Dialectal Phenomena In English And Arabic Literature

Résumé: There is nothing more sublime and serviceable to human beings than literary language which engenders different levels of formality and conceivable varieties of language. Literature is, as a whole, an artistically organised system specially bringing ordinary talk in contact with formal literary language. Henceforth, linguists become more and more drifted towards a collection of different slips of the tongue and the Arab linguist Al-Kisa'i was among the first linguists who wrote an interesting book entitled 'Error of the Populace'. The issue we would like to raise in this article may be summarized in the following question: How can literary language offer diversity in English and Arabic standard texts? In both Arabic and English literature, the writers tend to include dialectal forms in a standard artistic text. In spite of its richness, Classical Arabic, al fusha, cannot always be useful for some characters who are ignorant or uneducated. Similarly, Standard English cannot be used by a character who has never been to school. On this basis, this paper aims at clarifying the following points: - there is a strong relationship between language and literature - this relationship implies other components such as dialect and culture - this relationship is intensified by a scientific research about dialect in literature. In short, this paper attempts to shed light upon dialectal phenomena in English and Arabic literature as demonstrated in English and Arabic standard literary texts; and mainly targets on the importance of the function of dialects in the literature of both languages. Dialect use in literature is a highly controversial problematics for it is quite unusual to include a variety of spoken language within the standard form. Still, at the same time, it is almost paradoxical to make the uneducated character speak al-fusha in Arabic, or the one from a lower class use a highly soigné English.

Publié dans la revue: Revue Maghrébine des Langues