As Ferguson (1959) argued that Arabic language is one of the fewest languages that suffer from the issue of diglossia, in which a Low variety Ammiya and High variety Fusha of Arabic used and coexist together. Although the artificial harmonious relationship between the two varieties, these varieties are almost rivals: currently, low variety Ammiya is trying to take over the fields traditionally and previously dominated by Fusha such as religious speeches, media talks, literary works (e.g., poetry, short stories, etc). This conflict is highly evident when teaching Arabic as a foreign or second language where both teachers and students get puzzled and confused easily of what dialect to teach: in what context a specific variety is appropriate and when it is suitable to be used. It was suggested teachers may teach one variety only, two varieties simultaneously, or the middle variety which does not have a solid foundation of what it really is (Al-Batal 1992).Despite these differences argued by researchers; to date, there is not any systematic approach used to study big data to distinguish between the two varieties or examine how low variety is different from high variety in terms of vocabulary, grammar, etc. With the use of digital humanities, the current proposal tries to answer the following questions:
How far is the difference between Egyptian dialect (low variety) and Fusha (high variety) in terms of verbs, nouns, negation as represented in the poems of Abdelrahman Alabnoudi?