Diglossia as Ideology

Abstract

The Language Change in the Arab World (LCAW) project evolved from the collective sense of the researchers involved that there appears to be a significant shift underway in writing practices and attitudes toward writing in the Arab world. This paper proposes a framework for the study of attitudes toward writing in non-standard Arabic, and applies this framework to data from a Twitter hashtag about writing in Arabic, and to the results of the 2013 and 2015 fafo surveys of language attitudes and society in Cairo and Rabat (Kebede, Kindt and Høigilt 2013, Kebede and Kindt 2016). This framework takes as