Diglossic Shifting in Mosuli Friday Sermons: Multi-Level Shifts from Modern Standard Arabic to Mosuli Arabic

Abstract

This paper investigates how two Mosuli religious preachers shift from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) to Mosuli Arabic (MA) in their deliverance of Friday sermons in Mosul mosques. Rather than treating dialectal shifting as a departure from linguistic correctness, the study approaches it as a deliberate rhetorical resource used for convergence towards the audience, emphasis, stance-taking, and identity-positioning within a diglossic speech event. The data comprises 89 instances of MSA-MA shifting, coded into four mutually exclusive categories: lexical, morphosyntactic, discourse-marker, and phonological. Quantitative analysis reveals that lexical shifts are the most frequent, accounting for 52.8% of all shift instances, followed by morphosyntactic shifts at 24.7%, phonological shifts at 12.4%, and discourse-marker shifts at 10.1%. There are two distinct stylistic profiles displayed in the two sermons. The first leans heavily towards lexical shifting, and displays a higher overall density of shifts when considering sermon length, whereas Sermon 2 contains more morphosyntactic and phonological variation. Qualitatively, the shifts function to align the preachers with their audience, reinforce moral points, and dramatize religious narratives through indexicality of Mosuli identity. The paper contributes a four-way coding scheme supported by broad IPA transcription allowing a more precise account of shift depth beyond a simple MSA- dialect contrast. Although based on a small corpus, the paper presents a distinct method in transparent coding procedure and analytical approaches fortified by a documented appendix, making this work reproducible in wider studies of Arabic, and especially Iraqi religious discourse.