The Impact of Arabic Diglossia on Social-Emotional Skills in the Fifth and Seventh Grades.

This study examined the impact of Arabic diglossia on children's emotional intelligence, emotional intensity, and emotions identification. The participants were 250 Israeli Arabic-speaking children in the fifth and seventh grades, all native speakers of Palestinian Arabic. Children were examined for their Trait Emotional Intelligence (EI) performance, emotional intensity perception, and identifying feelings of episodes in spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA). Findings revealed an advantage in Trait Emotional Intelligence in SpA compared to StA across ages, suggesting that the spoken form of Arabic may facilitate greater ease or preference in identifying emotional content. Additionally, the results showed that SpA phrases were perceived as greater emotional intensity than in StA. As to the grade level, no difference was observed between ages regarding emotional intensity perception. Finally, the results indicated that children more frequently selected SpA items than StA when choosing expressions to represent their feelings. The findings highlight the importance of the diglossic Arabic language form in shaping social-emotional skills, particularly through SpA, which appears to facilitate easier emotional selection and may carry stronger emotional connotations due to its frequency in everyday communication. These findings provide new insights into the socio-emotional implications of diglossia, revealing its impact beyond linguistic constraints. The study's results contribute to our understanding of how diglossia influences emotional development, with implications for both theoretical models of language-emotion interaction and pedagogical approaches in Arabic-speaking educational settings.