Diglossia

[Mark A Peterson]

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.

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. 

One of the students said, "But my interviews are in colloquial Arabic. Shouldn’t I translate the words to proper Arabic?"

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)

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.

What I had thought was an argument about "correctness" (Fusha is real 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 unable to read it, at least not without a great deal of effort.

"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."

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. 

What they are complaining about is a problem with language perception and comprehension. Written amayyah, they claim, is literally unreadable, however common it is to speak.

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.

I would welcome any comments and references to relevant literature.

Mark Allen Peterson
Asst. Professor of Anthropology
The American University in Cairo
PO Box 2511, Cairo 11511 EGYPT
peterson at aucegypt.edu

"Laughter overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority."
          -- Mikhail Bakhtin
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