What is
happening to lughatunā
l-gamīla? RECENT media representations and social practice in Egypt
Gunvor
Mejdell
University of Oslo
In one of his later papers (Carter 2006),
Michael Carter traced the linguistic arguments and sources according to which
the early grammarians based their description and rules of the Arabic language,
and how with time this language came to be sanctified and given additional
authority by identifying it as the language of the Qurʾān. Carter
ends his article by addressing the challenges facing it, as the authority of
grammar and of grammarians to control the language of the community fades away,
and the ‘language of the people’, that is
the vernacular varieties, takes over the domains of the classical ʿArabiyya. This article presents
views and arguments found in Egyptian printed media over the past decade and
relates them to earlier studies on the language debate. Finally, it discusses
the extent to which these media representations reflect observed linguistic
practice and social processes at work in the Egyptian language community.
The respective status and roles of al-ʿArabiyya
and the spoken vernacular, ʿĀmmiyya,
has been an issue throughout the modern history of Egypt and of other
Arabic-speaking societies. Official language policies in Egypt, including those
of the Language Academy (Magmaʿ
al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya) and educational authorities, have had the full
functional restoration of al-ʿArabiyya
as their proclaimed goal. With the spread of education in the 1950s and
60s, optimism ran high that linguistic competence would improve among the
people, to the extent that al-ʿArabiyya
as the unified national language for the wider Arab nation would eventually
replace the divisive regional and local tongues at all or most levels of
communication. Voices calling for the recognition of the ‘language of the people’ and making it the basis
of national standard languages have been relatively few and far between.
The calls for tamṣīr al-lugha
(‘Egyptianizing the language’) argued for a more liberal language policy and for narrowing the gap between the
varieties, by allowing certain words and expressions from the everyday
vernacular speech to be used in writing, and simplifying the grammatical rules
of al-ʿArabiyya. However, apart
from a few well-known proponents of making al-ʿĀmmiyya
the national language, such as Tawfīq ʿAwwān, Lewis ʿAwaḍ,
and the radical Salāma Mūsā, who even supported the transition
from Arabic to Roman script, the Egyptian language reformists never intended
the codification and standardization of Egyptian Arabic (for accounts of the language
debate in Egypt, see Diem 1974, Hamzaoui 1975 Gershoni and Jankowski 1986,
Haeri 2003, Suleiman 2003, 2004). The use of this variety in literary works was
mainly restricted to political poetry and drama, as well as dialogue in fictional prose, in order to promote realism of portrayal
(cf. Somekh 1991, Mejdell 2006b).
While a certain
troubled concern for the well-being of al-ʿArabiyya
has long been expressed in the Egyptian language debate, a growing awareness
and frustration among intellectuals, educators, and the cultural and religious
establishment can be observed in the last ten to fifteen years, relating to what
are perceived as serious threats and challenges to the present and future
status of the language. The present paper will present samples of how this
awareness and concern is reflected in Egyptian printed media in this period
(based on a survey of newspaper articles/interviews/commentaries on linguistic
issues collected from the CEDEJ archives in
Cairo in 1997–8, 2001–2, and 2006–7). I shall relate the various views
and attitudes expressed in these samples to representations of linguistic
issues analysed in previous research, and finally discuss the extent to which they may be said to reflect and/or affect social
practice, that is to say, linguistic behaviour.
Eisele’s
model of ‘regimes of authority’ in linguistic issues[1]
In some stimulating
contributions, John Eisele outlines––in what is explicitly work in progress––a
model for ‘dealing with the culture-wide perception and representation of
Arabic’. This seeks to integrate ideological
positions and social relations in a theory of practice. It also approaches
discourse on language as social constructs (‘representations’), determined by
sociocultural and individual experience and socio-historical phenomena or
‘practices’ (Eisele 2003, 14). Eisele draws on Bourdieu’s theoretical concept
of ‘habitus’ – ‘a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in
certain ways […] generate practices,
perceptions and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously
co-ordinated or governed by any ‘rule’’ (Bourdieu 1991, Introduction), or in
other words, ‘a cultural system of expectations giving rise to recognizable
actions or practices’ (Eisele 2003, 14). In this framework, Eisele operates
with various ‘regimes of authority’ in discourse on language (including modern
‘European’ linguistics with its own sets of attitudes and expectations).[2]
In what he
refers to as ‘the dominant regime of authority’ on Arabic linguistic issues,
Eisele identifies four main themes or recurrent motifs (‘cultural tropes’),
which underlie the native tradition of written discourse, or narrative, of
Arabic (ibid., 51):
unity: of the Arabic language
and the cultural values it supports.
purity: the perfect state of
Arabic, which must be guarded from contamination by other sources.
continuity: its invincibility, its
depositing of the written tradition ‘in which inheres the most highly valued
features of the culture’.
competition: the state of conflict or
competition with other languages, formerly Persian and Turkish, more recently
French, and these days, above all, English.
Each motif, suggests Eisele, ‘represents the valorization of specific
cultural
aspects of Arabic while it stigmatizes others’ (Eisele 2002, 7). The obvious
candidates for stigmatization, which ‘disturb’ the unity, purity and continuity
of the language, are the vernacular varieties. They are viewed as representing linguistic (and sociocultural and
political) diversity instead of unity; they threaten the purity of
Arabic through their influence, or interference; they represent change and
innovation, as against the continuity of the
high language. Suleiman, referring to the conservative establishment as
the ‘language defenders’, argues that underlying their grave concern with
purity and correctness of al-ʿArabiyya
and their deprecation of the spoken dialects, is the assumption that these
varieties represent a state of decay and corruption that undermine the very
value system of Arabic culture (Suleiman 2004, 74–80).
Motifs
in the current debate
The valorization of the
unity, purity, and continuity of al-ʿArabiyya,
and the concern for the competition to which it is being exposed, are all
strongly represented in recent media coverage of language issues. An additional
(sub-)motif which is prominent in the data and which is related to the former
motifs (which are also interconnected and overlapping in discourse) is the uniqueness of Arabic: it is unique in
beauty, morally unique in the sense of being a revealed, God-given language,[3] and also unique as a historical entity
(linking to continuity), as in:
The
Arabic language has a status (makāna)
which no other language in the world comes close to having. This language was
able, throughout the ages, to stand firm (taṣmud)
in spite of the worst kind of trials (aswaʾ
al-miḥan) it was exposed to. It was under attack from other languages
in its own land, as it suffered from its people being alienated (tanakkur ahlihā) from expressing
themselves in it. No other language, however vital and widespread it might be,
could possibly withstand such events as the Arabic language did. (Al-Ahrām 6 June 1997).
Concerning the
linguistic qualities of al-ʿArabiyya,
Al-Ahrām (30 Nov 2007) quotes
the famous writer and critic al-ʿAqqād (d. 1964):
Applying
the measures of linguistics to the Arabic language, we find there is no other
language of greater perfection (ʿawfā)
when it comes to vocabulary and grammar. We have the right to consider it the
best of all languages even by just one measure, namely the human vocal
apparatus: The Arabic language uses this apparatus to its utmost.[4] (Al-Ahrām 30 November 2007).
Popular belief
in the special qualities of one’s national language is, of course, not specific
to Arab culture. This is amply demonstrated in J. Fishman’s book, In Praise of the Beloved Language. A
Comparative View of Positive Ethnolinguistic Consciousness (1997) – a
cross-language study of native language evaluation, where representations are
lofty and high-flown, indeed. Even in a comparative perspective, however,
Arabic discourse on language has a remarkably emotional touch, which also finds its way into academic writing on
Arabic: lughatunā l-jamīla, ʿArabiyyatunā hādhihi – its intimate ties with the
Arab persona is expressed with affectionate use of pronouns as verbal
manifestations of attachment and loyalty.
More as a
curiosity, let me mention that even a critically minded soul as Edward Said
lets himself be carried away by the unique qualities of the language:
[Classical
Arabic] emerges as a sonorous, carefully modulated, heightened and
extraordinarily inflected instrument capable of great, often (but not always)
formulaic eloquence. Properly used, it is unmatched for precision of expression
and for the amazing way in which individual letters within a word (but especially
at endings) are varied to say quite distinct and different things’. [C]lassical
Arabic, its rules, inflections, syntactical modes, and overpoweringly beautiful
richness seems to exist in a sort of abiding simultaneity of existence that is
quite unlike any other linguistic state that I know of’ (‘Living in Arabic’
posthumously printed in Al-Ahrām
Weekly 12 February 2004).
Defending
the beautiful language from external threat
In recent years, and most
notably in Egypt, concern has grown into an alarming awareness that the
beautiful language is in deep crisis, with media headlines typically calling
for people to stand up for ‘this language which is being exposed to evil
attacks from within and from without’ (hādhihi
al-lugha allatī tataʿarraḍ li-hajma sharisa min al-dākhil
wa-l-khārij).
The external
threat is perceived as coming from the pressures of globalisation (ʿawlama) imposing Western
political, economic and cultural hegemony. The notion of conflict, in the sense
of ‘competition’, is coached in strongly marked evaluative terms (rape, evil
forces etc.). ‘Our beautiful language is being raped in commercials, on shop
facades, in the streets, in schools and universities’, complains the Egyptian
opposition paper, Al-Shaʿb (1
November 1996)[5], and likens the present
situation to the darkest days of the British occupation. The centrality of al-ʿArabiyya for the Arab
construction of national identity is repeatedly evoked, e.g. ‘We must cling to al-ʿArabiyya to safeguard our
identity in the face of the pressures of globalization’ reads a typical
headline in Al-Ahrām (27 June
1997). To the writer Muḥammad Galāl, interviewed in Ṣawt al-Azhar (21 July 2006), al-ʿArabiyya is ‘the daughter of the people […] whose position
will be strong or weak depending on her family […] In times of hardship we
cannot expect too much of her’. Nowadays, however, there is a genuine awakening
in the Arab world, claims Galāl, which is ‘ready to stand against the evil forces which do not wish well for the Arab nation,
and want it to be even more fractured than it is’ (ibid.) But the Arab peoples
have learned to fight for their values, he says, and the real value of the nation is the Arabic language, which
will remain strong, because it is the language of the Qurʾān,
which protects its honour (sharaf).
There must be a common awareness that the honour of this nation is the Arabic language, and that the
nation must stand united to protect the honour of this Arabic language/daughter
(ibid.).
The
internal challenges
Equally important and
damaging, if not more, are the effects of internal neglect:
‘The
trials of the Arabic language began with the decline of nationalism’, claims a
member of the parliamentary Cultural Committee to Al-Usbūʿ (11 May 1998). The isolation and marginality of
the Language Academy is frequently addressed, as in the article found on the
cultural pages of Al-Wafd newspaper
(27 February 2001): There is no continuity between generations, as almost all
members are of old age, and nobody heeds their advice, anyway, complains dr. Ḥāmid
Ṭāhir. ‘Its current rigidity is turning it into a mausoleum’ says
dr. Ṣalāḥ Qanṣuwwa, while dr. al-Ṭāhir
Makkī criticizes the Academy for neglecting the media, thereby staying
aloof of the public (ibid). ‘Society blames it [the Academy], while nobody is
interested in its recommendations’. (Al-Jumhūriyya
11 May 2001).
‘The
Arabs have treated the Arabic language with contempt, and their cultural
weakness has doomed its future’, denounces al-Dustūr,
and continues: ‘the foreign languages are
strengthened thanks to the private schools and to the embassies who care
for their national languages. (al-Dustūr, 8 March 2006).
‘The
Arabic language is being fought by its own people, especially in Egypt’, says
Dr Muṣṭafā al-Shakʿa of the Council for Islamic Research
to al-Ahrām. ‘If the child does
not know the language of his family/nation (ahl),
he will grow up ignorant. We are not against teaching other languages, but we
demand that we only learn them after we know and understand the Arabic language
thoroughly’ (Al-Ahrām 30 November 2007). Also a recurrent blow to
national pride is the claim that ‘[w]hile the Jews have revived their dead
language, we are killing our living language’ (Al-Usbūʿ 11 May 1998).
The
explosion, in recent years, in the number of private schools (madāris al-lughāt), where all
subjects are taught in a foreign language (mostly English), and Arabic
constitutes a minor discipline, is commonly mentioned as having an alarming
effect on the competence in Arabic of young people of the middle class:[6] ‘The new generation does not know the rules of
grammar, but they do know ‘Very good’! (Rushdī Ṭaʿīmī
interviewed in Al-Dustūr 8 March
2006). He illustrates his point with the story of a student in college who
wanted to offer her professor a present, something he politely refused. She
looked at him in bewilderment and said (in ʿĀmmiyya):
‘But why, doctor – even the Prophet accepted cadeaux’. The daughter of a friend was asked by her father what she
had learned in the religion class at school that day: ‘the teacher told us
about our Lord Muḥammad, that he went to Abū Bakr al-Ṣaddīq
and asked him to accompany him on the hijra
to Medina. – Okey, yā Muḥammad,
said Abū Bakr’.
The effect of
this neglect, it is claimed, leads to al-ʿArabiyya
losing interest and prestige in society:
There
is a rush to use foreign languages, and it is considered a shame to speak them
[foreign languages] incorrectly – while the person who uses al-ʿArabiyya is made fun of, and
one takes pride in not pronouncing its sounds and expressions correctly’ (Al-Ahrām 13 June 97).
The ever-increasing
spread of ʿĀmmiyya, young
people’s ‘strange talk’, as well as the influx of foreign languages into al-ʿArabiyya, has even affected the
well educated, ‘who seem to think that adding foreign terminology to their
speech is a new way to earn people’s respect and to appear distinguished’ (Sawṭ al-Azhar, 1 September 2006).
The
decline in educational standards and the influence of ʿĀmmiyya
The general crisis of
education (azmat al-niẓām
al-taʿlīmī) as part of the crisis in Egyptian society is
commonly mentioned as one of the main reasons for the slide in language
competence. More specifically, low standards of teaching Arabic grammar (azmat al-dars al-naḥwī), with
the conservatism and rigidity of the Arabic teaching tradition is also frequently
blamed. The lack of competence of Arabic teachers is considered both a result
of and a reason for their low standing in society. The Arabic teacher has
become an object of ridicule (Al-Dustūr).
‘Al-ʿĀmmiyya threatens to wipe
out the Arabs’ reads a headline in the literary weekly Akhbār al-Adab (19 March 2006), and follows up:
A
national obligation (wājib
qawmī wa-waṭanī) calls upon us to stand up against this conspiracy. [T]here is no difference of
opinion with regard to the existence of a far-reaching struggle between ʿĀmmiyya and Fuṣḥā in various domains
of everyday life. We can observe it in our schools, universities and the media
– arenas where we should protect and defend al-Fuṣḥā
– because ʿĀmmiyya is
an illness which has become more serious among the Arabs’.
The stigmatization
of ʿĀmmiyya, however,
appears to be less prominent in the recent media debate than what has been
observed and reported in earlier years. The discourse in general is less
polarizing, and ʿĀmmiyya is
more often presented as a natural fact of any language – sometimes normalized
by referring to French argot (which
is not quite appropriate). A typical non-antagonizing example is represented by
Dr ʿAbd al-ʿĀṭī Kaywān from the Faculty of
Education, Fayyūm branch of Cairo University, who writes the following
about the relationship of ʿĀmmiyya
to Fuṣḥā:
While
ʿĀmmiyya is the core of
speech (kalām) in the language
of everyday conversation, it should be noted that ʿĀmmiyya is derived from Fuṣḥā in both its uttered and written forms, with
some simple transformations that imposed itself on many words. This is not said
in defence of ʿĀmmiyya or
belittling of Fuṣḥā,
nor [can it be said that] ʿĀmmiyya
is evidence of the weakness of the Arabic language or its lack of significance
among people. That will never happen, because, while we speak in ʿĀmmiyya, we write in Fuṣḥā. This has been
characteristic of the Arabic language since its early beginnings’ (Al-Ahrām 27 Nov
2001).
A
new source of corruption: lughat
al-shabāb
Whereas ʿĀmmiyya, the spoken language
of the people, is mostly absolved for its corrupting influence, a common topic
in earlier years, the attention increasingly is focused on really ‘bad’
language: ‘our Arabic language has drowned in the sea of street/vulgar
language. Commercials, television series and songs all work to spread such
speech’ says a headline (Al-Akhbār
23 August 2002). And in the last few years a new source of corruption is
captured by the commentators: ‘the young destroy our beautiful language!’ (al-shabāb yudammir lughatanā
al-gamīla) cries a headline in Al-Masāʾiyya (8 August 2006) –
referring to the uses of shortened and mixed codes on SMS texts and chat, as
well as a new jargon[7] spreading among urban youth: ‘they create a
new language in their conversations on the net and the mobile, they have
exchanged words of the Arabic language with letters and numbers written in
Latin script’. But conservative professor, ʿAbd al-Ṣabbūr
Shāhīn, of Dār al-ʿUlūm
College takes it calmly: ‘Al-lugha al-ʿArabiyya
al-Fuṣḥā will not be influenced by any revolt or
violation, whereas the dialects change in successive generations’. For some,
the linguistic decline reflects a general decline in behaviour among the new
generation, a lack of respect for their Arab culture and tradition. For others,
more sympathetic to the situation of young people, it is a way to express
feelings in shorthand (ikhtizāl
al-mashāʿir) in a tough world with a broadened social gap between
the elite from the foreign language schools and the children of modest families
from government schools. According to psychologist Shihāta Zayyād,
‘to invent a new language is something
normal, al-lugha al-ʿĀmmiyya
absorbs all that is new’. He stresses that this is not a psychological
illness, but rather, ‘a willed and conscious denial (rafḍ) from the young generation of what is happening around
them in society, and which they in the present situation have no possibility to
change […] the individual’s act of protest against oppression, trying by all
means to escape his uneasiness and to create a code of mutual understanding
among his peers, who just like him suffer from unemployment and the economic
situation in the country’ (ibid.).
Promoting
the status of ʿĀmmiyya
Discourse which openly
challenges the ‘dominant regime of authority’ and promotes the status of ʿĀmmiyya, is still rarely
found in the media. In the roundtable organized and reported by Al-Ahrām
(20 June 1997) , Fatḥī Imbābī asks: ‘what is a standard
language (lugha miʿyāriyya)’
and questions the functionality of Classical Arabic (al-ʿArabiyya al-klāsikiyya). He suggests that the
grammatical structures be ‘liberated’ and ‘revised on the basis of the language
used by the Egyptians, the Egyptian language’.[8] Here he is abruptly interrupted by the
moderator: ‘I do not want to go on with this. What you are saying implies that
there is an Egyptian nation (waṭan) and an Egyptian language.
This is not acceptable. We are part of an Arab nation (umma) and we speak the Arabic language.
This language is basic in upholding a national identity (hūwiyya qawmiyya)’.
Apart from
this, open support for ʿĀmmiyya
was expressed in two recent articles, both in the weekly al-Qāhira. In the first, from 11 September 2007, the case for
the language of the people is coached in an unmistakably radical discourse as
in the headlines: ‘diglossia is a strong expression of class division in the
Arab societies’ (al-izdiwāj
al-lughawī bayna Fuṣḥā wa-ʿĀmmiyya yuʿabbir
bi-quwwa ʿan al-inqisām al-ṭabaqī fī-l-mujtamaʿāt
al-ʿArabiyya), and ‘[t]ime has come for the oppressed popular
culture/cultural expressions (al-thaqafāt
al-shaʿbiyya al-maẓlūma) to start moving’. The text
continues:
The
languages (lughāt) which were
oppressed (qumiʿat) so that they
should not carry out the act of writing, such as the Egyptian vernacular (ʿĀmmiyya), found refuge in the
oral arts. The oppression (ẓulm)
which is linked to popular culture goes back to that evil dichotomy which
divides humanity into masters and slaves.
Then the
argument is taken one step further:
We
can understand how Egypt as well as Tunisia, both anthropologically distinguished
from the the Semitic Arabs, came to be culturally Arab, at least relatively, due to the long linguistic and
religious contacts, and finally also politically, standing together in one camp
(for a certain period), namely in the struggle against modern and contemporary
Western colonialism. The central issue in this is the following: is it possible
to consider the Arabic language (al-lugha
al-ʿArabiyya), which was imposed on Egypt under the reign of ʿAbd
al-Malik ibn Marwān in the hijra year 87 and which was officially
elected for Tunisia in 1974 as the first language of these two peoples––the
mother tongue––lisān al-ʾumm?
Certainly not.
The mother
tongue issue is raised more acutely in the next article, signed Fatḥī
Sayyid Farag, under the headline: ‘The Egyptians are in constant trouble
because they learn a language which is not their national language (laysat lughatahum al-qawmiyya)’ (30 October
2007). The journalist emphatically refers to al-ʿArabiyya as not being al-lugha
al-ʾumm or lughat al-ʾumm,
thus challenging the established notion of al-ʿArabiyya
as ‘mother tongue’ In this, the writer is in line with modern Western
practice, where the notion ‘mother tongue’ is applied to the primary and
psychologically most entrenched linguistic variety of the individual – and thus
not appropriately applied to al-ʿArabiyya,
being a secondary variety. (On the other hand, it might in fact make sense to
call al-ʿArabiyya a ‘national
language’, especially as the use of qawmiyya
normally refers to Pan-Arab nationalism.)
In this
article, furthermore, we encounter the strong and rather unusual (in the
Egyptian context) claim that the Egyptian ʿĀmmiyya
is an independent language with no
connection to al-ʿArabiyya (wa-lakinnahā fī-l-ḥaqīqa lugha mustaqilla lā ʿalāqa lahā
bi-l-lugha al-ʿArabiyya’), only interspersed with some Arabic words.
The article cites Bayūmī Qindīl to the effect that modern
Egyptian has Hamitic origin (dhāt aṣl
ḥāmī), being a continuation of the forms of the ancient
Egyptian languages (imtidād li-ḥurūf
al-lughāt al-miṣriyya al-qadīma), thus it is not Semitic
and Phoenician like al-ʿArabiyya
(here) is said to have. Among the many specific features of modern Egyptian, he
mentions that the Egyptian language ‘has made an enormous step’ by dropping
declension of the relative marker. It also
hails the Egyptian language for having ‘relieved itself of heavy
consonants (ḥurūf thaqīla)
which need muscular efforts in producing them, passing the lower back parts of
the vocal organ’ (ibid.) Here, the writer is
actually referring to loss of medial hamza
and monophthongization of diphthongs.
While the features mentioned in the article as specific to Egyptian (as
opposed to al-ʿArabiyya) are common
to most modern Arabic dialects, and do not reflect Hamitic origin, the thrust
of the article is of course to emphasize the distance between the varieties.
The article ends with denouncing those who defend the present ‘diglossic’
situation and neglect its harmful effects.
Urgent
appeal
Over the last few years,
the texts in support of preserving the beautiful language convey, if anything,
an even more desperate urgency, together with a sense of disillusionment, as
this interview with Ramaḍān Abū Ismāʿīl
illustrates:
There
have been many initiatives and declarations the last years from various
official and non-official institutions calling for raising Arab awareness/consciousness
concerning the situation of the Arabic language – this language which God
honoured by making it the language of the Qurʾān. Some years ago the Lisān al-ʿArab Society [funded
by ALESCO] announced that the year 2004 should be the year of celebration of
the language and of finding ways to raise its status and meet the numerous
challenges facing it, internal as well as external. And there were, in fact,
organized seminars and conferences about this, but to no avail’ (Ṣawt al-ʾAzhar 21 July 2006).
He goes on to
say that the year 2006 was similarly proclaimed ‘year of al-ʿArabiyya’: again seminars and conferences are organized,
statements and recommendations are issued –
and thrown into the ‘basket of neglect’. The decision-makers (aṣḥāb al-qarār),
pay no attention to them, ‘while the other nations are about to achieve their
fundamental goal: a gap separating our young generation from its Qurʾān and its cultural
heritage’.
Akhbār
al-adab
(19 March 2006) quotes from an article by Islamist writer Fahmī
Huwaydī deploring the current situation:
The
degree of neglect which has befallen the Arabic language in the Arab world is a
catastrophe. The first year students of al-Azhar are obliged to learn French,
while France prohibits the teaching of any foreign language in this early
phase.
Acknowledging
the alarming proportions (tafāqum)
of the problem he writes: ‘Time has come to raise our voices loud to call for
people to get to know the language (lisān)
of the Arabs’. For several years, he says, he has championed the case of the
language of the Qurʾān
in the Islamic states in Asia and Africa […] ‘but with bitterness we must admit
that it has been defeated in its own countries’. He points to Mauritania, which
he claims has ceased teaching al-ʿArabiyya
in its schools, though the country used to be one of the strongholds of the
language. He deplores the situation in North Africa, where political leaders
are more comfortable in French than in Arabic. In the Gulf area, Urdu
establishes itself as a second language, while English has becomes the language
of education, and Arabic is becoming marginalized. Finally, concerning Egypt,
he claims that, ‘it is indeed very sad that in the largest Arab country the
learning of foreign languages has become a national goal and that in many
milieus gibberish language (al-raṭāna)
is totally acceptable’.
The new
interest in the West in recent years for learning Arabic gives rise to bitter
irony, as in these headlines: ‘The language of al-Qurʾān – its
enemies are learning it, while its people is neglecting it’, and: ‘We, sons of
the Arabic language, are killing this language’ (Al-Ahrām 30 November 2007). In his commentary ‘Thanks to
terrorism’ (shukran lil-ʾirhāb)
Egyptian author Yūsuf al-Qaʿīd observes the proliferation in
Cairo of courses and schools teaching Arabic to foreigners; he sarcastically dismisses
that the impetus for this interest would be respect for Arab people or culture,
or even the strength of the area’s political and economic weight in the world.
It is ‘thanks to the terrorist attacks, that the rest of world flock to learn
the language of the enemy, and through the language know their ways of
thinking, as in the slogan: Know your enemy!’ Ironically, writes al-Qaʿīd,
this upsurge of interest in al-ʿArabiyya
from outsiders ‘coincides with a dramatic decline for the ʿArabiyya from its own people and speakers – to the extent
that there is a situation of alienation concerning the language among its
people’ (Al-Muṣawwar 31 March
2006).
I give the last
word to the president of the Language Academy, Maḥmūd Ḥāfiẓ,
who deeply deplores ‘the people’s insistence on using ʿĀmmiyya [which] hastens the process of deterioration and
decline [of al-ʿArabiyya]’ (Al-Ahrām 30 November 2007).
Representations
of language and social practice
What is reflected in these
representations is a sense of total collapse of the status and functions of al-ʿArabiyya. While representations
do not necessarily reflect the full truth of social reality (or practice), the
ideologies, perceptions, and attitudes they reflect are part of a process and contribute
to shaping reality. They are a sign that educated Egyptians are aware of an
approaching doomsday for the beautiful language – and that they feel they are
not able to avert it. A minority welcomes the current development and sees it
as an opportunity for the language and culture of the people to gain status and
recognition. Most people – especially among the new generation (some estimates
claim that some fifty per cent of the population are under the age of
twenty-four) – apparently do not care very much. Some may see their future
interest linked to competence in English rather than al-ʿArabiyya, while ʿĀmmiyya
takes care of the functions of their everyday lives. We may assume that for
most young Egyptians these days their lives
are overshadowed by crises looming larger and more acutely than issues
of language and identity.
Why do
Egyptians ‘insist on using ʿĀmmiyya’
when they should use al-ʿArabiyya
according to the dominant language authority? Modern sociolinguistics and
social network theory hold that language practice and linguistic change in a
language community is overwhelmingly related to social status of speakers and
the prestige of actual, living role models. In her influential work on language
norms and practice, Renate Bartsch claims that:
[N]orms
[of language] are the constellations in social reality that create, delimit and secure the notions of correctness. These
norms consist of relationships between people, in which it is determined
what the models or standards which have to be followed are, who have to follow
which models, who provide models, and who enforces, if necessary, adherence to
the models (Bartsch 1987, 70).
It is not
necessarily the norm with the highest official prestige, as al-ʿArabiyya unquestionably still
has, which serves as models for people. Interesting evidence for the existence
of competing forms of prestige, i.e. competing norms for linguistic practice,
and in an Arabic setting, is provided by Ibrahim (1986): local Jordanian women
in a village setting were observed in the process of linguistic change; a
change not in direction of the
standard language, however, but towards linguistic norms set by urban women,
even when it involved a change away from features that were shared by their
local dialect and al-ʿArabiyya.
The social status of urban women, with their more modern and sophisticated ways
in the eyes of the female villagers, proved stronger than the status of whoever
were the practitioners of al-ʿArabiyya, e.g. school teachers and
imams (and naturally of the locals), and––so the argument goes––made them role
models for imitation.
The role models
for the early grammarians are reported to be the native speakers of the desert,
possibly only some of them, ‘on whose language use one could rely’: ʿarabiyyan mawthūqan bi-ʿArabiyyatihi,
samiʿnā man yūthaqu bi-ʿarabiyyatihi yaqūlu
(Sībawaihi, in Levin 1994, 207), or ‘whose Arabic is acceptable’: fī lughat man turtaḍā ʿArabiyyatuhu
(ibid., 209). The medieval cultural elite, including the grammarians, may be
assumed to have been models of correct usage among themselves and to their
students. As Carter (1983, 66) suggests, ‘as the inevitable preliminary to all
educated discourse, a knowledge of grammar was usually taken for granted’.
Carter here, twenty-five years ago, cites J.-P. Charney as to the functional
role of language ‘as a system of reference to certain values […] permitting
each individual to ‘test’, to verify and affirm his belonging to the group’
(ibid.).
In contemporary
Egyptian society, there are hardly any influential models motivating the oral
use of al-ʿArabiyya. Popular
culture, movies and songs are since long
performed in ʿĀmmiyya. The
most popular Islamic preacher among young and old in Egypt, is ʿAmr
Khālid, whose live and recorded performances are mainly in ʿĀmmiyya, interspersed with a
few Quranic verses. And for those who aspire for a better life economically,
their role models will be businessmen and entertainers, who have little regard
for the beautiful language.
My own research
(Mejdell 2006) has demonstrated that even highly educated Egyptian academics
with a high level of linguistic competence, when talking to an audience on
cultural and social matters, prefer strategies of code-switching and mixing of
varieties, to regular standard Arabic, not only for reasons of ease, but also
because a less formal way of speaking reflects on them as modern and
liberal-minded, but still cultivated people, and in addition makes
communication with the audience more direct.
As elsewhere in
the world, the domains of traditional ‘high’ culture and literature are under
some pressure, and ‘lighter’ genres are entering into competition. The Egyptian
linguist, Madiha Doss, gives evidence of how ʿĀmmiyya is increasingly used––in some works
exclusively––in both literary and non-literary writing, (Doss 2004). The
younger generation employ the vernacular (and other languages) in blogs and
other web productions.[9] And in Autumn of 2006, the Egyptian satellite
channel OTV challenged another bastion of al-ʿArabiyya,
when it started broadcasting its news bulletins in ʿĀmmiyya.[10]
Not only in
Egypt, but in many regions of the Arab world, changes apparently are under way. A competent Western observer recently reports:
During my visits to Morocco in the
last few years I have noticed a development in this country that has interested
me for many years: there is a growing use of the Moroccan Arabic dialect (the
local low variety) for written purposes. My visits to Syria, Lebanon and Egypt
were intended to compare the situation in these countries with the situation in
Morocco. And indeed, I noticed that a similar development is taking place in
Lebanon, that in Syria this development seems to be at an initial stage, and
that Egypt is far ahead of the other countries mentioned (Professor Jan
Hoogland, NVIC Newsletter, November
2008).
As for the Maghrib, the research of Dominique
Caubet (INALCO, Paris) documents the flourishing of young––and not so
young––artists, musicians and playwrights using the vernacular as medium, In
Morocco, a weekly magazine, Khbar Bladna,
appeared in 2002 using the dārija
(the colloquial), written in Arabic script. Its 6,000 copies were distributed
free of charge across Morocco. In 2005, in the Rabat/Salé area, another journal
in the colloquial, Al-Amal, was
launched, this time regional in scope and content, and with social welfare and
objectives. Supported by the director of the regional Institute for Information
and Communication, Al-Amal apparently
became an instant success, with demands for similar initiatives elsewhere. (www.jeunemaroc.com, published 13 June
2006, accessed 18 December 2008).
Khbar Bladna later expanded to become a
publishing house and set up a new literary price, Bladi Bladna, in order to encourage dārija prose literature. It was the writer Youssouf Amine
Elalamy who reportedly published the first novel in this variety, in February
2006 (ibid.)
There is no
doubt that al-ʿArabiyya holds
the fort as the absolutely dominant variety for writing Arabic, so these
vernacular trends are at least not yet in a position to dethrone the beautiful
language. From various sources one can observe a certain optimism concerning a
revitalisation of al-ʿArabiyya
as a spoken medium – and thus a strengthened linguistic unification of the Arab
peoples, through the new satellite channels broadcasting all over the Arab
world. Most observers assume, however, that the language form of these channels
represent some kind of standard variety. My impression is that these new media
– beyond the control of state censorship, riqāba,
also represent a freedom of expression beyond the control of the linguistic riqāba. A web comment on the Arabic
satellite news coverage of the Iraq invasion, included the following remark:
The
quick war tempo and difficulty of prior preparation revealed incredible
weakness in Arabic language mastery on the part of correspondents, some TV
announcers and presenters. The best was Al-Jazeera, followed by Abu Dhabi, in
terms of verbal and structural mastery of language. This served also to reveal
the poor language of Gulf officials, who made basic mistakes in grammar (the
Saudi foreign minister persisted on screen in making the word ḥarb
(‘war’) masculine rather than feminine.[11]
If these
well-established and well-funded channels have problems with linguistic
correctness, what can one expect from channels with lesser resources and
perhaps less access to highly educated professionals and dignitaries? This may
represent a challenge to the beautiful language – but only to its strict unity
and perfect purity. It promises vitality – if only one accepts the range of variability which its speakers and writers already
make use of. In this final comment, I reveal my own preferences, of course,
which (as Eisele reminds us) is part of a predominant, but not exclusive,
European regime which values vitality, variation and change over unity, purity
and continuity.
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Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 11–22.
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Egypt’ in Abdelrahman, Maha et al. (eds.), Cultural
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Muhammad H. 1986. ‘Standard and Prestige Language: A Problem in Arabic
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E. Joseph. 1989. ‘Popular and Scientific Beliefs about Language Status: An
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[1] Drawing particularly on Eisele’s work, ‘Myth,
Values, and Practice in the Representation of Arabic’ in International Journal of the Sociology of Language 163 (2003),
43–59.
[2] Tracing the changing views on grammar and
language in the frame of European cultural history, John E. Joseph (1989)
convincingly seeks to establish how ‘both popular and scientific beliefs and
attitudes about language status are consistent within the broader belief
systems of which they are a part’ (1989, 254).
[3] Asked whether he considers Arabic a sacred
language, professor Ṭaʿīmī comments that in the context of
a religious text it is, but when used by a communist to attack the faith, it
still is Arabic, but not sacred... (Al-Dustūr,
8 March 2006)
[4] Eisele has analysed al-ʿAqqād’s
views on language in one of his contributions, and mentions this point. Its
occurrence in 2007 shows the continuity of the notion!
[5] Here taken from the English language weekly Al-Ahrām weekly 21 October 1999.
[6] Apparently, most families who can afford
it––and many sacrifice a lot to be able to––have their children go to these
schools, because of the wretched condition of government schools, including
those who worry about the decline of Arabic due to the proliferation of private
language schools.
[7] A guide to young people’s slang (al-rawshana) can be found on http://fowatown.jeeran.com/1.html
(accessed 11 September 2008).
[8] For more on Fatḥī
Imbābī’s position as well as some other radical contributions, cf.
Mejdell 2006, 23–4.
[9] A pilot survey of ‘online communication’ in
Cairo (Warschauer et al. 2007), showed that English and Egyptian Arabic (roman,
but also arabic script) were by far most commonly used in email and online
chat. The use of romanized Egyptian Arabic is rightly said to represent ‘a
major expansion of its written use’.
[10] A most interesting study of this channel,
‘which explicitly addresses a young audience’, and of the processes behind its
news bulletin is Doss (forthcoming).
[11] Abbas al-Tonsi,
http://www.tbsjournal.com/Archives/Spring03/tonsi.html