Developmental diglossia : diglossic switching and the equivalence constraint

Abstract EN

Diglossic switching in the speech of adult Arabic speakers has been noted before.

The phenomenon has not been observed before in the speech of preschoolers who have not been exposed to the High variety of Arabic through formal education.

The present study provides evidence of diglossic codeswitching from the speech of a 5 ; 6 month old child who seems to code-switch freely between the High variety or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the Low variety or the Hejazi dialect (HjD) of Arabic.

The child’s code-switches appear to be rule- governed and show complete adherence to the Equivalence Constraint (Poplack 1980) reflecting an underlying competence of the syntactic structures of both varieties at a very young age.

Additionally, the analysis reveals that verbs are the most frequently mixed linguistic items despite the fact that they are the most semantically and syntactically complex units in the sentence.