Diglossic Influence on Standard Arabic Production: Word Order and Verb Agreement in Narratives by Saudi Najdi Preschool Children

This study examines the influence of diglossia on the production of Standard Arabic (SA) by 29 Saudi Najdi preschool children aged 4 to 6 years old. It explores their ability to produce sentences in SA, identifies whether subject–verb–object (SVO) or verb–subject–object (VSO) word order is more prevalent, and examines patterns of verb agreement. Data were gathered by asking participants to retell three stories presented in SA. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were used in the morphosyntactic analysis. The findings show that despite preschool children’s limited, informal exposure to SA through television and other media, they were able to produce sentences in this variety. VSO word order was more frequently produced than SVO, but no word order was statistically dominant in the data. The descriptive data showed slightly higher rates of VSO than SVO word order in SA sentences and in utterances with diglossic intra-sentential code-switching, whereas SVO word order was more frequent in sentences combining SA and shared forms. This pattern aligns with previous accounts of VSO as an unmarked word-order structure in both SA and NA and may reflect children’s ongoing acquisition of SA. The results also reveal that the preschool children were generally able to produce accurate verb agreement, although errors occurred in verb–subject agreement, suggesting that full agreement is more easily produced by children than partial agreement in VSO word order. An exploratory analysis also identified a gender difference, with male participants producing a higher proportion of SVO utterances than female participants. As the study was limited to Saudi Najdi preschool children and focused on word order and verb agreement, further studies are recommended with larger samples from other regions in Saudi Arabia and focused on other linguistic features.