Diglossia in the Arab Media: A Comparative Study of Arabic Use in Five Arab Satellite Channels

D.r Ibrahim Al-Huri

 Assistant professor of sociolinguistics at University of Saba Region, Marib – Yemen. He was awarded his PhD degree from Central University of Jharkhand – India in 2018. He is generally interested in sociolinguistic studies and Translation. He currently works as a director of Language and Translation Center – University of Saba Region.

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Diglossia in the Arab Media A Comparative Study of Arabic Use in Five Arab Satellite Channels

First edition “2024” – Book – Diglossia in the Arab Media: A Comparative Study of Arabic Use in Five Arab Satellite Channels

Abstract

The relationship between media and language has attracted the interest of many scholars to investigate how media and language interact in many different ways. The language of Arab media is diglossic in nature, and therefore, varies according to the genre and the contextual framework in which it occurs. Three Arabic varieties are used in the various types of Arab Media; MSA, which is the variety widely used in News and documentaries, Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA), the variety predominantly spoken by educated Arabs who come together from different Arab countries in their debates and conversations and usually used in the debates or some social programmes. Such variety is used as a ‘lingua franca’ to facilitate linguistic comprehensibility between speakers. The third variety is Colloquial Arabic, which occurs more in the folk programmes, public interviews, TV shows and for the most part, in serials and songs. The current study seeks to introduce new knowledge about how Arabic is used on the Arab satellite channels from a sociolinguistic perspective and investigates the extent to which both MSA and Colloquial Arabic are used in their programmes.