Diglossia

[KE Hoffman]

Dear Mark,
You've started an interesting thread re. writing Egyptian Arabic that has
partly to do with diglossia and partly, as Misty pointed out with the case of
Corsican, to do with attitudes towards writing minority/vernacular languages
more generally.

In Morocco both issues come into play when writing Tashelhit and other
varieties of Tamazight (or 'Berber').  The diglossic relationship in Morocco is
between Standard Arabic on the one hand and Moroccan Arabic ('derija') or one
of the Tamazight varieties (Tashelhit, Tamazight or Tarifit) on the other
hand.  As for models for writing vernacular Arabic, there is poetry for sale in
the market even today (eg Mejdub, who coined many of the proverbs in
circulation) going back around 6 centuries.  I imagine that there is some
verbal art in Egyptian aamiya as well (at least there is in the Syrian Arabic,
eg plays that students could read in class as examples of vernacular languages
in print).

The thorny issue in Morocco is with Tamazight, an umbrella term for a variety
of languages forms that are in the throes of being standardized for the
purposes of writing as well as radio use.  This is a project both indigenous
rights activists and linguists have gotten involved in.  Writing Berber
suggests sympathy with a political project that to some smacks of
anti-establishment and anti-nationalism -- dangerous allegiances indeed.

I encountered a resistence to writing Tamazight quite frequently while working
in SW Morocco over the past 4 years.  This resistence came in several forms
that might interest fellow Arabists as well as non-Arabists.

First, there was the common-sense assumption of the person on the street that a
way of speaking that did not already "have" a written component was not
dignified enough to put into writing.  Writing, in this part of the country
where a majority of people are not literate, was an honor reserved for only a
few languages.

Second was an issue more relevant to my own transcription work.  My assistant,
who holds a university degree in English linguistics and is a native Tashelhit
speaker but had never written Tashelhit before, constantly found herself trying
to approproximate conventions for writing Arabic when we transcribed
Tashelhit.  We used the Arabic script, which she was more comfortable with and
which I thought more appropriate since there was so much borrowing and
code-switching into Arabic. (French ethnographers and linguists overwhelmingly
use Latin script and have set the conventions for many Moroccan Berberist
scholars as well.)  My assistant and I encountered two notable problems:
diacritics and religious language.

Re. diacritics:  when a sound resembled one found in classical Arabic, she
wanted to write it according to Arabic conventions -- eg the IPA sound "i" she
wanted to transcribe with an alif (and would put the hamza underneath).  My
convention was to use the y letter in arabic to avoid the necessity of
diacritics (which of course the alif required).

For me, avoiding diacritics was an ideological choice as well as a practical
one.  One of the arguments frequently launched against writing
Tashelhit/Tamazight at all is that without diacritical marks these language
varieties are not comprehensible.  Since it is difficult to use extensive
diacriticals for small print (newspapers etc.), this amounts to an argument
against writing in the vernaculars at all.  I developed a system whereby
diacritics were not necessary.  But to my transcription assistant, the
conventions flouted common sense about how you're supposed to write (based of
course on approaches to text she was socialized into in Arabic).

Re. religious language: Moroccans both Arabic and Tashelhit speakers pepper
their speech with frozen forms from classical Arabic, praises to God and the
prophet and other religious invocations, sometimes assimilated into Tashelhit.
My desire to capture the phonological contours of these phrases, especially
when they differed from classical Arabic, was not shared by my devout
assistant, who found this blasphemous.  After going round and round on this
issue for months, I gave up.  Capturing those particular phonological contours
in the end was not as important to my research as working in a way that allowed
my assistant to retain her dignity and piety -- she had worked hard to master
classical Arabic for religious devotation, and I seemed to be asking her to
deface it.  From that point on, whenever we ran across a classical Arabic
phrase that I wasn't sure how to write in "proper" Arabic, I passed the
notebook and pencil to her to record the phrase as she knew it should be
written (including all of the proper diacriticals).

There is no ideology-free transcript.  We pick our battles.

Katherine Hoffman
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
UCLA


At 01:25 PM 3/25/00 +0200, Mark A Peterson wrote:

>
>
>
> 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
> <mailto:peterson at aucegypt.edu>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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