Juba Arabic as a written language

Abstract

International audienceThis paper deals with the issue of Juba-Arabic (JA) as a written language and investigates various written materials produced from early 20th c. up to early 21th c. The investigated writings are presented in their socio-historical context in order to determine in which ways genres and contexts impact the writing practices, particularly regarding orthographic and grammatical choices. These choices are analyzed following the notions of sameness and distance used for evaluating literacy processes in non-standard languages. The paper highlights the key moments and key agents of the codification of JA as a written language and the new developments led by the use of the internet

Arabic-based Pidgins and Creoles

“…This mainly concerns the slang used by the youngest urban population of Juba (Miller 2004;Nakao 2013). As a further matter, Juba Arabic has a relatively long written tradition both in Arabic and Latin scripts (Miller 2014). Despite this, mainly as a consequence of the ideological reaction to the process of Arabicization enacted by the former unified Sudan, Juba Arabic is recognized as neither an official nor national language of the current Republic of South Sudan (Manfredi & Tosco 2018).…”