26.67, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling; Writing Systems: Mumin, Versteegh (2014)

Tue Jan 6 19:54:01 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-67. Tue Jan 06 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.67, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling; Writing Systems: Mumin, Versteegh (2014)

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Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 14:53:40
From: Kariema El Touny [k.eltouny at gmail.com]
Subject: The Arabic Script in Africa

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EDITOR: Meikal  Mumin
EDITOR: Kees  Versteegh
TITLE: The Arabic Script in Africa
SUBTITLE: Studies in the Use of a Writing System
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Kariema El Touny, Women's College for Arts, Science, and Education, Ain Shams University

Review's Editor: Anthony Aristar

SUMMARY

The book consists of sixteen papers that deal with the use of Arabic script to
write African languages other than Arabic. It is divided geographically into
four sections, North, West, East, and South Africa respectively, in addition
to a preliminary section for general papers.

Section I General Problems of Arabic-Script Based Traditions

The Type and Spread of Arabic Script
Peter T. Daniels

Daniels gives a brief history of the origins of the Arabic script. Arabic
writing has its roots in Nabataean, which is a branch of the Middle Aramaic
scripts during the Common Era (Klugkist 1982). When Arabic took over the
Nabataean script, several difficulties occurred. For example, the similar
letter sets, which was solved by introducing the consonant dots towards the
end of the second Islamic century.

The author moves to the use of the Arabic ‘abjad’, the notations used only for
consonants. He gives examples of several languages that use it. These are
Persian, Uyghur (a Turkic language), Pashto (the Iranian spoken in Afghanistan
and Pakistan), Urdu of Pakistan, and Ottoman Turkish.

The Arabic Script in Africa: Understudied Literacy
Meikel Mumin

Mumin provides a summary of the status of Arabic script within academic
research. With the advent of Islam in Africa, Arabic became the lingua franca
not only for religious studies but also for politics, business, and science.
Many newly-converted scholars preserved their own indigenous languages by
writing them using Arabic script, modifying it to adapt to the linguistic
features of the different languages. It is now documented that 80 to 95
languages in Africa use Arabic script.

The author speculates that the scarcity of research on the subject is due to
Western academes’ bias. They treated Arabic as a language of religion. Hence,
most texts written using Arabic-based script and/or orthography were dismissed
as Islamic literature, Islamic writings, or Arabic literature.

Moreover, literacy surveys and statistics in Africa have double standards when
it involves languages other than what the colonialists provided. The author
advocates for the integration of the Islamic institutions into the mainstream
educational systems to elevate the literacy rates.

Section II North Africa

Preliminary Notes on Tuareg in Arabic Script from Niger
Maarten Kossmann and Ramada Elghamis

The authors use selected texts from collected field work by Elghamis (2011) to
present the main characteristics of Tuareg Ajami (Arabic script) orthography.
First, they give an introduction on Tuareg, a language spoken in the central
and southern Sahara and the Sahel, in Niger, Mali, Algeria, and Burkina Faso.
Then, they examine whether Tuareg writings are an indication of inherited
tradition or personal inventiveness by the writers of the texts through
graphemic choices, for example: the writing of /g/.

Finally, they try to put Tuareg Ajami in its regional context. On the one
hand, it has a phonemic system similar to that of Classical Arabic, which is
evident in some writers’ logical choice of Arabic script. On the other hand,
other writers opt for the graphemic choices of other Sahelian languages, such
as Fulfulde and Hausa, and West-African traditions of Arabic writing. The
authors do not draw conclusions to prompt further research.

Writing ‘Shelha’ in New Media: Emergent non-Arabic Literacy in Southwestern
Algeria
Lameen Souag

Souag takes the area of Southwestern Algeria as the focal point of his
article. It is the Saharan ‘wilayas’ (states) of Tindouf, Becher, En Naama, El
Bayadh, and Adrar. Literacy in this region is acknowledged by competency in
Standard Arabic. However, many non Arabic languages are spoken and written
there that are collectively called ‘Shelha’, examples of which are Taznatit,
Zenati, Tamasheq, and Kwarandzyey. Comparing the use of these languages
suggests a difference in their status. While Arabic is institutionalized and
used formally through government communications, the educational system, and
as a sign of urbanity; Shelha is minimally taught and typically used by
individuals from the same community mainly as a sign of solidarity. 

The author uses online correspondences to examine writing Shelha by users of
internet forums and social websites. He discovers some difficulties for users
to properly write Shelha, attributing them to the inability of devices to
handle the necessary orthography. This does not hinder its use neither
publicly, such as place names or recording old proverbs, nor privately, such
as phatic communications: greetings and family inquiries.

Section III West Africa

Old Kanembu and Kanuri in Arabic Script: Phonology through the Graphic System
Dmitry Bondarev

The main purpose of this article is the study of old Kanembu present in the
Qur’an manuscripts, MS 3ImI, MS 1YM, and MS 2ShK, as glosses and commentaries
next to the original text in Arabic. Kanembu and Kanuri belong to the Saharan
family of the macro Nilo-Saharan language phylum and are spoken by four
million people around Lake Chad.

The author gives a brief account of the graphic system used in these texts. He
describes Old Kanembu spelling conventions, followed by vowel and consonant
graphemes. Finally, he provides two comprehensive tables dedicated to the
language of (Qur’an) glosses LG: one for LG grapheme/phoneme correspondences
for consonants and the other for an inventory of its consonants.

Bondarev notes that writers of Old Kanembu adhered to the graphic system of
Arabic by adapting it to their native sounds rather than creating a new
Arabic-based script due to the reverence they held for the text.

Influence of Arabic Poetry on the Composition and Dating of Fulfulde Jihad
Poetry in Yola (Nigeria)
Anneke Breedveld

In her analysis, the author uses a collection of jihad poems, the Yola
collection, by the famous Fulbe poet and warrior Sheehu Usman dan Fodio
(1754-1817) and his contemporaries. They used Arabic-based script and adapted
it for the characteristics of their non-Arabic languages. The purpose of these
poems was not just for recitation on special occasions, but also for educating
people about Islam and as mnemonics for scholars.

Breedveld states three reasons for the difficulties in translating and
transliterating the Yola collection. One is the nature of poetry itself as
subjective material full of imageries and feelings. Two is the lack of an
authoritative, standardized Fulfulde Ajami orthography. Three is the 200 year
old text, full of archaic terms and formulations.

She chose two salient features in Arabic poetry and traced them in the
collection. First, the hammisaande, derived from Arabic “hamsa” (meaning
five). In it, a poet takes an existing poem, and as an homage to the original
poet, chooses two hemistiches (stanzas) and adds three more making those five.
Second, the chronogram, which is an expression meant for a numerical
interpretation. Usually, the consonants of last stanza are added to signify an
important date in the Islamic calendar. Each letter is assigned a numeric
value, for example: ا = 1, ب = 2, etc.

West African Ajami in the New World (Hausa, Fulfulde, Mande Languages)
Nikolay Dobronravin

The author briefly discusses how African Muslims maintained their knowledge of
Arabic script after they moved to the New World. He studies the few surviving
manuscripts that were discovered in the Caribbean and Brazil, for example, the
Dublin manuscript written by a soldier based in the Caribbean in 1817 to a
surgeon in Trinidad. It is in Arabic script and mainly uses Hausa, but
includes Arabic, Eastern Fula, Mandinka, and English or material from
English-based Caribbean Creole languages. He provides an account of three
prayer books found in Brazil, which are written in Arabic script.

Fula and the Ajami Writing System in the Haalpulaar Society of Fuuta Tooro
(Senegal and Mauritania): A Specific ‘Restricted Literacy’
Marie-Éve Humery

The author takes Fuuta Tooro, located in the middle valley of the Senegal
River that runs between Senegal and Mauritania, to trace the socio-political
effects on the use of Arabic script in writing Fula within the Haalpulaar
society. She compares Ajami, Arabic script, and Abajada, Roman script.

She utilizes two previous surveys to present her findings. The first, in 1996,
was conducted in Nabadji Civol and Galoya, two villages of the Senegal River
Valley, plus the Guédiawaye suburb in Dakar. The second, between 1999 and
2001, was in Juude and Dungel, two Fuutanke villages. Her interviewees
preferred Roman script in writing Pulaar because of its accessibility.
Contrarily, Pulaar Ajami had limited use.

In the 18th century, Arabic and Ajami witnessed a rise in their status. With
the spread of Islam, many Arabic religious texts were translated into Fula
using Arabic script, in addition to original work written directly in Fula
using Ajami. However, by 1950-60s, this practice gradually declined to be
replaced by Roman script. In Senegal, this was a result of weak attempts of
the Haalpulaar’en Arabists to make Ajami a symbol of their clerical and
scholarly class. In Mauritania, even with Arabization at full force, several
movements, such as the Pulaar Movement, propagated the use of the Roman
script. This was validated at the Bamako Conference in 1966.

Ajami Scripts for Mande Languages
Valintin Vydrin

The author observes the scarcity of research on Arabic script texts for the
Mande languages even though the Mande people were among the first in West
Africa to be contacted by Islamic culture and Arabic. He provides a brief
history of this, beginning with French colonial times, where Delafosse (1904)
is the only scholarly record available of Manding Ajami. Unfortunately, the
scholar was contemptuous of the writing system, which led to subsequent lack
of interest in the topic. Nowadays, of the three available writing systems,
Roman, N’ko, and Ajami, the latter holds the weakest spot due to its being the
least standardized and adapted, and its rare use in publications.

Vydrin briefly presents the current status of Manding Ajami in various areas
where the Manding languages are spoken. In the Southern Senegambia region,
Manding Ajami is still used today. In Guinea, it held a high place during
pre-colonial times, but witnessed a decline by the middle and late 20th
century. Similarly, Côte d’Ivoire, Bamana, Mogofin (Mikhifore), and Susu
(Soso) used Manding Ajami around the beginning of the 20th century (18th
century for Suso), but its current use is mainly for personal notes and
correspondences. He compares the grammatological properties of each variety of
Mande Ajami through texts, such as the Bijini Chronicle, Parts II and III, and
the Keba Singateh’s Texts.

Manding Ajami Samples: Mandinka and Bamana
Valintin Vydrin and Gérard Dumestre

The authors describe the limitedness of Manding Ajami texts and the difficulty
of their acquisition, analysis, and publication. They extensively analyze two
sets of documents and provide some grammatological remarks and discuss the use
of diacritics, the orthographic segmentation of words, and the dialectal
characteristics of the texts. The first set consists of three texts that are a
hunter’s incantations in Mandinka. The second is in Bamana, originally from
San (an old southwestern area in Mali), and is comprised of five texts.

West African Scripts and Arabic-Script Orthographies in Socio-Political
Context
Andy Warren-Rothlin

The author examines the consequences of socio-political factors on three
languages: Hausa, Fulfulde, and Chadian Arabic, spoken in the Sahel region
between the Mossi and Jula in the west and the Sango and Maba in the east. He
focuses on the current practical use of Arabic script, its development, and
the effects of publishing in these languages, by government and non-government
organizations, on its standardization.

In the 19th century, Arabic script was used, along with Arabic, even by
pre-colonial Christian missionaries. However, by the 20th century, and the
French and British colonization, Roman script came into conflict with Arabic
script. This led to digraphia, the existence of two scripts for the same
language,  exhibited on billboards, for example.

He presents and discusses the modern orthography of the three languages,
followed by some general problems that face Arabic script in the region, such
as the difficulty in representing of nasalization and tone. Arabic loan words
present a problem to writers in choosing either the phonetic or etymological
form of the same word.

Section IV East Africa

Chimi:ni in Arabic Script: Examples from Brava Poetry
Bana Banafunzi and Alessandra Vianello

Chimi:ni, a Bantu language spoken in Brava which borrowed heavily from Arabic,
is considered an endangered language due to war and consequent migration.
There are few studies of its grammar and syntax,

In the early 20th century, Sufi scholars used to write their religious poems,
ste:nzi, in Chimi:ni using Arabic script as a sign of solidarity against
European colonization,fundamentalist Wahhābis as well as modernist movements.
They resorted to poetry because it is more popular and easier to memorize. The
themes were strictly religious and the poems were delivered orally, hence
written examples are scarce. The authors describe Chimi:ni in Ajami by
providing two versions of a poem by Sheikh Qasim al-Barawi (1878-1922) and
comparing them.

Swahili Documents from Congo (19th Century): Variation in Orthography
Xavier Luffin

Luffin describes the Arabic script used in Swahili documents, which come from
Stanley Falls, Marungu, and Uele in the now Democratic Republic of Congo, and
gives a brief history of them and their structure. They consist of official
and personal archives and other papers that were found, or intercepted during
the battles of the “Arab campaign 1892-1894”, in Swahili settlements, and date
back to a period from 1884 to 1899. Arabic script use started with Omani and
Swahili traders in the 1860s, then it was adopted by the local chiefs, then it
spread to the Islamic schools, and was used with the European explorers
through translators and interpreters.

Akhi Patia Kalamu: Writing Swahili Poetry in Arabic Script
Clarissa Vierke

The author provides a short history of Swahili in Arabic script and examines
the interaction between poetic language and its representation in script.
Swahili in Arabic script is found in letters as early as the 7th century and
on coins around the 13th. Its use peaked in the 17th and by the 18th, the
oldest written Swahili document discovered in Goa dates back to 1724. The
oldest Swahili poem in Arabic script, Utendi wa Tambuka, dates back to 1728.

Starting from 1840, colonization and Christian missionaries introduced Roman
script. By 1899, Arabic script was excluded officially, and was only used in
personal letters and contracts. However, it was still used by some
missionaries to reach a wider range of people. Between the 1920s and 1930s,
Swahili was standardized in Roman script while Arabic script was linked more
to folklore and local dialects.

Vierke examines the written poems in Swahili Arabic script to discuss the
conventions used by the poets regarding the visual representation of sounds in
Arabic script.

Section V South Africa

Revisiting Al-Qawl Al-Matīn: A Sociolinguistically Engineered Arabic-Afrikaans
Text
Muhammed Haron

In his article, the author summarizes the salient features of Al-Qawl Al-Matīn
as an example of the linguistic contributions of the Cape Muslim community,
without delving into the controversy surrounding it in academia. He gives a
brief history of the formation of Afrikaans as a common language in the
region, recognized in 1925, and how it was influenced socially, politically,
and linguistically by the languages of colonists, Dutch and British, and other
settlers, slaves from South and Southeast Asia and East and west Africa.

The Cape Muslims’ ancestry has three roots: Southeast Asia, South Asia, and
East and West Africa. The use of Arabic script (Jawi script) was maintained by
religious leaders as a gesture against colonial rule and to keep their
ethno-religious identity. Haron gives a few excerpts from the manuscript to
show several features of the Arabic script used. These are orthographical
options, the transcriptions/translation challenges, word construction, and
combination of graphemes.

A Remarkable Document in Arabic-Afrikaans: The Election Pamphlet of 1884
Kees Versteegh

The author uses an election pamphlet for Anders Ohlsson (1841-1912), in his
1884 campaign for parliament, as an example of a written document in
Arabic-Afrikaans (Afrikaans in Arabic script). He gives a brief history of the
development of Arabic Afrikaans, followed by a comprehensive examination of
the document itself: a description of its content, the script used, its social
context, and the candidate’s biography. From it, he deduces the Dutch
linguistic influence on Afrikaans and the political weight given to Muslim
voters in the Cape.

EVALUATION

The book serves as a guide to a relatively under-studied topic, the Arabic
script as it is used to write various languages in Africa. The collection is a
study of its origins, development, orthographical features, and linguistic,
social, and political influences. Hence, it could be used as a valued
reference for researchers of Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics,
Orthography, and Historical Linguistics.

The authors managed to present their ideas despite the scarcity of references
and source material, in the articles. Almost all contributing authors complain
of how documents were either lost or destroyed, and encourage the preservation
of existing ones. In addition, calls for further research and/or a
re-examination of current theories are found in abundance throughout the book.

The editors divided the continent into manageable parts and assigned to each
its relative articles. This enables the reader to choose according to their
interest. One of the visually appealing features is the use of digital images
of the original documents along with the appropriate transliterations and
translations either in paragraphs or tables. Another feature related to the
content of the articles is their brevity even though the authors provide
historical backgrounds along with the linguistic topics. Concise terms are
used with no redundant or superfluous information.

REFERENCES

Delafosse, Maurice. 1904. Vocabulaires comparatifs de plus de 60 langues ou
dialectes parlés à la Côte d’Ivoire et dans les regions limitrophes, avec des
notes linguistiques et ethnologiques, une bibliographie et use carte. Paris:
Ernest Lerux

Elghamis, Ramada. 2011. Le tifinagh au Niger contemporian: Etude sur
l’écriture indigene des Touargs. PhD Thesis, Leiden University

Klugkist, Alexander C. 1982. Midden-Aramese schriften in Syrië, Mesopotomië,
Perzië en aangerenzende gebieden. PhD Thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kariema El Touny has an MA from Women’s College, Ain Shams University. Her
interests include (but are not limited to) Syntax, Arabic Dialectology,
Typology, and Theory Construction. She presented and published her research on
Cairene Arabic syntax within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program and
Optimality Theory.

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