Arabic is a “Semitic language
first attested by inscriptions in the Arabian peninsula from about the
5th century BC carried by the expansion of Islam in the 7th and 8th
centuries AD to a large area across the southern Mediterranean and the
Middle East, and thence, as a language of religion especially, much
wider. Written in a North Semitic alphabet, in origin purely consonantal, but with marks for vowels added in the 8th century.
The language of the Koran is Classical Arabic, and modern Arabic-speaking communities are in the main diglossic,
with a range of variation between ‘Modern Standard Arabic’, a form of
Classical Arabic with a modernized vocabulary, and one of many national
or local ‘dialects’. At sufficient distances these dialects are mutually
unintelligible.” So says the Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics.
Are language, dialect, Classical, Modern Standard, the 8th century and the MENA what we talk about when we talk about Arabic?
Leaving
aside the problem of assessing a foreign language (the Arabic, Semitic)
using another’s (the English, Indo-European) terminology and concepts,
when we discuss Arabic, we use terms that rely on many an assumption. I
have always found the adjectives chosen to describe the Arabic language
strikingly tortuous and contradictory. Modern Standard Arabic? Is
Modern meant as contemporary, as in the Arabic used today? What of
‘Standard’? If ‘Standard’ refers to ‘standardised’ then it is referring
to 12th century Arabic scholasticism during which the
grammatical rules of Arabic were fixed. If Standard is indeed a
shortcut for ‘standardised in 12th century’ then ‘Modern’ in
the sense of contemporary creates an incongruity: contemporary old
Arabic? If Standard means regular, the compound would stand for ‘a regular type of contemporary Arabic’. What kind of linguistic descriptions are these!
What
of the Classical attribute? The term ‘Classical’ is a Western reference
to its own time line, and to its own notion of a golden era.
‘Classical’ is not appropriate for a non-Western time line. Arabic had
already shifted by the 8th century, early grammatical treatises attest to that. Arabic continued to develop synchronically during the 8th century also, it did not remain static; that is the nature of languages, they shift, they change. The 8th-12th
century does not correspond to a Classical era in the Arabic tradition.
‘Classical’ does not communicate an appropriate synchronic description
of Arabic, nor a diachronic one. It freezes Arabic within a timeframe
that is foreign and temporally misplaced. The result of the kind of
Arabic early and medieval grammarians were attempting to describe and
categorise, and later, from the 12th century had to
standardise for didactic purposes cannot be aptly described by
‘Classical’. ‘Classical’ can indeed signify traditional, conventional,
orthodox, established, and this array of meanings infers Arabic belongs
to a fixed, rigid, frozen dimension. Languages are not motionless.
Arabic has not been motionless. Why is it that we do not refer to
Arabic as we refer to other languages: describing them diachronically.
Why do we not designate Arabic according to its place in time: Ancient
Arabic, old Arabic, middle Arabic, Arabic?
Classical Arabic and
Modern Standard are not even translations of what Arabic calls itself.
Both are foreign labels born out of a need to try and apprehend a
language system most elusive.
Arabic in Arabic
Arabic in Arabic responds to two titles. It bears a crown name: fuṣḥā (the eloquent and pure), and a birth name: al-3arabiya
(the Arabic). The great dictionaries of Arabic lexicography, the
All-Encompassing Ocean (Qamous al-Muhit), and the Tongue of the Arabs
(Lisan al-3arab) define al-3arabiya, as ‘the language of the Arabs’.
Now, this is one clear definition. Fuṣḥā is an adjective meaning
eloquent, and grammatically and semantically it describes a certain kind
of Arabic.
Early and Medieval grammarians (8th to 12th
century) were engaged in preserving and analysing this specific Arabic:
fuṣḥā. Eloquent and pure is to be understood as that which respects the
grammatical rules observed occurring in this particular language
system, it is not a reference to ethnic purity. Fuṣḥā was first
observed and examined. Then, the rules it seemed to live by were laid
out in grammatical treatises, and as time went on and as the number of
new Arabic speakers (non-native and native) grew these rules became
increasingly prescriptive. The geographical area where Arabic was being
taken was growing fast and a certain type of fuṣḥā was being codified.
Fuṣḥā and Arabic should not have become the amalgamated notion for a
single speech phenomenon. Fuṣḥā is one manifestation of an Arabic whose
origin still remains to be elucidated. Fuṣḥā is an adjective after all,
to identify, not a speech register, but a specific linguistic system
responding to particular grammatical rules. Fuṣḥā is not the
origin of Arabic. Fuṣḥā is perhaps to be located between pre-islamic
poetry and the revelation of Quran. These two terms, Arabic and fuṣḥā
could help differentiate between a language whose origin we are still
tracing (Arabic), and a language, part of a group and varieties for
which we have written evidence (fuṣḥā). These two birth points (Arabic
and the qualifier fuṣḥā) should be disassociated. Because the orthodox
Abrahamic narrative focuses on an Arabic placed at the origin of a
community’s birth (the muslim umma), and because this focus has been the
most prominent not to say the loudest, Arabic is often treated as the
divine: its origin is certain, it is not to be questioned. The origin of
language was much debated between the 8th–10th
century. The debate was not about the origin of Arabic, it questioned
the origin of human speech. What a wretched development that such
debates and critical inquiries have not continued.
The confusion
or conflagration of two points of origin (origin of a religious
community and origin of an entire language system) gave birth to a fuṣḥā
fixation and a ‘dialectal’ inhibition.
Let us confess, yes,
speakers of Arabic ‘dialects’ carry with them the fuṣḥā complex. And it
is a manufactured complex. This neurosis was created internally, during
the Arab expansion and invasion, perhaps as early as the 12th century,
and was reinforced pre- and post-decolonisation by Arab states. While
the formulation of the neurosis came from an external source, outside
the borders of the state – yes from my East I am indeed pointing
westwards.
Where does our dialectal inhibition come from and what does its reasoning sound like?
In Arabic, several words mean dialect or vernacular, Arabic is rich that way we know. 3amiyya is a term used by Egyptians to refer to the Egyptian ‘dialect’. Lahja is one
of the terms used in the Levant to refer to the region’s ‘dialects’.
Derja is the term used in North Africa to designate the Algerian and
Moroccan ‘dialects’. These different terms are used to mean a dialect
yet they refer to a language. What? Are they not languages for you?
Let’s look at how ‘experts’ formulate the language/dialect concepts.
The terms ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ remain problematic in Western linguistics and in Arabic studies. In the 6th edition of A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (David Crystal) we find:
Language: “….
At its most specific level, it may refer to the concrete act of
speaking, writing or signing (see SIGN language) in a given situation –
the notion of PAROLE, or PERFORMANCE […] A particular VARIETY, or
LEVEL, of speech/writing may also be referred to as ‘language’ (e.g.
‘scientific language’, ‘bad language’), and this is related to the
SOCIOLINGUISTIC or STYLISTIC restrictiveness involved in such terms as
‘trade language’ (see PIDGIN), the teaching of ‘languages for special
purposes’ (in APPLIED LINGUISTICS), etc.
The notion of
language may be seen both in a synchronic sense (e.g. ‘the English
language today’) and a DIACHRONIC sense (e.g. ‘the English language
since Chaucer’). Higher-order groupings can be made, as in such notions
as the ‘Romance languages’ ‘CREOLE languages’. All of these examples
would fall under the heading of ‘natural languages’ – a term which
contrasts with the artificially constructed systems used to expound a
conceptual area (e.g. ‘formal’, ‘logical’, ‘computer’ languages) or to
facilitate communication (e.g. Esperanto).”
This
definition of language, abstract as it is (parole, diachrony,
synchrony) relies on a notion of variety. This could go some way to help
delimitate the two concepts language/dialect but ‘variety’ is also used
to define dialects.
Dialect: “A
regionally or socially distinctive VARIETY of language, identified by a
particular set of WORDS and GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES. Spoken dialects are
usually also associated with a distinctive pronunciation, or ACCENT.
Any language with a reasonable large number of speakers will develop
dialects, especially if there are geographical barriers separating
groups of people from each other, or if there are divisions of social
class. One dialect may predominate as the official or STANDARD form of
the language, and this is the variety which may come to be written
down. The distinction between ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ seems obvious:
dialectas are subdivisions of languages. What linguistics (and
especially SOCIOLINGUISTICS) has done is to point to the complexity of
the relationship between these notions. It is usually said that people speak different languages when they do not understand each other. But the so-called ‘dialects’ of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc) are mutually unintelligible in their spoken form.
(They do, however, share the same written language [surely, what is
meant here is that they share the same script], which is the main reason
why one talks of them as ‘dialects of Chinese’). [OUR EMPHASIS]
‘Dialect’
is also sometimes applied to the linguistically distinct historical
stages through which a language has passed, and here the term historical
or temporal dialect might be used, e.g. Elizabethan English,
seventeenth-century British English.”
This definition of dialect is most relevant for Arabic. First,
the way Chinese ‘dialects’ are referred to is significant (and on a
side note, it pleases me no end to find the mention “so-called dialects”
in a specialist dictionary entry since that is exactly what it is: a
model based on an alleged concept. We are told that languages are
recognisable because they are mutually unintelligible. Our Arabic
‘dialects’ are mutually unintelligible the further geographically
located they are. Couldn’t it mean that Arabic ‘dialects’ are languages
then? The understanding of Arabic dialects among Arabic speakers depends
on the exposure of the hearer to these tongues, notwithstanding that
Arabic dialects are genetically related to fuṣḥā. Understanding an
Arabic ‘dialect’ does not depend only on the similarity of the ‘dialect’
itself to a ‘source’ language but having been exposed to it enough to
pick it up.
Perhaps the most crucial part of this definition of dialect for assessing the case of Arabic is “One
dialect may predominate as the official or STANDARD form of the
language, and this is the variety which may come to be written down.”
This is indeed what has happened with fuṣḥā. From the time of
revelation, one version of Arabic was favoured. Arabic grammatical
treatises of the 8th to 10th century contain many
examples of other kind of usages that deviate from what was an expected
form. These unusual syntactical and semantic examples were not in wide
use. We also know that there existed the sab3a qira’at, seven readings, of Quran (revealed in seven ahruf)
that attested to at least seven accents and dialectal variations with
the reading (and writing) of Quran eventually standardised. The Bedouins
were held to speak a variety of fuṣḥā that was the representative of a
certain kind of Arabic. We can trace through the grammatical treatises that have come down to us that fuṣḥā, over at least 4 centuries (8th-12th)
was both undergoing change and evolving in the form we mostly know
today, and that what we now consider ‘exceptions’ were once considered
only as uncommon and remnant of a better clearer (more eloquent)
language. With time, different semantic usages and different
grammatical features of an evolving fuṣḥā were classed as ‘exceptions’.
Written Arabic shows that there were and are three spheres intertwined:
Arabic, fuṣḥā and ‘dialects’.
So, is Arabic a language or a
dialect? Is fuṣḥā a language or a dialect? Are our dialects, well,
dialects? Let’s leave dictionary entries and inquire into the mind of
the layman. For many Western laymen, myself included, and for many of
us Complexed-of-the-Tongue (Arabic dialect speakers) ‘language’ mostly
refers to an official, general and wide-ranging use of speech while a
‘dialect’ is regional, with a more restricted use. Thus, the word
‘language’ carries a positive connotation, and wears a formal
respectable social cloak, while a dialect carries a neutral to negative
connotation.
Let us explore etymologies.
‘Language’ is a
Latin word that simply means ‘tongue’ (lingua). ‘Dialect’ is a word of
Greek origin and simply means ‘talk, conversation, speech’ (dialektos).
We note that the positive term is of Latin origin while the negative
connotation is carried by the Greek. The negative-Greek versus the
positive-Latin is amusing. It is a telling example of how our choice of
words and the concepts they carry are still predisposed to promoting
ancient Rome’s world view and the Roman sense of cultural superiority.
Rome’s inheritors are still squashing the Greeks daily.
Inquiring a
little further into our unqualified minds (ok, my unqualified mind), we
seem to interpret a ‘dialect’ as a variety whose dimension is
principally oral. A dialect is often equated with the unwritten and
with being difficult to render in writing. This assumed un-writable
characteristic is a further sign of weakness and a failing according to a
certain Western tradition that implicitly holds a worthy ‘tongue’ and
therefore culture is one which is written. The Western tradition is not
the only one to hierarchically class the written above the oral. The
Arabic tradition born in the 8th century rests on ‘iqra’, not
the TV channel but the divine order that told us to ‘read!’. It thus
encouraged the addressees to start writing in order to have something to
read other than their hearts. Only the divine knows the heart and that
is not accessible reading for the neighbours and the rest of humanity.
Nor is it inheritable, a crucial weakness.
A language then we could say is identifiable by at least two parameters: it is written and we are told it’s one. Who tells us?
The nation-state.
To make a nation-state
you only need three components: 1) a people, 2) a territory with
borders, and 3) a language to claim that bordered territory and insult
those who trespass. That is when one version of a language is selected
and crowned, and that this version is institutionally born. Note that
these ingredients are violently singular, ONE language, ONE people. You
all know the cruel joke that the difference between a language and a
dialect is that the language has an army. But wait, Algeria has an
army, does it make Derja a language? I say it does.
Talking of
Algeria, in 1959 while Algerians were fighting for their independence
against France who had taken ingredient number two to a fanatical
extreme, a linguist called Fergusson came up with a much needed
temporary explanatory solution for the problematic classification of
language and dialect when these were in common daily use within one
community. No, not bilingualism, too easy, but: diglossia. Charles A. Ferguson in the journal Word
defined this linguistic phenomenon as that which “affects a speech
community using two languages, genetically related or not”. One, he
classed, represents a ‘high variety’ and the other of a ‘low variety’.
Ferguson defined the ‘high variety’ as the one used within literary
discourse, and which holds a prestigious social position, and the ‘low
variety’ was recognisable by its use in ordinary conversation. Here we
find again the hierarchy we encountered earlier as laymen: prestige
(embodied by Latin, lingua) and lowly conversation (Ancient Greek
based).
Thus, what appeared as a language/dialect division for
Arabic was a case of diglossic variation, a sort of bilingualism, but
involving two genetically related varieties. Diglossia has a distinct
socio-hierarchical flavour to it: the prestigious versus the ordinary.
Have Arabic dialects no prestige? Are they not used as literary vehicles
and in the arts? But the Algerian language, sorry Derja dialect, is
the language of a prestigious theatre.
Sounds literary and prestigious enough, no? So we slowly come to the
crux of my motivation: Derja is a language, not a variety or a dialect
nor an offshoot of fuṣḥā.
It seems to me that it is not the
tongues that are the problem. Their classification is a challenge and
observing languages is a fascinating process when one doesn’t forget
that it also is a scientific process: proof is needed, falsifiability
must be applied. But languages are also a powerful political tool and that
is when classifying languages becomes a dangerous, and revealing,
instrument to validate cultural hegemony. What is highly problematic is
the paradigm we use to think of language (based on the language/dialect
or language/variety dichotomy) - a paradigm that is hidden under the
term ‘definition’. The concepts language/dialect or language/variety are
intellectual shackles.
Trying to rephrase and rethink dialect and language is akin to trying
to wear the chains in a manner more comfortable. This paradigm is based
on a disturbing hierarchical division: a single point of origin (the
language) with everything else emanating from that original (dialect or
variety): not Adam and Eve but Language and Dialect, how biblical, no!
This arbitrary binary system language/dialect or language/variety
paradigm also boxes language phenomena, so rich in essence, into two
slots. Examining Arabic, a language as any other, according to a
language/dialect or even a language/variety hierarchical and binary
division is suffocating. It creates a circular, smothering cell. Let us
try and burst a wall or two of it.
Arabics?
Could
it be that there is no Arabic … but Arabics? That what exists is a
plurality of Arabic tongues, of languages, among which we find fuṣḥā.
The reality on the ground today certainly points that way, there are
Arabics. What if there always had been Arabics? Arabic ‘dialects’ are
not poor renditions of fuṣḥā. They work according to their own
grammatical and semantic rules. Arabic dialects do not form cases of
fuṣḥā-violations nor of fuṣḥā-corruptions. Arabic 'dialects' were not
born from rendering fuṣḥā incorrectly. Fuṣḥā did not give birth to
Arabic 'dialects'. While it influenced Arabic 'dialects', it did not mix
with the 'locals' and resulted single handedly in building fuṣḥā
varities later called dialects. From the point at which we can trace
fuṣḥā in detail (in grammatical treatises from 8th century
onwards) we see that it changed and carried on changing. Its modern
rendition is just, well, fuṣḥā not the same but similar in many respects
grammatically and syntactically, close but further removed
grammatically and semantically. Semitic languages do evolve just as any
languages but Semitic languages are peculiar in that the changes are
not as vast as what we find in old French and contemporary French for
example. This relative slow change can be a misleading factor. But
change, however little comparatively speaking, is still change.
Let
me venture further and propose: could it be that Arabic is not simply a
language, but a system? A linguistic system where this singular
feminine noun, ‘Arabic’, represents not only a plurality of Arabics but
also stands for a family of languages. This Arabic system would class as
a sub-system of the Semitic branch and under its umbrella we would find
fuṣḥā and our Arabic dialects
languages. If Arabic is the language of the Arabs, is it not plural by
definition? Arabs refers to a plurality. This classification would not
discount the fact that each Arabic tongue can give rise to many local
varieties. I say, there are Arabics among which Derja, an Algerian
language. And fuṣḥā stands next to each Arabic tongue as an equal, not a
dictator.
Arabic tongues are not dialects submitted to the mother
language fuṣḥā. Arabic tongues are languages in their own rights
within the Arabic system. Arabic ‘dialects’ contain words we find in
ancient fuṣḥā, yes, and their sentence structure has been observed as
having given preference to one of the sentence structures already
present in 8th century fuṣḥā. But some dialects also display
sentence structures that are inherited from another linguistic system:
Derja contains structural features of Tamazight. Although the sentence
structure varies from Arabic tongue (dialect) to Arabic tongue (dialect),
each still belongs in part or in full to the Arabic system. They do not
originate from fuṣḥā, they were affected by it and other languages.
‘Arabic dialects’ are not corruptions of a pure form of Arabic. We
simply do not know the origin of Arabic and of dialects. We should also
drop the puritanical search for purity, for a single singular point of
origin.
In passing, we note that a majority of Arabic dialects
happen to have a nation and a people and have officially been given the
next best title: national languages (close to Language but not quite
there yet!). The ‘Arab world’ has classed Arabic tongues as dialects
for political reasons. Only one version, fuṣḥā, was promoted in order to
create a unified political entity. This promotion was pushed both
during and after the Arab conquest, for administrative reasons not for
the love of God (also known once as religion). It was promoted again
when countries formerly belonging to the territories conquered by the
Arabs were trying to free themselves from colonialism. The countries
that now belong to the ‘Arab world’ had to define their identity (well
to defend their right to exist initially) and to prove their potential
as nation-states: ONE language, ONE people, ONE territory. Ironically,
countries in the ‘Arab world’ have tied a knot back to their glorious
past using the formulations of the former coloniser as cord.
The
binding material of a community is what it considers to be a shared
identity. This shared identity is not explicitly stated until a calamity
strikes: meeting the other. It only becomes necessary to explicitly
define an identity when meeting an ‘other’ who does not belong to the
community. It does not mean that the community’s identity did not exist
pre-explicit-definition. It is a matter of the implicit giving rise to
the explicit. Words have no meaning alone,
they only acquire meaning when they are placed in relation to other
words, they form a net and there are several nets layered. We
understand the word ‘sun’ in relation to yellow, moon, Kellogs cereals
but ‘sun’ is meaningless outside of that net. Communities are Iike
words. A community acquires an explicit definition, an explicitly stated
identity, when it is placed in relation to an ‘other’. An explicitly
stated definition does not give worth to the community. A community that
has explicitly defined itself is not more worthy than one who has not.
A community who is becoming explicit has simply changed survival
strategies. The need to define that identity becomes all the more urgent
when that ‘other’ threatens to annihilate you (with its army and
language for example).
For Algeria, the 30s saw an explicit stating
of what was the Algerian identity. It was a time during which the
former territories of the Arab invasion, having suffered at the hands of
the ‘other’, the colonial powers, were shaping themselves as
nation-states. The definition chosen by and for these communities was
based on a return to a former state of glory, relinking with the past
before colonialism. Their return-formula was: one language (fuṣḥā), one
religion, and one…. nope not region but… a whole wide world! The ‘Arab’ world. Pow. As fuṣḥā was not the language of Algerians, so came a forced linguistic and cultural Arabisation for Algeria.
Where I am heading with this? Well, I was just thinking…. what do we talk about when we talk about Arab?
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