Specificity of the Analysis of Syrian Arabic Words and Expressions

In Arabic countries, the linguistic situation, characterized by diglossia, which manifests itself in the presence of colloquial variants as the primary means of communication and the literary Arabic language as the language of the official sphere, attracts the interest of sociolinguistic researchers and is a relevant issue of the Arabic linguistics. With the growing interest in Arabic dialects, there is an increasing need for accessible resources for linguists and those studying the Arabic language and its dialects. One of such resources is the multimedia dictionary of Arabic dialects we are now developing, which contains information about the phonetic and grammatical characteristics of words, their origins, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, as well as extralinguistic information about the concepts or objects they denote. The creation of a dictionary for the Syrian dialect, in light of the insufficiency of lexicographic resources, defines the novelty of this study. The analysis focuses on the lexical units from the Syrian dialect of the Arabic examined, regarding the stages of their selection and the characteristics which distinguish them from the units of the literary language for inclusion in the multimedia dictionary. The research material consists of dialect words obtained through a comprehensive sampling method from film discourse in the Syrian dialect of the Arabic. The result of this work is an algorithm developed by the authors, aimed at improving natural language processing, for analyzing dialectal lexical units and expressions in the Syrian dialect of the Arabic, allowing for the acquisition of the most complete information about their origins, phonetic and grammatical features. © 2024 Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. All rights reserved.