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<P>I had a very interesting class discussion on diglossia the other day and
I’m hoping some of you can help me sort it out.</P>
<P>In my undergraduate fieldwork methods class the other day, I was trying to
explain why I wanted them to each produce a verbatim transcript of one of their
interviews. </P>
<P>One of the students said, "But my interviews are in colloquial Arabic.
Shouldn’t I translate the words to proper Arabic?"</P>
<P>Sighing, I once more explained that I wanted verbatim transcripts, so that we
could compare transcripts with interview notes as an exercise when we looked at
transcripts (and read some things by Moerman and others). I went into a short,
canned diatribe I keep handy about the argument that colloquial isn’t real
Arabic (convincing an American English teacher that AAVE is a "real"
dialect of English is nothing to convincing most Egyptians that Amayyah is
"real" Arabic of a sort)</P>
<P>But my student shook her head and said she had no problem with the idea of
transcribing as being proper. Her concern was more practical: "How will I
be able to read it?" she asked. Several other students were nodding their
heads.</P>
<P>What I had thought was an argument about "correctness" (Fusha is
<I>real</I> Arabic and Amayyah is not) turned out instead to be a very practical
and pragmatic argument about diglossia, and specifically about the relationship
of high and low codes to the media of transmission. The student was concerned
that if she transcribed the interview exactly as spoken, she would be literally
<I>unable</I> to read it, at least not without a great deal of effort.</P>
<P>"Well, we are going to put a great deal of effort into reading
these," I replied. "Anthropologists deal with unwritten languages all
the time. So just do it."</P>
<P>So much for the pedagogical problem. The linguistic problem is more complex.
It is not enough to simply argue that there are rules about what code to use in
what situation, as most descriptive sociolinguistic studies do. My students have
no problem with my assigning them work that violates social rules. They’re
used to it. </P>
<P>What they are complaining about is a problem with language perception and
comprehension. Written amayyah, they claim, is literally <I>unreadable</I>,
however common it is to speak.</P>
<P>I have run into similar claims in India with regards to different languages.
One woman told me, "If I was sitting on a train and was bored and really
wanted something to read, and there was a Hindi newspaper sitting abandoned on
the seat next to me, it would never even occur to me to pick it up." This
woman spoke Hindi at home and read (or used to read, it’s not clear from
the interview) romantic novels in Hindi but newspapers (and "technical
reading" like textbooks) she said had to be in English. I have lots more
examples like this and have handled this Indian data in terms of connecting
genres and language ideologies. It strikes me, however, that there is something
different about the diglossic argument my students.</P>
<P>I would welcome any comments and references to relevant literature.</P></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Mark Allen Peterson<BR>Asst. Professor of
Anthropology<BR>The American University in Cairo<BR>PO Box 2511, Cairo 11511
EGYPT<BR><A
href="mailto:peterson@aucegypt.edu">peterson@aucegypt.edu</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>"Laughter overcomes fear, for it knows no
inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and
authority."<BR> --
Mikhail Bakhtin</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>