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Perceptions of Non-Native Arabic Dialects Among Indonesian Students: A Sociolinguistic

Paper · 2025 · Fatia Rahmanita, Maryam Nur Annisa, Holis et al.

Summary

This qualitative case study looks at how Indonesian graduate students of Arabic react when classmates speak Arabic shaped by their own regional languages. The setting is the MPBA-G class at UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang, whose students hold the Indonesia Bangkit Scholarship and come from many regions and ethnic groups. Over two weeks, the researchers held semi-structured interviews with five participants whose home regions were Aceh, Bone, Java, Madura and Maluku. The authors coded the interviews with Braun & Clarke's six-phase thematic analysis and confirmed their readings with the participants through member checking. They examined four themes: variation in form, peer interaction, identity, and academic norms. The students mostly saw accent differences as a normal sign of Indonesia's cultural diversity. Some said unfamiliar pronunciations made them harder to understand. Others felt cross-dialect contact built tolerance. Standard fushah Arabic remains the academic norm, yet regional identity still shows in how students speak. The authors argue that Arabic curricula should build in sociolinguistic awareness so learners communicate better across accents and classrooms become more inclusive.

Key points

  • Participants: 5 graduate students (Aceh, Java, Bone, Maluku, Madura) in the MPBA-G class at UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang, all Indonesia Bangkit Scholarship holders.
  • Method: semi-structured interviews over two weeks, Braun & Clarke (2006) six-phase thematic analysis, and member checking for credibility.
  • Four analytic lenses: linguistic variation, social interaction, cultural identity, and the social norms of academia.
  • Findings: views are mixed. Some students find pronunciation differences (e.g., of letters such as ق and ع) hard to follow, while others treat them as enriching. Fushah dominates formal settings, but regional accents persist.
  • Stated limitations: a very small sample and no comparison across proficiency levels. The authors call for larger multi-institution, mixed-method studies (observation, phonological analysis, surveys) and native vs. non-native comparisons.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Member checking, where interpretations are handed back to the people who produced the data for confirmation, guards against the analyst projecting meaning onto sources.
  • I2. A prestige standard (fushah) and regional variants are treated as coexisting layers rather than "correct vs. wrong", which keeps variant forms as information instead of noise.
  • I3. The study keeps the institutional norm of a setting (formal academic language) apart from the identity markers speakers still leak into it.
  • I4. The six-phase thematic workflow moves from raw codes to candidate themes, then reviews them against the data before naming them, which gives a disciplined way to turn scattered observations into categories.
  • I5. The authors flag the missing comparison across proficiency levels as a weakness, which points to stratified evaluation as a remedy.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (back): generate a paraphrase from the meaning graph and check it against the source text (or a teacher model) before accepting the analysis, a round-trip "member check" for every parse.
  • I2 (tree): during UD dialect conversion and parsing of non-standard English, record the variant features as annotations next to the normalized tree instead of silently discarding them.
  • I3 (frames): the pragmatics layer could tag register expectations of the context separately from speaker-identity signals, so speech-act and implicature reasoning can use both.
  • I4 (learn): cluster parser and frame errors into coded groups and re-verify each group on held-out data before promoting it to a self-induced repair rule.
  • I5 (answer): report reader and student accuracy separately by text difficulty or school grade, so gains on easy material do not hide failures on harder texts.

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

 Institutions

🎓Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik IbrahimMalang · Indonesia4 works

Also on the byline: Institut Agama Islam Hamzanwadi Pancor Lombok Timur.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksEducation · 203 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 2,908 works

Cite

Cite as Fatia Rahmanita, Maryam Nur Annisa, Holis and Syaiful Mustofa. 2025. Perceptions of Non-Native Arabic Dialects Among Indonesian Students: A Sociolinguistic. Eloquence 4.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.58194/eloquence.v4i3.3029

@inproceedings{rahmanita2025perceptions,
  title = {{Perceptions of Non-Native Arabic Dialects Among Indonesian Students: A Sociolinguistic}},
  author = {Fatia Rahmanita, Maryam Nur Annisa, Holis and Syaiful Mustofa},
  booktitle = {Eloquence 4},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.58194/eloquence.v4i3.3029},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.58194/eloquence.v4i3.3029}
}

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