CHAPTER 9 The Politics of Pro-‘ammiyya Language Ideology in Egypt

Mariam Aboelezz

interviews with an Egyptologist pro-ammiya political party dude and the head of malamih publishers, who publish ammiya stuff, how both of them enact language ideology according to 6 topoi.

• language politics in Egypt takes the form of a binary of Egyptian nationalism vs. pan-Arab nationalism: the former ideology favouring ʿāmmiyya and the latter favouring Standard Arabic or fuṣḥā (Suleiman1996)
•  ʿāmmiyya might be used to counter the hegemonic discourse of the (language) authorities (Bassiouney 2014; Ibrahim 2010
• Language change at two levels: 1) the structure of the language (lexicon, grammar, etc.); 2) use of the language, that is, “the functional allocations of the varieties of language used” in a speech community
• As Kelsey (2014: 309) points out, “a myth is not a lie. Rather, it is a construction of meaning that serves a particular purpose through the confirmations and
  denials of its distortion”.
• Eisle: 4 cultural tropes underlying value system of Arabic language –
  unity, purity, continuity and competition.
• Eisle: Salama Musa’s aim was to subvert dominant beliefs about Arabic, “he never the less reflects the dominant Arab way of talking about language”
• 3 more topoi: conspiracy, authenticity and superiority.
• Mohamed El-Sharkawi editor of ‘Malamih’ publishing. has a ‘no-language-editing’ policy

Changing Norms, Concepts and Practices of Written Arabic A ‘Long Distance’ Perspective

• processes of standardisation and destandardisation, with shifting norms of use, have come in wave
• A standard language norm is the product of a process of selection and
  codification of features and variants of a language to function as a model of
  correctness,defined by people who have become norm authorities, role models
  supported by official institutions (Bartsch1987:78). The standard language has
  validity in the language community in so far as speakers/writers perceive its
  norm to be valid, i.e. that they accept it as a model/measure of correctness
  – without necessarily having access to it.
• Bartsch – the prescriptive standard as a normative concept of language planners, from the empirical standard as a descriptive concept of socio-linguistics.
• Arabic at the dawn of Islam was a special register, a super-tribal variety of Arabic
• Jabarti’s Mudda is characterized by negligence of literary usage and form in addition to a proliferation of colloquial terms, expressions, and linguistic patterns”. Moreh believes that the text may have been “a rough draft written without paying special attention to the rules and for this reason the text is especially interesting from a linguistic point of view” (1975: 25–26).
• Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī  talkhīṣ bārīs was apparently composed mentally in vernacular and then translated into a still “error-ridden” version of standard. also corrected, like many things, is subsequent versions. in his dissertation on al-Ṭahṭāwī(1968) Karl Stowasser finds even the printed edition replete with deviating forms typical
  of many medieval texts, both syntactic and morphological, some reflecting
  vernacular features, other obvious hypercorrections.
• Humphrey Davies puts it thus: “If the use of Middle Arabic is found to be
  widespread and consistent, a further implication would be that, had it not
  been for the linguistic self-consciousness and ‘reforms’ introduced during the
  nahḍa of the nineteenth century, Middle Arabic might well have become the
  standard form of written expression in Egypt (and no doubtelsewhere)”(2008:
  111)
• Rather than a Dante or a Cervantes, pan-Arabism asserted the Nahdawi project
• Think of the Nahda as a re-imposition of normative grammar rather than its return or recovery.
• The “discovery” of dialects by orientalists see Pierre Larcher 2003.
• Lahja is part of the native repertoire of metalinguistic concepts (“tip of the tongue; way of speaking”), and is adopted as the technical term for the new discipline of dialectology(ʿilmal-lahajāt) at some time around the turn of the century.
• Campaigns calling for the promotion of the vernacular as the standard
  language towards the end of the century received very little support from native
  intellectuals; the fact that colonial officials were among the strongest and most
  active in the promotion campaign for ʿāmmiyya did not exactly help the cause.
• The (semi-)colloquial press, which had been at its high in the 1890s and
  1900s, declined rapidly in the following decades, “until they disappeared com-
  pletely by the 1950s” (Fahmy 2011:76
• I doubt that the language cultivators, now institutionalised authorities in
  academies and committees, or in ministries and Arabic departments at the
  universities, in fact exercised much control over writing in Egypt in the 20th
  century – apart from, of course, imposing and securing the position of nor-
  mative al-ʿarabiyya as target in the school system.Rather, the literary ‘ethics’ of
  the time,echoing the pan-Arabic political ethics, called fora certain normative
  self-discipline.The literary developmentof the novelandshortstoriestowards
  social realism, on the other hand, imposed the question of (appropriate) style
  to represent in writing the speech of common people. It became commonly
  accepted to use ʿāmmiyya in dialogue (reflecting direct speech), in a frame of
  fuṣḥā narrative; although a few prominent writers (notably Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and
  NagībMaḥfūẓ)stronglyobjectedtoacceptinganythingbut‘correct’formsinto
  the literary sphere. Some writers openly struggled with the dilemma: we have
  the popular writer Iḥsān ʿAbd al-Quddūs (1919–1990) arguing with himself in
  theintroductiontothesecondeditionof hisnovel Anāḥurra (“Iamfree”,n.d)–
  in the end finding peace and calm in the following solution: that a longer fictional work may well have ʿāmmiyya in the dialogue, whereas shorter stories
  may – or may not, according to the general ‘atmosphere’ of the story (Mejdell
  2006b: 205). The issue was never settled, but, from now on, it only occasionally
  flared up in heated debate.
• Genre has a huge effect on the appropriateness of language choice (memoirs and sakhr adab in egypt vs. novels)

Chapter 2: Diglossia as Ideology – Kristin Brustad

• Categories such as register exist insofar as speakers imagine and create them.
• We cannot know the scope of such “border crossings” just as we cannot
  know the reality of writing across society by the accident of what survives today,
  since most of it has been “corrected” by editors to adhere to contemporary
  norms before publication.
• studies on Middle Arabic: Blau (2002), Doss and Davies (2013), and Lentin (2008, 2009), as well as Zack and Schippers (2012)
• always have to be aware of the tashih for all literary texts as a metatextual factor which is CRITICAL to the language usage of the Arabic text
• the 20th century is an aberration in the long history of Arabic
• Diglossia named in the 1959 treatise by Ferguson.
• Milroy defines a standard language ideology culture as one in which
  speakers believe their language exists in “a clearly delimited perfectly uniform and perfectly stable variety – a variety that is never perfectly and consistently realized in spoken use”
• Calls to reform the Arabic writing system reached their peak from1944 to1947,when the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo put forth a call for proposals for the simplification of the Arabic writing system.
• The ideology of diglossia obscures this deep and lasting relationship. More
  ʿāmmiyya and more fuṣḥā go hand-in-hand, and mean more written Arabic for all.