Ḍufḍaʕāt eller ḍafāḍeʕ - En analys av språköverföring i muntliga berättelser berättade av palestinska och syriska arvsspråkstalare

Summary, in Swedish

The purpose of this thesis was to study language transfer from the majority language Swedish to the minority language Arabic (the Syrian-Palestinian dialect). The problem negative language transfer causes is that dominant languages affect minority languages in a society in a negative way. The result is that the speakers of these languages never learn how to speak these languages properly. If we know how language transfer affects these speakers, we can use this knowledge to improve their language skills. The questions I was aiming to answer with this thesis was if the heritage speakers knew how to inflect plural and dual, and if they knew how to construct possessive constructions and restrictive relative clauses. To answer these questions I asked ten adult heritage speakers and ten control persons to tell two frog stories by Mayers. I analyzed their stories and I found that the heritage speakers overall produced few mistakes when they told these stories. Earlier research shows that language transfer can explain these types of mistakes that the heritage speakers made. However, I cannot draw the conclusion that the mistakes made by the heritage speakers in this thesis are caused by language transfer.

• Author: Omar Doughoz
• Department/s: Arabic Studies
• Publishing year: 2015
• Language: Swedish
• Full text: Available as PDF - 1 MB; Download statistics
• Document type: Student publication for Bachelor's degree
• Topic: Languages and Literatures
• Keywords: heritage language speakers; language transfer; Heritage language acquisition; Arabic; Swedish; plural; dual; possessive constructions; restrictive relative clauses; frog stories
• Supervisor: Maria Persson