The influence of English on Modern Standard Arabic speech reporting styles: A corpus-based study

This paper traces the development of speech reporting styles across historical varieties of Arabic and seeks to explain aspects of such development. To this end, the study examines and compares speech reporting patterns in corpora representing Modern Standard Arabic and different stages of Pre-modern Arabic. The comparison reveals that Modern Standard Arabic uses speech reporting methods that were extremely rare or totally lacking in the Pre-modern varieties, such as indirect speech, mixed reporting, and quotation fronting. The paper argues that such changes are attributable to language-external rather than language-internal factors, namely, the impact exerted on Arabic by modern European languages, especially English, which is the most learned and most translated foreign language in the Arab world. The study proposes that such changes have occurred through massive translation into Arabic from English and through bilingual writers who may use foreign patterns in their writing. This argument is further supported by the close structural similarity between the newly introduced styles and those established in English, the adoption of the Western punctuation system, and the high frequency of the new styles in genres that were themselves borrowed from the West, which suggests that there is a reciprocal relationship between borrowing a given genre and borrowing the linguistic patterns associated with it. The study also shows that the new reporting styles serve pragmatic purposes that cannot be achieved by employing the conventional speech reporting methods alone. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.