Arabic Writing in the Digital Age

Towards a Theoretical Framework

Saussan Khalil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000585346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The written and spoken forms of Arabic have been traditionally viewed as separate forms of the language that rarely overlap in writing, but this book will examine the recently emerged concept of 'mixed' writing that combines both written and spoken forms.

This book takes a close look at different examples of mixed Arabic writing in modern (twentieth to twenty-firstt century) print and online literature, offering an analysis of this type of mixing alongside a dynamic model for analysing mixed Arabic writing, and the motivations for producing this type of writing. This book further introduces the ground-breaking concept of the seven writing styles for Arabic, ranging from Classical Arabic to ChatSpeak, whilst also offering an overview of early Arabic literacy and children's literature.

Primarily aimed at Arabic researchers and teachers in linguistics, sociolinguistics, identity studies, politics and Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, this book would also be informative for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Arabic as foreign language, Arabic linguistics and dialectology.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003044321-1

The Arab Spring is one of the most remarkable and significant moments in recent memory in the Arab world and spawned many of the current events we are witnessing today. At the time, it resonated globally, as people witnessed revolt for the first time against decades-long autocratic regimes. The 2011 uprisings were unforeseen and seemed to come out of nowhere to experts and laypeople alike. Since then, much analysis has been done to try and understand how these uprisings came to be, what their impact has been and what they may lead to in the future. The outcomes of these remarkable uprisings ranged from regime change to civil war, and their impact is still being felt globally today. Much was made of the role of the Internet and online communication tools in the facilitation of the uprisings, at least initially, but much less attention was paid to the language used to formulate the online messages that were communicated to hundreds of thousands of followers, and that went seemingly undetected at the time by the notorious security services.

In the case of Egypt in particular, I witnessed with amazement the simple, bold, articulate messages being posted and shared online by a new generation of online youth political activists. They were expressing messages of anger at the status quo, hope for change, and the power of the collective will to subvert a reality that was becoming more oppressive and cruel by the day. The tipping point came after the brutal broad-daylight torture and murder of a young local man, Khaled Said, at the hands of the Egyptian security forces for daring to post images of police brutality in Egypt online. Said became the face of the Egyptian revolution.

Working online to spread the news and messages of discontent, and organising peaceful protest events, the language of choice for the young activists showed a clear break with tradition, for they did not simply write in the standard variety of Arabic found in newspapers and other forms of traditional political discourse, instead opting more for the colloquial variety and in effect finding a more genuine voice for themselves that set them apart from the political establishments of the regime and the opposition.

I started the study that forms the basis for this book in 2011 by following the Facebook page of one of the most influential youth political activist groups at the time, the 6th April Youth Movement, which was used for communicating with the group’s 1 million+ members and followers. The study first came to be as an initial observation by a curious researcher of what appeared to be a novel yet effective use of language, bearing the hallmarks of speech, but in a written format. Since the Arabic language is known for its use of a strict standard variety for writing, which is separate from the spoken form used for everyday communication, this appeared to be an intriguing use of language worthy of further investigation and research. The Internet had been seen up until the time of the 2011 uprisings as trivial, both in content and form, by an older generation, who did not pay much attention to it at the time, as it was perceived to be used by the younger generation for gaming and chatting, and little else. Part of this image of frivolity, I believed, must have lain in the language variety used for communication and young people’s conscious choice to use spoken versus standard Arabic to communicate in writing online. Nowadays the Internet and social media in particular play a more essential role in virtually all of our everyday lives, across all generations and for all purposes in Egypt and around the world. Certainly in Egypt at least, the proliferation of social media in daily life can be traced back to the events of 2011 (Egypt Independent, 2011; Spot on Public Relations, 2011; Ahram Online, 2012).

And so began a journey of discovery of Arabic language use online, and later the use of spoken Arabic forms in print writing. At the time I began this study, scholarly interest in online Arabic writing centred around the use of Latinised Arabic, otherwise known as Arabizi, that is, Arabic written in Latin script, often with the insertion of numbers to represent letters that have no corresponding sound in the Latin alphabet, like the number 3 for the Arabic letter ‘ayn (ع), the number 7 for ḥa (ح), etc. To my knowledge, little to no research had been conducted around online Arabic writing in Arabic script, much less into mixed or colloquial writing in print. However, after personal circumstances dictated a break from this study, and upon returning to it two years later, I found a relative abundance of new literature on mixed Arabic writing, including online writing. This became an exciting opportunity to make valuable observations and reflections on the state of Arabic writing, both online and in print, and to compare my findings with those of the new studies. It has certainly been a fascinating and enlightening journey, the results of which are shared in this book. I hope they succeed in shining more light on the breadth and depth of written Arabic. This book is not intended as an end point by any means, but rather a starting point for observing the shifting sands of the ever-changing, forever evolving, always living, Arabic language.

Background

From a sociolinguistic perspective, Arabic is a complex language with distinct forms that vary between writing and speaking. Traditionally, the written form of the language referred to as fuṣḥá is more or less standardised across the Arab world, making it an attractive language choice for publishers and media outlets seeking to maximise their audiences. Conversely, the spoken form comprises a range of regional, non-standardised forms referred to as ‘āmmīyah that vary greatly across the Arab world. This language situation has been famously described as ‘diglossia’ (Ferguson, 1959) and forms the basis of many modern sociolinguistic studies of Arabic. The situation is further complicated by the existence of numerous regional and local dialects, which range from the mutually intelligible to the mutually unintelligible. And while this diglossic situation has been well documented for spoken Arabic, when it comes to written Arabic, much less scholarly attention has been paid to the influence of diglossia.

In The Politics of Written Language (Brustad, 2017), Brustad argues that the very existence of diglossia can be seen as the result of the ideology that arose at the time of the nahḍah, or Arab Enlightenment, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Arabic language received much attention in the form of modernisation and standardisation efforts, which led to the modernisation of fuṣḥá and the emergence of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It is this modernisation and standardisation process that has allowed MSA to become the standard variety used in officialdom across the Arab world. Before this, we find variations in the history of written Arabic, as well as changing attitudes and practice towards writing in the spoken form. In fact, Brustad argues that standardisation and de-standardisation have existed in ‘waves’ over time, with standardisation waves occurring at the time of the early codification of Arabic in the early centuries of Islam and the twentieth-century Arab nahḍah, while de-standardisation occurred with so-called Middle Arabic. This is a term referring to a form of Classical Arabic that makes use of spoken forms and existed up to the time of the nahḍah, comparable to the more modern and contemporary ‘mixed’ forms of Arabic that similarly mix between the standard and spoken varieties. In fact, according to Badawi (1973), mixed Arabic can be seen as the ‘true’ native use of Arabic, since fuṣḥá is rarely produced other than by religious scholars or in news media.

Ferguson’s description of Arabic as diglossic was followed by another major study by Badawi (1973), which expanded on this theory and identified five discrete levels of contemporary Arabic in Egypt: Classical Arabic (fuṣḥá al-turāth), Modern Standard Arabic (fuṣḥá al-’asr), Educated Spoken Arabic (‘āmmīyat al-muthaqqafīn), Less-educated Spoken Arabic (‘āmmīyat al-mutanawwirīn) and Illiterate Spoken Arabic (‘āmmīyat al-ummiyīn). Badawi’s model is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, but for now, suffice to say in identifying Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA) as a language level, it laid the groundwork for several other studies of mixed Arabic to emerge, by highlighting the fact that most educated speakers of Arabic with knowledge of and some degree of mastery of Standard Arabic, can and do mix very naturally between the standard and spoken forms in their speech. Furthermore, more recent evidence (Bassiouney, 2006, 2013; Mejdell, 2006, 2014) points to the mixed style as being the dominant style in formal speech, rendering diglossic or ‘level’ models as outdated or even obsolete since most native speakers operate within the mixed realm of the language. Another interesting concept that has arisen to explain mixed codes is that of the continuum (Rickford, 1987), which was applied to Arabic by Hary (1996). Again, the concept is discussed more fully in Chapter 2, but at least on the surface, it would seem that native speakers have more underlying intuitions and give themselves much further scope for language mixing than the concept suggests. Standard Arabic, with its prescriptive grammar, can be seen on the continuum as a kind of target, which speakers may aim to hit, or aim roughly towards hitting, rather than a model for actual language use.

Indeed, to simply say that the varieties of Arabic divide neatly along the lines of writing and speaking is far too simplistic and indeed idealistic. In more practical terms, we could view language use in terms of style and register in relation to formality or informality of situations, with the implication that formal situations ‘call for’ (have the standard linguistic correspondents of) formal language, while informal situations ‘call for’ (have the standard linguistic correspondents of) informal language; rather than having a fixed frame of reference for speech – for who nowadays, apart from newsreaders speaks completely in MSA? On the other hand, who speaks in a way that manipulates the wide range and scope of the language, to suit the tone, register and for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Variation in Arabic
• 3 A delineation of variation in Arabic
• 4 The proposed theoretical framework: seven writing styles
• 5 A practical application of the writing styles in online writing
• 6 Colloquial Written Arabic in print, in various dialects
• 7 Children’s literature and early literacy
• 8 Conclusion
• Index