Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Date: September 2024
This study analyzes the online discussions surrounding the dubbing of Disney movies into two Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA). The objective is to uncover the language ideologies and attitudes taken by Disney Facebook commenters and verbal-guise technique (VGT) participants online. Dubbing Disney movies into these two varieties has sparked numerous debates on social media, particularly on Facebook. The study employed stance-taking to analyze the metalinguistic comments made by Facebook users about the use of these two Arabic varieties in the context of Disney. A VGT experiment was conducted on Disney excerpts to complement the results. The findings provided valuable insights into how Arab social media users’ stances are influenced by their ideologies and attitudes. Lastly, the VGT experiment provided another perspective on how Arabs evaluate MSA and ECA in the context of Disney movies and how they express their indirect language attitudes. The findings showed the differences in language attitudes between Maghreb, Mashreq, and Arab Peninsula countries. The language attitudes of Mashreq and Peninsula countries were closer to each other than to those of the Maghreb countries. Moreover, ECA competes with MSA in prestige and pleasantness. MSA is seen as the thread that connects the Arab World and is admired for its connection with the Arab heritage, religion, and education. However, it is less favored for its rigidity, unintelligibility, and unnaturalness as a spoken variety. Finally, ECA is favored for its simplicity, humor, closeness, familiarity, intimacy, naturalness, and entertainment.
