Language and Society in the Middle East and North Africa

Yasir Suleiman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317849377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates issues of central importance in understanding the role of language in society in the Middle East and North Africa. In particular, it covers issues of collective identity and variation as they relate to Arabic, Berber, English, Persian and Turkish in the fields of gender, national affiliation, the debate over authenticity and modernity, language reforms and language legislation. In addition, the book investigates how some of these issues are realized in the diaspora at both the micro and macro levels.

Chapter One

Language and Political Conflict in the Middle East: A Study in Symbolic Sociolinguistics

Yasir, Suleiman^*

1. Politico-linguistic Conflicts in the Middle East: A General Introduction

Although readers of this paper may consider some of the points which will be raised later controversial, one thing, we are certain, would be non-controversial: the Middle East — especially if we accept its expanded sense to include the Muslim Republics of Central Asia — is an area of political conflicts which have a habit of igniting from time to time with violent consequences. While language is hardly ever the cause of such conflicts, nevertheless it is always implicated in them, whether functionally as a medium of communication or symbolically as a site of mobilisation and counter-mobilisation in games of power relations between contending parties. On the simplest level, we may point to the lexical role of language in the Middle East in constructing highly ideologised versions of reality which may gain wide currency by diffusion through the languages of international communication.¹ In this context, it does matter whether one refers to the 1967 War between the Arabs and the Israelis by that name or as the Six Day War. Likewise, the terms 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Yom Kippur War or Ramadan War are all ideologically impregnated labels, as are the terms ‘Peace for Galilee’ and ‘Grapes of Wrath’ which were used to designate Israeli incursions in Lebanon in 1982 and 1996 respectively. Moving on to geography, the terms West Bank and Gaza, the occupied territories, Arab occupied lands, Palestinian occupied lands, the territories occupied by Israel, the territories, the Israeli administered territories, lands which came under Israeli control in 1967 and Judaea and Samaria are all ideological ways of speaking.² The same applies to the following terms: the Israeli security zone, the occupied border zone and the ‘compromise label’ the Israeli occupied security zone when used to designate that area of southern Lebanon which Israel directly occupies or does so indirectly through proxies. In the short term, what is at stake behind these labels is the concern with persuasion by managing public opinion to the designator’s advantage. This is why it matters a great deal to the parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whether the proposed Israeli settlement (in 1998) on the outskirts of Arab East Jerusalem is to be known to the outside world as Har Homa, Jabal Abu Ghneim or, in a compromising mode, Har Homa on Jabal Abu Ghneim.³ In both the short and long term, the conflict of labels in the Middle East is a deadly serious one. It concerns claims of legality and counter-legality as well as which version of history will formulate, rather than just articulate, reality. Language here does not just reflect reality, but acts on it, configuring it and shaping it to accord with a given ideology. This is why troop deployment and military action in the Middle East are invariably accompanied by lexical deployment and action. In the Middle East the gun and the dictionary march hand in hand, and this is no more apparent than in Israel in which “Hebrew continues to be driven by ideology, and is … still considered a metaphor for the security of the nation” (Shohamy, 1994).

The aim of this paper is not to discuss these politico-linguistic issues, interesting though they are, especially if approached from the viewpoint of the translational controversy about ‘managing versus monitoring’ (De Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981; Farghal, 1993; and Shunnaq, 1992) — or ‘domestication versus foreignisation’ (Venuti, 1995) — in the transfer of the language of broadcasting and the press media from one code, normally English, to another.⁴ Rather, our aim is to consider how political conflicts in the Middle East, whether interethnic or inter-nation in character, involve a host of policies and practices which directly or indirectly involve co-territorial languages and dialects in antagonistic or less than amicable relations to each other. It is however important in this regard not to think of languages or dialects as disembodied objects, i.e. as means of communication in isolation from their speakers whose linguistic rights are an important part and parcel, although often a neglected one, of their total human rights entitlement (Coulombe, 1993). Having said that, it is necessary to point out for methodological reasons that our approach in this paper is not based on the notion of linguistic rights, although the denial of such rights by the dominant group to the subordinate group or groups in their common territory of ten succeeds in turning language into a more potent symbol of resistance and counter-mobilisation than it would otherwise be. The situation in Turkey with regard to the language bans on the Kurds in particular are a case in point (Skutnabb-Kangas and Sertç, 1994; Blau and Suleiman, 1996),⁵ as are the bans imposed on the Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the late eighties and early nineties (Rudin and Eminov, 1990; Balim, 1996). What is interesting about these two situations is the manner in which they graphically display the potency of the ‘double standards’ syndrome in managing national and international affairs even in the cultural sphere. Thus while Turkey strongly condemns the denial of linguistic and other related rights to the Turkish minority in Bulgaria,⁶ it nevertheless enacts more or less the same policies against Kurdish and the Kurds in Turkey itself, justifying this by asserting that the Turks in Bulgaria are a national minority while, at the same time, considering the Kurds in Turkey as no more than an ethnic group, if that.

In what follows we propose to concentrate on the linguistic reflexes of one type of political conflict in the Middle East, the inter-ethnic conflict, leaving other types of conflict, especially those of inter-nation variety, for a future study. A defining property of inter-ethnic conflicts from the sociolinguistic point of view is the inter-dialectal nature of the linguistic reflexes they generate, especially the occurrence and distribution of code-switching or code-mixing among members of the speech community in one and the same state territory. In carrying out our investigation we will rely on the data and interpretations generated by previous studies, while using for interpretative purposes what may be regarded as non-canonical explanatory approaches in Arabic sociolinguistics. This is a deliberate strategy on our part for two reasons. On the one hand, studies of this kind are particularly interesting because of the way they integrate the data under investigation with socio-political considerations of much wider applicability as well as with other, less problematic phenomena of the same generic type. On the other hand, by adopting this approach we aim to suggest a different orientation to the study of language in society than has hitherto been entertained, with a few notable exceptions, in the investigation of Arabic sociolinguistic phenomena. In particular, we hope to suggest that there is more to Arabic sociolinguistics than the statistical calculation of the distribution of variables and their correlations with demographic factors, interesting and important though these lines of functionally oriented inquiry are. More specifically, we hope to encourage other researchers to consider the merits of complementing numerical empiricism with higher order explanatory frameworks which can cast the data in interesting new lights. In the absence of a better term we will designate this orientation symbolic sociolinguistics, although functionality and symbolism cannot be totally isolated from each other on the conceptual level.

2. Linguistic Reflexes of Inter-ethnic Conflict: A Study in Symbolic Sociolinguistics

In this section we will deal with code-switching in Jordan with respect to the distribution of the dialectal variants of the Standard phonemes /q/ and /k/ among indigenous Jordanians, sometimes referred to as East Jordanians in the literature, and their Palestinian partners who, together, form the two major ethnic/national constituencies of the citizenry of Jordan. The distribution and sociolinguistic significance of these variants have been extensively dealt with in the literature (Abdel- Jawad 1981, 1986, 1987; Hussein, 1980; Sawaie, 1986; Shorrab, 1981; Suleiman, 1993; and Al-Wer, 1999). They will however be given here in a skeletal form for ease of reference.

Roughly speaking, Standard /k/ has two dialectal variants: [k] which occurs in the speech of East Jordanians and urban Palestinian speakers, and [t∫], as in English ‘church’, which occurs mainly in rural Palestinian speech. By contrast, Standard /q/ has three variants: the glottal stop [?] which traditionally occurs in the speech of Palestinian urbanites; [g], as in English ‘garden’, which mainly occurs in the speech of East Jordanians and, to a much lesser extent, Palestinians; and [k] which traditionally occurs in rural Palestinian speech. The /q/ variants as well as the variant [t∫] of Standard /k/ are very important to any characterisation of the language situation in Jordan owing to their emblematic or stereotypical nature. Thus, traditionally speaking, [?] is regarded as symbolic of Palestinian urban speech, [k] of/q/ and [t∫] are regarded as symbolic of rural Palestinian speech; and [g] as emblematic of East Jordanian, bedouin speech. We are of course aware that this is an idealised picture of the functional domain of the language situation in Jordan, hence the use of the word ‘traditionally’ in several places above. However, this picture is not without its symbolic force from a sociolinguistic or sociological perspective. This boils down to saying that although the above description of the variants and their distribution may not be fully accurate functionally, it is nevertheless highly applicable symbolically. Our interest in this paper is not so much in the functional aspect of language, but in the symbolic and its signifying meanings.

The above patterns of dialectal variation and their symbolic values obtained in Jordan with a certain degree of uniformity before and immediately after the 1967 War owing to the geographical separation of the two major constituencies of the Jordanian citizenry. Any code-switching which may have taken place at the time would most probably have been in the direction of the prestigious urban variety, which is still the case now but only with respect to the speech of the female sex (cf. Amara, Spolsky and Tushyeh, 1999) This perhaps explains and is explained by the attitude towards the urban variety as a ‘feminine’ dialect (cf. Al-Wer 1999). With respect to the speech of males, we believe that the three dialectal varieties all stood their own ground during the same period with negligible code-switching between them; this is particularly interesting in the context of the rural Palestinian variety owing to its stigmatised nature in comparison with its urban Palestinian counterpart.

This situation started to change radically after the 1970–71 clashes in Jordan between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian guerrilla movement, which clashes ended with the defeat of the latter and their eviction from the country. Although unrelated to these events, the expansion of the Jordanian urban space, especially the city of Amman as a metropolitan centre, has led to the expansion of the urban variety among female speakers through code-switching. More significantly from our perspective in this paper, however, is the code-switching by urban and rural young and middle-aged Palestinian males to the East Jordanian, bedouin variety.⁷ This is particularly surprising in relation to the urban variety whose speakers stood, in terms of social prestige, at the apex of the social hierarchy in the country.

Clearly what happened in Jordan in the period following the 1970–71 events was a double trajectory of code-switching: one involving female speakers in the direction of what is essentially an urban Palestinian dialect, and the other involving male speakers in favour of the East Jordanian, bedouin variety. This gendered bifurcation of codeswitching in Jordan has led many scholars to accept Abdel-Jawad’s interpretation (1981, 1986) of this phenomenon as one at whose basis lies the tension between the symbolism of femininity and masculinity, an explanation of this kind was bound to gain currency owing to the fact that it chimes with the well-entrenched views of Arab society as a strongly patriarchal structure.⁸

Abdel-Jawad’s solution does not however explain why the code-switching in male speech to the bedouin variety started to emerge as a significant linguistic factor only at the time it did, and not before 1970-71 as the present author can testify on the basis of his experience at the time. If it is truly the case that the bedouin variety is thought to be characterised by masculinity as an inalienable attribute, and, furthermore, if it is truly the case that Arab society, by virtue of its strong patriarchal structures, would favour a masculine sounding variety — whatever that means — for its male speakers, one is bound to ask why is it that the shift to the bedouin variety did not take place at such a massive scale earlier in Jordan? One may also ask why is it that similar shifts in male speech have not taken place in congruent language situations, for example Syria and Palestine where in the latter the rural variety is dominant in relation to the bedouin variety in the Palestinian c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Names of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Language and Political Conflict in the Middle East: A Study In Symbolic Sociolinguistics
• 2. Why do Different Variables Behave Differently? Data from Arabic
• 3. Sociolinguistic Reflexes of Socio-Political Patterns in Bethlehem: Preliminary Studies
• 4. Hebrew and English Borrowings in Palestinian Arabic in Israel: A Sociolinguistic Study in Lexical Integrationand Diffusion
• 5. Pronouns and Self Presentation in Public Discourse: Yasser Arafat as a Case Study
• 6. Language Choice, Language Policy and the Tradition-Modernity Debate in Culturally Mixed Postcolonial Communities: France and the ‘Francophone’ Maghreb as a Case Study
• 7. The Status of Berber: A Permanent Challenge to Language Policy in Morocco
• 8. Comparative Perspectives on Language Planning in Iran and Tajikistan
• 9. The Story of a Failed Attempt: 1997 Draft Bill on the Correct Use of Turkish Language
• 10. Gender in a Genderless Language: The Case of Turkish
• 11. The Sociolinguistic Connotations of /p/ and /v/ in Cairo Arabic
• 12. Language and Diaspora: Arabs, Turks and Greeks
• 13. Sociolinguistic Meaning in Code-Switching: The Case of Moroccans in Edinburgh
• 14. The Arabic Proverb and the Speech Community: Another Look at Phatic Communion