Thought colloquial but found formal in Jordanian Arabic vernaculars: a sociolinguistic perspective

Resumen

Lexical borrowing can be looked at as a vital sign that a certain language or variety of a language is lively and progressive, rather than spiritless and regressive. Masquerading under the guise of colloquialism and subscribing to the view that both interlingual and intralingual lexical borrowing can be seen as a linguistic zone of contact, this paper examines the premise that Jordanian Arabic local dialects proliferate in words that have been traditionally conceived by many ‘semi-languaged’ people as being colloquial, while they are actually formal and/or standard. Analysis shows that while some examples have displayed a perfect congruence between the colloquialized forms and their ‘parent’ ones at the semantic, syntactic, phonological, and morphological levels, some other ones have undergone certain changes at one or more of these levels, in response to the sociolinguistic exigencies of human communication. Analysis also provides proselytizing support to the overarching claim that classical Arabic enjoys a sonorous signifying richness, a primacy, and an inspiring, horizontalizing, and ennobling influence and effect on the different vernaculars spoken across Jordan; rather, classical Arabic never ceases to serve a cathartic function and to play a formative role in animating such local colloquial codes.