European Journal of Social Sciences – Volume 12, Number 3 (2010) 397 Future Markers in Modern Standard Arabic and Jordanian Arabic: A Contrastive Study Emad Al-Saidat Al-Hussein Bin Talal University E-mail: dresaidat@gmail.com Islam Al-Momani Al-Hussein Bin Talal University E-mail: almomani_islam@yahoo.com Abstract This paper aims at finding the differences between MSA and JA in the area of future. It focuses on the forms and uses of these markers. It is found that MSA future markers are not used in JA; instead, a number of different markers are used to express different speakers’ attitudes towards the future activity. Moreover, MSA markers are not inflected while some of JA future markers are inflected for person, number and gender. It is found in this paper that differences between the two varieties of Arabic do exist but still they are two dialects of the same language, Arabic, and cannot be considered as two different languages because of some religious and political reasons. 1. Introduction Arabic is one of the world major languages. It is usually divided into three main forms, namely, Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Arabic. Classical Arabic is the language of the pre-Islamic period (al-jaheliyyah) and the language found in the Quran and the post Islamic period. It is considered to be the most prestigious form of Arabic for all our modern writers in the sense that they try to follow the syntactic and the grammatical norms put down by classical grammarians such as Sibawaih (1966) and others. It is the mother tongue of nobody. It is not considered as a dead language because of its religious importance. Modern Standard Arabic is derived from CA. In the present Arab World, it is the language of literature, media, education, work places, formal speech, etc. When there is no mutual intelligibility between people of different dialects, MSA is used as the only means of communication. Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken varieties of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which differs radically from the literary language. It includes a number of national and regional varieties that constitute the everyday spoken language. These varieties are different enough to be mutually unintelligible, for instance, it is difficult for a Jordanian Arabic speaker to understand a speaker of Moroccan Arabic and vice versa. The question of similarity between Arabic dialects and MSA is frequently asked, but there is no definite answer since most speakers of any dialect believe that their own dialect is the nearest one to MSA. Because of such variability in the answers, the importance of investigating the matter stems for researchers to find out the similarities and differences either between the dialects themselves or between a dialect and MSA. The literature is rich in studies that investigate the different linguistic features of Arabic dialects as well as making different comparisons either between Arabic dialects or between Arabic and other languages. In this respect, the future markers in MSA and JA is a striking area deserve real attention. It has received little attention in literature.