A contrastive genre analysis of selected English and Arabic national anthems

الملخص EN

The present paper is a genre analysis of selected English and Arabic national anthems.

It aims to find out whether the genre of national anthems is similar or different cross-linguistically with regard to discourse organization and linguistic features.

Two English and two Arabic Anthems are selected for the study.

The analysis is carried out of two anthems at a time according to the ruling system they represent.

Thus, a detailed contrastive genre analysis is conducted of the American national anthem and the Iraqi national anthem as they represent the republican system.

A similar analysis is also carried out on the British and the Jordanian anthems because they both represent the royal system.

The analysis has revealed a number of interesting points.

The anthems as a genre can be organized into parts or phases with regard to the themes they convey.

Linguistic features that tend to occur in the genre of anthems are subsumed under the headings: person, parallelism, repetition, diction and other features.

anthems are concerned, there have been some studies such as Anderson De Souza (2008) which applied the systemic functional grammar to anthems written in English, Esra’ Mustafa (2015) which tackled the semantic framing in anthems of only two countries: Egypt and England, Al-Shuweili (2016) which was concerned with the stylistic aspects of Arabic anthems, etc.

However, no study has ever dealt with national anthems of two different cultures, different languages and two different political systems (royal and presidential).

The present study is to fill in this gap by contrasting national anthems from different languages, cultures and political systems.

Thus, the study has selected two English anthems (the American and British) and two Arabic anthems (the Iraqi and Jordanian) as its data.