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Acehnese interference in students' spoken Arabic: A multi-level cross-linguistic analysis in an Indonesian Islamic boarding school

Summary

The study looks at how Acehnese, the students' first language, shows up in the spoken Arabic of pupils at Dayah Babul Maghfirah. This Islamic boarding school in Aceh officially requires Arabic for daily communication. The authors note that earlier Indonesian work on Arabic interference usually covered one linguistic domain at a time and rarely covered Aceh. They used a qualitative descriptive design and observed naturally occurring oral interaction for one week without taking part in it. The material was coded with the interactive model of Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña, within Weinreich's structural view of interference. They found systematic Acehnese influence on four levels:

  • sounds: replacement of Arabic consonants that Acehnese lacks;
  • word formation: Acehnese particles and affixes attached to Arabic;
  • sentence structure: Acehnese-style templates;
  • vocabulary: inserted Acehnese interjections and discourse markers.

These levels often co-occur within one utterance, and interference is most visible in spontaneous peer talk. The authors conclude that an immersion policy does not switch off L1 structure. This matters for teaching Arabic in multilingual religious schools.

Key points

  • The site is Dayah Babul Maghfirah in Aceh Besar. It has fixed Arabic-only hours, and its students share a mostly homogeneous Acehnese L1 background.
  • The data are one week of non-participant observation of authentic speech, supported by observational notes and audio recordings. The analysis follows the Miles, Huberman & Saldaña interactive model.
  • Interference was found at four levels:
    • phonological: substitutions of marked Arabic consonants;
    • morphological: Acehnese particles and affixes;
    • syntactic: Acehnese structural templates;
    • lexical: discourse markers and interjections.
  • The framework is deliberately interference-based, following Weinreich (1953), rather than translanguaging. This keeps structural transfer separate from code-switching.
  • Stated limitations are the single institution and the short observation window. The authors propose comparative, quantitative, longitudinal and elicitation-based follow-ups, including learners whose L1 is Gayo, Alas, Jamee or Simeuleu.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors trace a single utterance through sound, morphology, syntax and vocabulary at once, because transfer effects stack within it. — For Mova (tokens): Non-native or dialectal English input could be tagged with layered anomaly labels (spelling/phonetic, affix, word order, inserted particle), so the tagger explains which level departed from the norm.
  • I2. A pattern is credited to Acehnese not only by its surface form, which may overlap with Indonesian, but by its frequency, its pragmatic use and its interactional function. — For Mova (learn): When judging which source caused a parse error or silver-data disagreement, compare usage distributions rather than single surface matches before naming the cause.
  • I3. The authors propose a contrast group from other regional L1s in the same school, to separate Acehnese-specific patterns from pan-Indonesian ones. — For Mova (learn): This is a natural negative-control design. Check whether a self-induced repair rule fires on text from unrelated sources too, to tell genre-specific fixes from general ones.
  • I4. The study draws a principled line between structural interference and deliberate code-switching or translanguaging. Without it, two different phenomena would be counted as one. — For Mova (frames): Inserted foreign interjections or discourse markers should be treated as pragmatic signals (stance, emphasis) rather than parsing noise, so speech-act and implicature detection can use them.
  • I5. Transfer surfaces more in relaxed peer talk than in monitored settings, so register predicts how much non-standard structure to expect. — For Mova (tree): Parser confidence thresholds or dialect-conversion rules could depend on register, with more tolerance for non-standard templates in informal dialogue than in formal text.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15548/diwanjurnalbahasadansastraarab.v18i1.2443

@inproceedings{ahmad2026acehnese,
  title = {{Acehnese interference in students' spoken Arabic: A multi-level cross-linguistic analysis in an Indonesian Islamic boarding school}},
  author = {Ahmad, Maulana Ihsan and Zaini, Hisyam and Rambe, Windi Alhafiza},
  booktitle = {Diwan: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra Arab 18},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.15548/diwanjurnalbahasadansastraarab.v18i1.2443},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15548/diwanjurnalbahasadansastraarab.v18i1.2443}
}

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  42. AUTHORS’ SHORT BIODATA Maulana Ihsan Ahmad is a Master’s student in Arabic Language and Literature at the Faculty of Adab and Humanities, Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He previously completed undergraduate degrees in Informatics (Universitas Syiah Kuala) and Arabic Language and Literature (UIN Ar-Raniry). His research interests include Arabic linguistics, semiotics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing. Email: 23201011009@student.uin-suka.ac.id. Hisyam Zaini is a lecturer in the Arabic Language and Literature Department at the Faculty of Adab and Humanities, State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta, Diwan: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra Arab [•P-ISSN 2339-2088 •E-ISSN 2599-2023] Vol. 18, No. 1, January-June 2026, 33-48 https://doi.org/10.15548/diwan.v18i1.2443 ↗
  43. Indonesia. His research focuses on Arabic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and Arabic language education in multilingual learning environments. Email: hisyam.zaini@uin-suka.ac.id. Windi Alhafiza Rambe is a graduate of Mathematics Education at the Faculty of Islamic Education and Teacher Training, State Islamic University Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh, Indonesia. She also serves as a teacher at Dayah Babul Maghfirah, Aceh Besar. Her research interests include mathematics education, problem-solving strategies, and classroom learning processes. Email: 200205039@student.ar-raniry.ac.id. find

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