A Comparative Study of Pejoration in English and Egyptian Vernacular Arabic from a Historical-Sociolinguistic Approach

Abstract

Pejoration is an under-researched topic in the Arabic language. This study intends to examine pejoration in Egyptian Arabic, as well as its domains and causes. The study employs a socio-semantic approach for pursuing in-depth investigations of pejoration in Egyptian Arabic. Pejoration was contextually traced with the purpose of revealing how contextual realities, including historical, social, cultural, and even ethical norms, could contribute to the pejorative meaning of given linguistic expressions. The present used a mixed methodology combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. It has been discovered that pejoration in Egyptian Arabic has fallen into several domains such as morphological, prosodic, lexical, metaphorical, and pragmatic through conversational implicature and through slurs. The metaphorical extension of meaning has largely influenced the pejoration process in Egyptian Arabic, and it was found to be high in lexical items charged with sexual connotations. Nouns are more prone to pejoration than adjectives and verbs. Pejoration is largely represented in the vernacular discourse, which contributes to the notable gap between Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquialism.