Community, dialect and urbanization in the Arabic-speaking Middle East

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explain how changes in the social structure of the countries of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are being reflected in new patterns of dialect use. The last 30 years have seen an enormously increased interest in Arabic as a living mode of everyday communication, reflected in many dialectological, typological and sociolinguistic studies. As a result, we now have a much clearer overall picture of the dialect geography of the eastern Arab world, and the beginnings of an understanding of the dynamics of language change. Inevitably, the focus of many studies has been geographically specific, so that the area-wide nexus between social change and linguistic change has not always been seen in a sufficiently broad context. By examining three case studies documented in the literature, I aim to point up similarities in the dynamics of change which are often obscured by distracting local particularities.

Nature = Life: Environmental Identity as Resistance in South Sinai

“…So too has language. South Sinai dialects are significantly different from colloquial Egyptian Arabic and serve as a social marker as in other Arab-speaking contexts (Holes 1995). However, while an educated Egyptian may affect to find Bedouin dialect impenetrable, no Bedu fails to understand barked commands at checkpoints.…”

“…However, a qaṣīda mocking the dominant culture or lamenting its impacts still provides entertainment at a public gathering such as a wedding, and brings prestige to its composer. Bedouin oral poetic tradition remains vital today in South Sinai as elsewhere (Bailey 2002;Holes andAbu Athera 2007, 2009), with poetry both composed spontaneously and memorized by listeners to repeat at later gatherings. 12 Stories may be as powerful as poetry in transmitting resistance.…”

Spoken Arabic dialects identification: The case of Egyptian and Jordanian dialects

“…For example, instead of considering dozens of existing Arabic dialects, only two dialects were considered, viz. the Jordanian dialect (spoken by the authors) and the Egyptian dialect (one of the most widely understood Arabic dialects due to the predominance of Egyptian media [5]). This restriction is important due to extreme difficulty in collecting a proper dataset for entire set of dialects.…”

“…As a first attempt to address this problem, only two dialects are considered, viz. the Jordanian dialect (spoken by the authors) and the Egyptian dialect (one of the most widely understood Arabic dialects due to the predominance of Egyptian media [5]). The first step of the proposed approach is to collect a dataset of audio samples by recording them from native speakers of the considered dialects annotating each one with the dialect of the speaker.…”

Words of War: The Iraqi Tower of Babel

“…In recent decades, formal education in the Arabic world has increased enormously, and electronic media have expanded the role of MSA (Owens 2001:430). In estimating the number of Iraqis capable of communicating in Modern Standard Arabic, we can be guided roughly by literacy figures, since Arabs are “literate” if they can read and write MSA; Arabs do not generally write in a vernacular or dialect (Holes 1995:272; Sampson 1985:27). While other sources (like UNESCO) have generated much higher numbers, the United Nations Population Division estimates that in 2005 about 55% of adult (i.e., over 15 years of age) Iraqi men were literate, although only about 24% of adult Iraqi women could read and write (UNPD 2007:204).…”