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GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF EGYPTIAN AND PALESTINIAN ARABIC HERITAGE SPEAKERS’ ORAL PRODUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2011

Abdulkafi Albirini ,
Elabbas Benmamoun  and
Eman Saadah
Abdulkafi Albirini
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Elabbas Benmamoun*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Eman Saadah
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
*Address correspondence to: Elabbas Benmamoun, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801; e-mail: benmamou@ad.uiuc.edu.
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Abstract

This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, use of null subjects, selection of prepositions, agreement, and possession. The degree of codeswitching in their narratives was also investigated. The goal was to gain some insights into the Arabic linguistic competence of this group of speakers. The results show that although Arabic heritage speakers display significant competence in their heritage colloquial varieties, there are gaps in that knowledge. There also seems to be significant transfer from English, their dominant language.

Information

Type
Research Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 33 , Special Issue 2: The Linguistic Competence of Heritage Speakers , June 2011 , pp. 273 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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