The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics

Enam Al-Wer, Uri Horesh, Enam Al-Wer, Uri Horesh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317525004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Lingue

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics comprises 22 chapters encompassing various aspects in the study of Arabic dialects within their sociolinguistic context.

This is a novel volume, which not only includes the traditional topics in variationist sociolinguistics, but also links the sociolinguistic enterprise to the history of Arabic and to applications of sociolinguistics beyond the theoretical treatment of variation. Newly formed trends, with an eye to future research, form the backbone of this volume.

With contributions from an international pool of researchers, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Arabic sociolinguistics, as well as to linguists interested in a concise, rounded view of the field.

1
Arabic sociolinguistics

Principles and epistemology

Enam Al-Wer and Uri Horesh

What is sociolinguistics?

Sociolinguistics is a way of doing linguistics. By this we mean articulating a theory of language. Different schools of thought approach this enterprise through different prisms, some through a historical lens, others through synchronic descriptions; all of these lend themselves to theorising about how language ‘works’. In this respect, sociolinguistics endeavours to answer the same foundational questions as other sub-disciplines, some of which are considered to be more ‘formal’. Yet by contextualising the study of language structure within the natural habitat of language, namely human society, and doing so with novel tools, such as quantitative analysis and advanced social scientific concepts, sociolinguistics itself is formal in its own way.

Sociolinguistics is often defined as the study of language in its social context, though in fact, language does not exist away from this context (Labov 1972: xiii),¹ a context which research has shown to be inherently variable. What interests sociolinguistics, however, is the structured nature of this variation, which is a crucial component of the theory of grammar. Additionally, language change is a natural process and the diachronic outcome of many (but not all) instances of language variation.

Since its initial conceptualisation as an independent theory in linguistics, sociolinguistics has expanded in various dimensions. In terms of levels of linguistic analysis, it has pioneered the study of discourse, i.e. units of language beyond the sentence, leading to such fields of inquiry as narrative and conversation analysis. It has also enhanced the study of language to include thinking about the humans who produce language, and the societies in which they interact. As such, social theories² have proved not only useful but essential to sociolinguistic theory. Methods of data collection have evolved in tandem with technological advances, as well as innovations in statistical tools and the quantitative conceptualisation of such data. Finally, linguistics at large has benefitted from sociolinguistics in that many formal linguists, including syntacticians such as Alison Henry (e.g. Henry 1995), Andrew Radford (e.g. Radford 2018), Michael A. Jones (e.g., Jones 1993), and David Adger (e.g. Adger 2006; Adger & Smith 2005), phonologists such as Paul Kiparsky (e.g. Kiparsky 2016) and Janet Pierrehumbert (e.g. Pierrehumbert 2003), have come to appreciate that variation is an important component of the grammar of any living language.

Research by scholars such as these has also encouraged sociolinguists to incorporate state-of-the-art syntactic and phonological theories into their work, thus raising the interest in these theories and the data that they embody amongst sociolinguists, and leading to a richer and more varied analysis. Another domain in which general linguistics and sociolinguistics have joined forces is the nascent field of historical sociolinguistics (e.g. Salmons 2018; Janda & Joseph 2011), incorporating core elements of sociolinguistic theory and methodology in a hitherto socially void treatment of language change.

As far as the study of Arabic is concerned, the work of Jonathan Owens is of particular relevance. His 2006 book A Linguistic History of Arabic is the first substantial work that integrates sociolinguistic principles in the historical reconstruction of Arabic. For example, in his chapter on Imala – which he defines, following Sibawayh, as “the change of a long aa to an ee-like value in the context of an /i/ in a preceding or following syllable” (Owens 2006: 197) – Owens asserts: “it is ultimately impossible to separate the linguistic treatment from dialectological and sociolectal variation” (201).³

Milestones

Arabic sociolinguistics is a thriving field of inquiry. The study, in earnest, of Arabic socio-linguistic variation, i.e. the correlation between variation in spoken Arabic and social and stylistic factors, began in the 1970s along two parallel tracks. In the United States, scholars such as Richard Schmidt (1974) and Hassan Abdel-Jawad (1981) wrote their doctoral dissertations within the Labovian Paradigm (on Egyptian and Jordanian dialects, respectively), while in Britain, Clive Holes’s (1987) pioneering work on Bahrain grew out of the dialectological tradition, which had been in place at the time, mostly in Europe, for about a century. This noticeable difference between the development of Arabic sociolinguistics in each of these regions is quite significant. In Europe it developed organically out of Arabic dialectology, which dates as far back as the history of dialectology itself, while in the United States, the earliest works in this field were, to a large extent, disconnected from this tradition. It wasn’t until the 1990s that we see the two lines intersect, with the work of Niloofar Haeri on Cairo (under Labov’s supervision at the University of Pennsylvania; published as a monograph in 1996) and that of Enam Al-Wer’s (1991) on Jordanian dialects (under Peter Trudgill at the University of Essex).

That research in Arabic sociolinguistics began in Europe and America is probably related to what later became one of the main obstacles to the expansion of research on Arabic dialects: attitudes in the Arab World had for a long time been negative as far as the enterprise of studying spoken language was concerned. This, we can say with satisfaction, has now changed to some extent, and there are many Arabic departments, as well as Linguistics and English departments, in Arab universities, where sociolinguistics is taught and researched. However, this improvement in attitude has been slow and somewhat inconsistent. Following an increase in the analysis of empirical data from spoken Arabic dialects in the 1980s, the region has seen something of a decline in such scholarship. We attribute much of this setback to socio-political instability in the Middle East, and in particular to the rise in many Arab societies of reactionary politics and its by-products, namely social fundamentalism and conservatism, which extend to the conceptualisation of Arabic as an imagined perfect language. Spoken dialects are considered by many not to be legitimate forms of language, and thus not worthy of being taught, learned or examined scientifically. These reactionary political stances have, in part, contributed to a reversal of intellectual achievements that viewed linguistic varieties through an egalitarian prism.

At the same time, the Arab World is experiencing what can be described as a vernacularisation of language. The sudden boom in electronic media in the last decade of the 20th century, which continued with the proliferation of the internet and social media in the first two decades of the 21st century, has brought spoken varieties into every household where Arabic is spoken. For the first time, viewers in Egypt were exposed to Syrian Arabic in soap operas, and speakers of Lebanese Arabic were introduced to talk shows from the Gulf; people began communicating on social media in their own vernaculars, even when chatting with speakers of other dialects on the other side of the region. In a time when politics have deteriorated and the ‘guardians of language’, as Peter Trudgill called them, have tried to promote the use of Standard Arabic, lamenting that it has been losing ground to the vernaculars, more and more people have been reading and writing in a wide array of Arabic varieties (including but by no means limited to Standard Arabic). This quiet linguistic revolution has not been lost on linguists in the region, who have capitalised on the proliferation of language use and the exchange of information in countless forms of the language.

Analytical approaches

An almost inevitable corollary of Arabic sociolinguistics, starting in the West at a time when models of sociolinguistic analysis were almost in their infancy, is the application of the model of analysis of modern European languages, most notably English. In these studies, prestige/stigma and standardisation were central nodes in the model that facilitated the understanding of variation. In the 1970s, in the early stages of analysing variation in Arabic, T.F. Mitchell and his associate Shahir El-Hassan laid important foundations for subsequent developments in this line of research, primarily through their treatment of Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA) in Egypt and Jordan. Interestingly, Mitchell had approached variationist theory with a critical eye: as his analysis of ESA was premised on it being a “koineized form of speech” (Mitchell 1978: 227), he argued the following:

although variationism may seem to offer the best prospect for success, its practice has so far been largely confined to programmatic statements or to the study of particulars and, as far as I know, not even an outline grammar of a koine, indeed of a foreign language, has been produced in variationist terms.

(Mitchell 1978: 256)

Similarly, El-Hassan, who cites scholars such as Ferguson, Blanc and Badawi as pioneers in the study of variation in Arabic, is also critical of some of their basic assumptions. For instance, he responds to Blanc’s assertion (1960) that case and mood endings (known in Arabic as ʾiʿrāb) are limited in unscripted speech to “set phrases” and “proverbs” by proposing an approach that is more in line with the variationist approach, which at the time was a recent theoretical development led by Labov:

It is also worth noting that speakers who know the ‘rules’ of Classical ʾiʿrāb are not consistent in applying these rules to their speech. This is reminiscent of what William Labov has called ‘inherent variability’, i.e. variation in the speech of the same person which is without (or seems without) any apparent motivation. Perhaps such variation is after all controlled by a set of variable linguistic and extralinguistic constraints.

(El-Hassan 1977: 121–122)

Gradually, a new model of analysis more befitting of Arabic was developed, spearheaded by Muhammad Hassan Ibrahim’s 1986 seminal article “Standard and prestige language: a problem in Arabic sociolinguistics”.⁴ In this article, Ibrahim resolved a conundrum regarding the role of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in sociolinguistic stratification. It had appeared until then that Arabic vernaculars were evolving in directions that contradicted the trajectories of change in languages like English.

His article shifted the discussion away from MSA as a resource speakers use to achieve prestige and explained that, as a language with no native speakers, it cannot be stratified in the same manner that spoken varieties are. Rather, Ibrahim asserted that multiple standards, in the sense referred to in the prevailing research on English variation, exist for Arabic speakers, and these standards are not MSA. Supra-local standards, which are themselves spoken dialects and not a superposed variety (as MSA is) are the ones that speakers of virtually any given Arabic dialect aspire to emulate if and when they are seeking to elevate their level of prestige. It is these supra-local standards, not MSA, that Ibrahim suggested were analogous to standard varieties of modern European languages. He therefore concluded that there was in fact no conflict between the research findings for Arabic and the patterns previously detected in other languages. Ibrahim thus tried to guide the discipline differently and more realistically, and following in his footsteps came studies that engaged with Arabic-speaking communities more closely.⁵

Abdel-Jawad (1987) incorporated Ibrahim’s approach and suggested that there were “competing prestigious forms” in the data from Nablus that he analysed in his paper. Haeri (1996) and Al-Wer (1991, 1997) were more forthright about the role supra-local dialects play in processes of language change for Arabic-speaking communities. Al-Wer (1997) surveyed the results of several sociolinguistic investigations of variation and change in spoken Arabic and concluded that these are determined by interactions between local dialects. In Al-Wer (2013), a further assertion is made: namely, that in light of the findings in four decades of sociolinguistic research on Arabic dialects, the proper approach to the analysis of variation in Arabic “is one that begins by grounding the linguistic data in the linguistic system from which they are derived (the local dialect) and the social context with which they interact (the local community)” (p. 256).

This approach has had an important knock-on effect in the way gender-differentiated linguistic patterns were interpreted (cf. Labov 2001). In this domain, patterns that had appeared to contravene general trends reported for other languages were reinterpreted. Other later scholars of Arabic sociolinguistics (e.g. Keith Walters, Aziza Al-Essa, Hanadi Ismail, Atiqa Hachimi; see Walters 1991; Al-Essa 2009; Ismail 2007; Hachimi 2012) have also correctly adopted this reinterpretation, positing that there is in fact no contradiction at all between the principles of gender-driven language change proposed by Labov and the results emerging from studies of Arabic dialects. At the same time, we wish to point out two apparent failures on the part of sociolinguists working on Arabic. The first failure is one of substance: while solid research in the field has confirmed this lack of contradiction time and time again, work that still considers the MSA–dialect dichotomy to be the be all and end all of variation in Arabic perpetuates the falsehood that Arabic data exhibit a reversal of Labov’s principle. This is compounded by poor practices of data collection and analysis carried out by some scholars.

The second failure is at the meta level: we have not successfully communicated this new understanding to colleagues who are not in the ‘inner circle’ of sociolinguists working on Arabic. Misconceptions regarding not only the role of gender, but also surrounding the very understanding of the history of Arabic, the structure of variation in Arabic, and what constitutes the standard(s) for Arabic speakers, still prevail among both linguists of Arabic who are not variationists, and among theoreticians of variationist sociolinguistics who are not familiar with the complexity of the Arabic sociolinguistic context (e.g....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Arabic sociolinguistics: principles and epistemology
• Part I Historical aspects
• Part II Dimensions of variation
• Part III Levels of analysis
• Part IV Aspects of sociolinguistics in the Maghreb
• Part V Language and ideology
• Part VI Applied sociolinguistics
• Index