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Comparative constructions in Bisha Colloquial Arabic: a case study

Summary

Bisha Colloquial Arabic (BCA), a southern Saudi dialect, had never been systematically described with respect to how its speakers express comparison. This paper fills that gap with a qualitative, descriptive study. The data are comparative expressions taken from undergraduate students' talk in grammar classes and from social media posts on TikTok and X. The author extracted these expressions and sorted them into structural types: simple, complex, equality, non-scalar, quantitative/qualitative, intensified, adverbial/clausal, and comparative correlatives. She then contrasted the BCA patterns with Classical Arabic, MSA, Hijazi and Najdi.

The main finding is that BCA relies less on the strict elative ʔafʿal morphology and case marking of MSA. Instead it leans on analytic markers, informal similarity words, default agreement and pragmatic intensifiers. This places it between conservative Najdi and the more analytic Hijazi and southern varieties. The work matters as documentation of an under-described variety. It also supplies a pattern inventory that the author suggests could feed dialect-aware NLP, teaching and translation.

Key points

  • Data sources: classroom discourse of undergraduate students and social media content from TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). The analysis is qualitative, with no statistical evaluation reported.
  • Core markers:
    • ʔaktar ("more") and ʔagall ("less") build periphrastic comparatives, mainly for adjectives that resist the ʔafʿal pattern.
    • zaay and kan ("like") appear alongside MSA mithl and ka, and nafs ("same") is also used.
  • Intensifiers include b-kathiir / bi-zyāda ("much more") and the hyperbolic b-milyoon marrah ("a million times"). Proportional and causal correlatives are built with kul ma ("the more…").
  • Table 1 compares BCA, Hijazi and Najdi on four phenomena:
    • comparative/superlative form,
    • mā…illa exclusion,
    • gender/number agreement,
    • intensifier use.
  • In that comparison, BCA simplifies agreement, while Najdi tends to keep classical elatives and agreement.
  • The literature review builds on Alsulami's (2018) HPSG analysis of MSA. That analysis separates simple from complex comparatives and clausal from phrasal ones, and notes that comparatives introduced by mā can be ambiguous between the two readings.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper uses a fine-grained typology of comparison: equality, non-scalar similarity, quantitative vs qualitative, intensified, and correlative, rather than a single "comparative" label. — For Mova (frames): A comparison frame could carry slots for compared item, standard, dimension, direction (more/less/same), and intensity, and a non-scalar "like" relation could be kept separate from degree comparison.
  • I2. Morphological comparatives (ʔafʿal) and periphrastic ones (ʔaktar + word) are treated as two surface routes to the same meaning. — For Mova (tokens): The English lemmatizer/morphology could normalize "taller" and "more tall/more beautiful" to one lemma plus a shared Degree=Cmp feature, so downstream steps never branch on form.
  • I3. Comparative correlatives such as kul ma ("the more X, the more Y") are read as encoding proportional and causal links between two quantities. — For Mova (world): English "the more…, the more…" could compile into a monotone dependency between two state variables, which maths word problems and QA could then reason over.
  • I4. Hyperbolic intensifiers like "a million times" serve emphasis and emotion, not literal measurement. — For Mova (frames): Pragmatics could flag numeric hyperbole as an intensifier so that the world model records "much more" instead of a literal factor of 10^6.
  • I5. A compact per-phenomenon feature table contrasts neighbouring varieties, each row with its source. — For Mova (tree): A similar sourced table of construction differences between UD treebanks or dialects could document and drive the UD dialect conversion rules for comparatives.

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

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3389/flang.2025.1560932

@inproceedings{alharthy2025comparative,
  title = {{Comparative constructions in Bisha Colloquial Arabic: a case study}},
  author = {Alharthy, Fatema},
  booktitle = {Frontiers in Language Sciences 4},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.3389/flang.2025.1560932},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2025.1560932}
}

References

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