Middle East and Dictator speak

[Archana Raja]

Something of interest to people following the Arab unrest: The Economist has an interesting linguistic detour (link).The Tunisian and Egyptian despots chose different dialects while addressing their angry people. The former chose to talk in a local dialect, instead of the Modern Standard Arabic that is used for formal occasions. Have appended some background info from the Language Log's take on the Tunisian speech. 

For those who aren't familiar with Arabic diglossia, a plausible analogy would be to equate "Classical Arabic" with Latin, to compare "Modern Standard Arabic" (MSA) to the variety of Latin used in the Vatican (with words and phrases added over the years to refer to more recent objects and concepts), and to link the various "spoken" Arabics (sometimes called "colloquials" or "dialects") with modern Latin-derived "Romance" languages like French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.

The analogy is incomplete, since MSA is taught everywhere in schools, used almost everywhere in the media, and is the only variety of Arabic with significant presence in a written form. The "spoken" or "colloquial" Arabics are used in everyday life, but generally don't have a standard written form and are rarely written. Still, the linguistic differences between MSA and Tunisian or Syrian are roughly as large as those between Latin and French or Spanish.

A story may illustrate some of the ideologies involved. A few decades ago, a Tunisian linguist who had studied in the U.S. returned to a university position in Tunisia. Because some of his published work dealt with the phonetics and phonology of Tunisian Spoken Arabic, one of his colleagues formally accused him in the faculty senate of bringing the Tunisian nation into disrepute, by suggesting in print that Tunisians spoke such a degenerate and incorrect variety of Arabic.

[Antariksh Bothale]

And it caused all the more interest since this was the first time he chose to do so...

2011/1/30 Archana Raja <archa...@gmail.com>

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Antariksh Bothale
Institute Secretary for International Relations
4th Year, Mechanical Engineering
IIT Bombay