ABSTRACT
THE DIMENSIONS OF LINGUISTIC VARIABILITY Linguistic variation in a speech community may be viewed in a number of dimensions: a "horizontal" one of geographical dialect spread and contact, or a "vertical" one of sociolects and prestige and stigmatized dialects. It may furthermore be given a temporal dimension and be viewed through the prism of historical dialect change and the "rise and fall" of prestige forms. To each one of these may be added a further cultural, political, or gendered dimension, detailing the relative power of certain groups or discourses within a speech community at one period in time or over the course of time. Arabic diglossia in modern linguistic discourse has been examined primarily in a vertical dimension, as embodying a distinction between an archaic but prestige literary form and a related but stigmatized spoken form in a given speech community. Diglossia in Arab traditionalist discourse has taken a quite different form, one which problematizes it in educational and cultural terms, drawing on a long cultural legacy of situating Arabic and its speakers in relation to other languages, ethnicities, religions, and polities.
