Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5
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Today I went to a shop in a nearby mall. I heard two people who worked there speaking a language that sounded a bit like Arabic, but was softer and different enough that I could tell it wasn't really Arabic — al-ʻArabīyah al-Fuṣḥā (العربية الفصحى) ("eloquent Arabic").
They were a young woman in her early 20s and a man who was probably in his late 20s or early 30s. The woman was Moroccan and the man Algerian.
I asked them what language they were speaking and the man said he was speaking Arabic. The woman declared, "I would never say that I speak Arabic. I don't understand people who speak Arabic and they don't understand me. I am half Berber and I speak a Berber tribal language." The man, who had honey blond hair and blue eyes, chided her and said, "You do speak Arabic." She replied, "Never!"
She was quite adamant about not speaking Arabic, and I wanted to find out why, but we were in a shop with other customers, and the Moroccan woman and Algerian man had work to do, so it wasn't convenient for me to pursue the matter further.
MSA [VHM: Modern Standard Arabic] is loosely uniform across the Middle East as it is based on the convention of Arabic speakers rather than being a regulated language which rules are followed (that is despite the number of academies regulating Arabic). It can be thought of as being in a continuum between CA ([VHM: Classical Arabic] the regulated language described in grammar books) and the spoken vernaculars while leaning much more to CA in its written form than its spoken form.[citation needed]
Regional variations exist due to influence from the spoken vernaculars. TV hosts who read prepared MSA scripts, for example in Al Jazeera, are ordered to give up national or ethnic pronunciations by changing their pronunciation of certain phonemes (e.g. the realization of the Classical jīm ج as [ɡ] by Egyptians), though other traits may show the speaker's region, such as the stress and the exact value of vowels and the pronunciation of other consonants. People who speak MSA also mix vernacular and Classical in pronunciation, words, and grammatical forms. Classical/vernacular mixing in formal writing can also be found (e.g., in some Egyptian newspaper editorials); others are written in Modern Standard/vernacular mixing, including entertainment news.
(source)
The situation in China, where there is a strong central government that can enforce uniformity and squeeze the topolects out of existence, is very different. The authorities in China can tell people that there is only one correct written Sinitic language and even only one correct spoken language, and that is Modern Standard Mandarin. In China, it is wrong to write or speak other types of Sinitic. So far as I understand, in the Arabic world, it is "permitted" to write in the separate regional vernaculars. The difference is very much a matter of politics. In the Arabic world, while there is only one holy scripture, the Quran, sharp schisms separate the believers, and politics are deeply divisive. All of this plays out differently in people's perceptions of language and ethnicity.
Selected readings
- "Arabic and the vernaculars" (3/6/22)
- "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 2" (3/8/22)
- "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 3" (3/9/22)
- "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 4 — the case of Bible translations" (3/10/22)
cliff arroyo said,
August 20, 2022 @ 10:12 am
""You do speak Arabic." She replied, "Never!""
My assumption would be that for him, both MSA and all the spoken topolects are the same language while her definition of Arabic is more restricted to MSA while speaking Moroccan topolect (Maghrebi topolects are often referred to as derja/darija) is not MSA so not Arabic.
Just a guess.
Ben Zimmer said,
August 20, 2022 @ 10:57 am
The literature on "diglossic" language ideologies of Arabic is full of examples of how the vernacular varieties (العامية al-ʿāmmiyya) are subject to various types of erasure on a scale from "not correct Arabic" to "not Arabic" to "not even language at all." See e.g. Kristen Brustad's "Diglossia as Ideology" in The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World: Writing Change, Jacob Høigilt and Gunvor Mejdell, ed., Brill, 2017.
David Marjanović said,
August 20, 2022 @ 1:08 pm
Often claimed to have "no rules", i.e. a grammar markedly different from Fuṣḥā.
Mark Liberman said,
August 20, 2022 @ 1:32 pm
Contemporary Arabic "colloquials" are approximately as different from one another as the various Romance languages are — having diverged from the original form, sociolinguistically and geographically, at just about the same time as the descendants of Latin did.
Obviously the ideology is radically different — it's as if the official view were that Latin is the only correct language, while French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc. are just the lawless and errorful result of inadequate education.
See Mohamed Maamouri, "Language education and human development: Arabic diglossia and its impact on the quality of education in the Arab region.", 1988. Also Mohamed Maamouri et al., "Dialectal Arabic Orthography-based Transcription & CTS Levantine Arabic Collection", COLING 2004; Dave Graff et al., "Lexicon Development for Varieties of Spoken Colloquial Arabic", LREC 2006; and Mohamed Maamouri, Georgetown Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic, and Georgetown Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic.
Chris Button said,
August 20, 2022 @ 2:29 pm
In particular, Tashelhit (a Northern Berber language) seems to attract a lot of interest from linguists around what constitutes a syllable.
Philip Taylor said,
August 20, 2022 @ 2:32 pm
« Obviously the ideology is radically different — it's as if the official view were that Latin is the only correct language, while French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc. are just the lawless and errorful result of inadequate education. »
Perhaps not Latin, but rather Hebrew or Aramaic. Is it not the case that the primary reason why "contemporary Arabic 'colloquials'" are looked down upon is that they deviate from the language used in the Qu'ran, which is regarded as God-given and therefore immutable ?
Levantine said,
August 20, 2022 @ 3:06 pm
I’m a little confused, because it seems from her reply that they were speaking a Berber language rather than any variety of Arabic, though her companion was insisting otherwise.
cliff arroyo said,
August 20, 2022 @ 5:00 pm
"it seems from her reply that they were speaking a Berber language rather than any variety of Arabic"
I think it's more likely they were speaking different versions of Maghrebi Arabic which he regarded as being "Arabic" and she didn't.
IME while Arabic speakers praise fusha to the skies…. they go out of their way to not speak it, strongly preferring to communicate across the barriers of the various topolects than risk the thorny landscape of MSA….
M. said,
August 20, 2022 @ 5:53 pm
@Philip Taylor: Could you please make your comment clearer and expatiate on it:
« Obviously the ideology is radically different — it's as if the official view were that Latin is the only correct language, while French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc. are just the lawless and errorful result of inadequate education. »
Perhaps not Latin, but rather Hebrew or Aramaic.
===
if we replace "Latin" by "Hebrew or Aramaic" in the foregoing quotation, by what is "French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc." to be replaced?
martin schwartz said,
August 20, 2022 @ 6:00 pm
We must keep in mind how Imazighen and other Berbers, tho they
speak Maghrebi Arabic, feel oppressed by other Arabic speakers,
who have prohibited education and much more in Berber.
To stories from Berkeley, which has many ArabophoneAlgerian Berbers, some of my acquaintance. Long ago I naively asked several of them if they knew my local Tunisian colleague, a scholar of Arabic literature. One of them asked, "In what language does he write?". I said, "Well, English, Arabic…" and was immediately
answered. "We don't know him". The preferred answer would have been, "English, French". Once I overhear a blonde woman on her mobile phone speaking Berber? Arabic? I follow her discreetly for a while: Yes, Berber, then Arabic, then French, then Berber, then Arabic. etc. etc. So, was the reported "soft" part Berber,
alternating with Maghrebi Arabic? Did the man answer "Arabic"
out of expedience and/or partial honesty, or were they indeed
speaking Maghrebi Arabic and the socio-politico-lingusitic
complexities of Maghrebi vs. Standard/puristic Arabic vs. Berber
(dialects) kicking in?
Martin Schwartz
Benjamin Geer said,
August 20, 2022 @ 7:10 pm
“TV hosts who read prepared MSA scripts, for example in Al Jazeera, are ordered to give up national or ethnic pronunciations by changing their pronunciation of certain phonemes (e.g. the realization of the Classical jīm ج as [ɡ] by Egyptians)”
In Egyptian news broadcasts it’s the opposite, they use the [ɡ].
Tom Dawkes said,
August 21, 2022 @ 3:02 pm
ON MSA and local vernaculars, Clive Holes, in "Modern Arabic : structures, functions and varieties"[Longman; 1995, pp.382-383], gives this anecdote:
"In September 1986, at the opening of the new Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, I witnessed an American university teacher give a fluent, idiomatic fifteen-minute presentation in Damascene Arabic on the organization of English courses in the University Language Center to a group of about 600 Omani freshmen who would be taking these courses. He was obliged to do this because the standard of their English was too low for them ot understand a presentation in English, and he did not feel confident enough of his spoken command of H (.i.e.MSA]. The audience reaction was a mixture of amusement and delight: amusement at the incongruity of an American giving a speech in a Syrian dialect to a group of Omans, and delight at hearing a foreigner able to perform with this level of competence in any kind of Arabic, L or H."
David Marjanović said,
August 22, 2022 @ 2:07 pm
…if you exclude Sardinian and probably also Eastern Romance (Romanian & stuff).
German and Slavic have about the same age, BTW.
Philip Taylor said,
August 23, 2022 @ 1:42 pm
M — « if we replace "Latin" by "Hebrew or Aramaic" in the foregoing quotation, by what is "French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc." to be replaced ? ». A good question. The analogy does indeed break down at that point, but I don't think that that entirely negates the validity of my assertion that « the primary reason why "contemporary Arabic 'colloquials'" are looked down upon is that they deviate from the language used in the Qu'ran ».
Lameen said,
August 25, 2022 @ 10:44 am
I'd say Arabic colloquials are looked down upon primarily because they deviate from the language taught in schools. MSA itself deviates in several respects from the language used in the Qur'an, and that doesn't seem to put anyone off or even get noticed much.
And yes, from the context, obviously they were speaking dialectal Arabic to each other, whatever other languages she may also speak.