Diglossia and Its Applications: The Case of Saudi Arabia

Until its comprehensive and systematic treatment by Ferguson in 1959 in his seminal paper entitled "Diglossia", Arabic diglossia had almost been absent from the literature.  Subsequently, researchers have evaluated the linguistic situation in different Arab countries, stressing the threat it poses to the Arabic language as well as its negative impact on education (e.g. Maamouri, 1998). While there is a consensus among Arab linguists on the two varieties suggested by Ferguson, namely the High (H) and Low (L) varieties with their defined functional complementarity, discrepancy is still found in the emergent Arabic varieties, thereby widening the gap between the Classical (H) and the Colloquial (L) to form a multi-level continuum that represents the varieties of Arabic in Iraq, Altoma, (1969),  Egypt, Badawi (1973) and Mejdell, (2006), and Tunisia, Walters (2003).
The present paper attempts to shed some light on Arabic diglossia with reference to Saudi Arabia, the largest country in the Gulf region, given that Arab linguists have given little or no attention at all to this particular issue. It also describes the relevant literature on diglossia in general and Arabic diglossia in particular and proposes a continuum of the diglossic situation in this part of the world.  This new model delineates the size of the gap between the linguistic codes in Saudi Arabia that results from the immense geographic area and the diversified social structure of the Saudi society. The degree of overlap between different codes is shown.