Abstract

Nominal pluralization errors by adult native Jordanians are a major problem for Jordanian-Arabic. While the existing literature has focused on Arabic pluralization errors produced by children or non-native speakers, this fills a gap in the literature in terms of the target group and the nature of these errors. This paper aimed to identify the violated grammatical constraints resulting from such errors and to explore participants’ sociolinguistic positioning to explain Jordanian diglossia. Using a descriptive-qualitative approach with quantitative support, this study analyzed Google Forms questionnaire data from 143 adult native Jordanians, employing qualitative analysis of nominal examples alongside frequency-based quantification of participants’ stances. Findings revealed that five grammatical constraints were violated, namely semantic substitution, suppletion, mass-count distinction, number-agreement, and double pluralization. Findings also showed marked differences between the negative stance (63.6%) and the positive (23.1%) and middle-ground stances (10.5%). Such differences are attributed to participants’ experiences and contribute to explaining Jordanian diglossia. Although the positive stance implies semantic-pragmatic acceptance of this phenomenon, the middle-ground stance accepted it without practice. Conversely, the negative stance’s refusal is due to its perceived potential harm to Standard Arabic, which is considered to best represent culture/identity/religion. Interestingly, results suggest that while fashion is a driving motive behind this phenomenon, males (25.4%) are marginally more likely than females (21.1%) to accept these nominals. As the results provide an understanding of the Jordanian diglossic context, they can alert those concerned with education to the need to pay attention to these forms during the stages of language acquisition.