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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear Mark,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I think that there is a real processing issue here;
one that I've encountered before and just encountered again in my observation of
a bilingual teacher training course on Corsica, where I'm currently doing some
new fieldwork (so your message struck a chord!).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>During this course, one of the organizers had all
of the participants read, in turn, parts of a handout in Corsican (a minority
language) that we were all working from. There were several fluent readers of
the Corsican text, but there were just as many people who were audibly
struggling to decode their portions. The woman next to me finished her couple of
lines, put down the piece of paper and said "I have no idea at all what I just
read". In other words, she had been so involved in decoding that the meaning had
escaped her. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>It is not that she "can't" read the Corsican. She
can, and did. But she doesn't have the years of practice reading this language
that she has reading French. She, like most good adult readers, reads French
(the dominant language here) without decoding at all--the meaning is
"direct"/"transparent" in French orthography. But as you remark below, to read
the minority/spoken language involves effort, and this effort is not what
reading is about for competent adult readers. My sense is that even a very small
effort--a single instance where people do not experience the text as a
transparent vehicle for meaning--is perceived as a large obstacle. It is what
leads people to say they "can't" (don't want) to read in a vernacular/minority
language etc. So these statements about readability have to do with people's
literacy experiences and the expectations they have built up about what reading
is/should be.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>All of this is a question of practice, practice
that has been defined by diglossic relationships between languages (and
therefore always ideologically conditioned). I expect--though I'm not sure--that
you could at least partially explain the English/Hindi example on this basis.
Reading news language is, after all, a kind of literacy practice that is not at
all the same as reading Romance novels. The "decoding" was apparently not going
on at the orthographic level, since she could obviously process the words
quickly, but she may well have had to decode at other structural levels. So
reading the newspaper could involve a real "effort" she wasn't willing to
give.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Misty Jaffe</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><B></B> </DIV>
<DIV><B>From:</B> <A href="mailto:peterson@aucegypt.edu"
title=peterson@aucegypt.edu>Mark A Peterson</A> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
href="mailto:linganth@cc.rochester.edu"
title=linganth@cc.rochester.edu>Linguistic Anthropology List</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Cc:</B> <A
href="mailto:DISCOURS@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG"
title=DISCOURS@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>Discourse Listserve</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, March 25, 2000 1:25
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Diglossia</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>
<P> </P>
<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></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>