not impress the listeners. The study claims that