Language Attitudes and the Prestige of Arabic Among Educated Muslims in Enugu and Anambra States

The prestige of Arabic as a religious and scholarly language in southeastern Nigerian Muslim communities, where Islam is a minority religion in an overwhelmingly Igbo Christian society, creates a distinctive sociolinguistic dynamic in which attitudes towards Arabic are shaped by intersecting religious identity, educational background, and inter-community social positioning. This study investigates Arabic language attitudes and prestige perceptions among educated Muslims in Enugu and Anambra States, using a matched guise technique and attitudinal survey to measure affective, cognitive, and behavioural dimensions of Arabic prestige in this geopolitical context. The matched guise study presents 200 educated Muslim participants in both states with audio recordings of Arabic, English, and Igbo speech samples, rating speakers on personality and academic attributes to elicit covert prestige evaluations. The direct attitude survey captures explicit beliefs about Arabic's value and importance. Structural equation modelling is used to model the relationships between demographic variables, covert prestige ratings, explicit attitudes, and self-reported Arabic learning behaviour. The study finds that Arabic commands high symbolic prestige among educated southeastern Nigerian Muslims but that this prestige does not translate strongly into active language learning effort, reflecting the limited instrumental value of Arabic in the predominantly English-medium professional environment of the region. Keywords: Language prestige, Arabic attitudes, southeastern Nigeria, matched guise, Muslim identity.