An Arab Child Learns to Read a Language Nobody Speaks at Home — Epoche B1
An Arabic-speaking child opens the first schoolbook and meets a language nobody in the house speaks. Standard Arabic is the written language — of books, newspapers, the news at nine and every official page — while the language spoken at home is a dialect that is not normally written for these purposes. The words for bread, boy and want may all be different. That is a real difficulty, and researchers have measured it. A child learning to read in English is writing down words already in the head; the work is decoding letters. An Arab six-year-old decodes the letters and then translates. Two jobs, at an age with the patience for one. So why is the split defended? Because of what it holds together. One written standard means a newspaper printed in Cairo can be read in Rabat, Baghdad and Khartoum, that a doctor's textbook serves the whole region, and that a poem from the ninth century is still on the same page as a headline from this morning. Give each dialect its own spelling and you would have a dozen small literatures instead of one large one. Standard Arabic also carries the Qur'an, which is not a matter anyone is willing to reopen. The answers found so far are partial. Children hear the standard early in stories and cartoons; teachers explain in dialect and read aloud in the standard; the two are allowed to sit side by side in a classroom rather than one being treated as a mistake. None of this removes the cost. It moves it — from the child struggling alone to a school that admits the gap exists. The unity of a written language is worth a great deal, and it is paid for at the age of six. References Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2003). Linguistic distance and initial reading acquisition: the case of Arabic diglossia. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(3), pp. 431-451. Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15(2), pp. 325-340.