Egyptian Arabic VS. MSA and heritage Arabic: a morphological approach with reference to Western theories

Abstract EN

Egyptian Arabic, or the vernacular, is the language spoken by the average Egyptian, educated or not.

this language is not a corrupt or a vulgar version of MSA, not to mention heritage Arabic.

this article uses a bottom-up textual analysis-lexical, syntactic and conceptual-which seems to support our initial intuition, namely that Egyptian Arabic is a type, not a level (socially conceived) of Arabic.

it is the language of thought, of early and developing cognition, however much influenced by, and influencing, both MSA and heritage Arabic.

based on this intuition, the article explores major issues related to Egyptian Arabic-writing for the stage in Egyptian Arabic, language and cognition, the development of Arabic, MSA and Egyptian Arabic, survival of Egyptian Arabic, standard Arabic morphology, the heritage effect, Wittgenstein's family resemblances, the coined abstract noun and coining by doubling.

the central issue the article addresses is the binary concept of language in the case of Arabic which has been fully studied by modern linguists, but not adequately related to its English literary counterpart.