Perspectives on Arabic Diglossia
Autor: Thaís Vidal | Publicado: 2011-10-19T12:06:00-07:00

 Andrew Freeman's Perspectives on Arabic DiglossiaDec. 9, 1996No discussion of Arabic is complete without at least a cursory  discussion of diglossia.  Charles Ferguson is credited with first using  the term diglossia in an article which he wrote in 1959 called Diglossia.   He identified four languages, Arabic, Greek, Haitian Creole and Swiss  German as being prime examples of languages which fit into his  definition of diglossia.  Very simply stated, he said that diglossic  speech communities have a High variety that is very prestigious and a  Low variety with no official status which are in complementary  distribution with each other, for instance the High variety might be  used for literary discourse and the Low variety for ordinary  conversation.  His original definition of diglossia was that the two  varieties which are in a diglossic relationship with each other are  closely related, and therefore diglossia is not bilingualism.  In his  defining examples he points out that the High variety is always an  acquired form, and that some educated native speakers might even deny  that they ever use the Low variety.  An important component of diglossia  is that the speakers have the personal perception that the High variety  is the "real" language and that the Low variety is "incorrect" usage.   In Arabic people talk about the High variety as being "pure" Arabic and  the dialects as being corrupt forms. Since that time much has been written about diglossia.  Charles Ferguson  himself has commented on the weaknesses of his original article in Diglossia Revisited. (1991. The Southwest Journal Linguistics).   For the most part he re-endorses his original article, but he does  criticize his lack of clarity on specifying that his definition for  diglossia was putative, and that the point of his original article had  been to point at a phenomenon that was not well understood hoping that  it would receive more attention. In the current context I feel the need to offer a coherent explanation  and a proposed model for how diglossia works in Arabic.  The written  language was first systematically codified in the 8th century  CE.  The  Qur'aan and the pre-Islamic poetry were the primary sources of the  prescriptive standard for the written language, which has since that  time been held in the highest regard by the entire Muslim community as  the language of the Qur'aan and the language that the angels in heaven  speak.  There is some evidence that diglossia existed at that time,  since this codification of the language was motivated by a desire to  have recent converts to Islam learn the correct language, rather than  the "corrupted" urban varieties of Baghdad and Damascus.  This standard  language has not changed in terms of syntax and morphology since that  time.  There has been a gradual shift in the lexicon so that I can't  read the Sufi texts or histories from the 9th century without a special  dictionary, but I can read witty entertainments or histories dating from  about the 12th century on.  A large body of literature has been written  in this language.  It is interesting to note that for a period of time  Arabic was the language of scientific discourse, much like English is  today.  In another parallel to the current situation with English, a lot  of what was written was not composed by native speakers.  This codified  language remains the highest standard of the language basically  unchanged to this day.  Conversely, the spoken language has had no  official status, and the various dialects have continued to evolve since  the 8th century with no attempt to form a standard.
When the split between the dialects and Literary Arabic occured is  subject to debate.  The prevailing view is that put forth by Ferguson in  1959 in an article entitled The Arabic KoinŽ in which he  posited that all of the dialects existing outside of the Arabian  peninsula had as their common source a variety spoken in the military  camps at the time of the Islamic expansion in the middle of the 7th  century and that this variety was already very distinct from the  language of the Qur'an.  In other words the dialects are not corrupt  forms, but instead have had a separate existence from the Classical  language for as long as they have existed outside of the Arabian  peninsula.
It should also be noted that even the codified Classical Arabic has a  large amount of inherent variability.  Most nouns have more than one  allowable broken plural.  There are many synonyms for even the most  common vocabulary items, and some verbs have meanings that shift  drastically according to the nouns and prepositions with which they are  used.  One explanation for this is that the Classical language that was  used for the Qur'an was a special form of the language common to all of  the tribes that existed in the Arabian peninsula at the time of the  prophet that had previously only been used in the traditional poetry.   The age of this form is not known, but it was a conglomeration that had  existed for some time and was not representative of any single dialect  or any one era.
From the 15th century on, most of the Arabic speaking world was under  foreign domination, either Ottoman or European.  The Ottomans produced  all of their official documents in Turkish and their religious documents  in Arabic.  The French in Algeria, between 1830 and 1962, tried to  actively suppress Arabic.  The British in Egypt at one point tried to  make the Egyptian dialect the official language.  Literary Arabic  stagnated during the Ottoman and colonial period.
There are roughly four major dialect groups, a) Maghrebi (Morocco,  Algeria, Tunis and western Libya), b) Egyptian (eastern Libya, Egypt and  the Sudan), c) Levantine (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine) and d)  the Arabic of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Iraq, Saudi  Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and Kuwait).  These  categories tend to ignore the split that has always existed throughout  the history of Arabic between Bedouin, Rural and Urban varieties  For  instance the speech of a Cairene is closer to the speech of a Damascene  than it is to the speech of a Bedouin dweller of Egypt, even though I  have placed Damascus and Cairo into different dialect categories.  There  are also some dialect isolates and relic dialects in Central Asia and  in the Sahara desert.
All of the dialects share features which do not exist in Classical  Arabic.  For Arabs they are mostly mutually intelligible with the  exception that the Maghrebi dialects are generally unintelligible  outside of the Maghreb.  For non-Arabs who have limited exposure to the  dialects the difference between dialects can be startling.  Furthermore,  most Arabs know how to speak in such a way so that only people from  their hometown can readily understand them.  The lexical variation can  be problematic.  "Mara" in Palestinian means wife, but in Egyptian  dialect it means "loose woman".  "Masha" in Palestine means "he walked",  but in Morocco means "he went".  The word for "sauce pan" is "qdra",  "Hilla" and "Tunjara" in Rabat, Cairo and Hebron, respectively, however  all three have usable Modern Standard Arabic cognates.  In Egypt and the  Levant "maashi" means "allright" but in Yemen and Morocco it means  "no".
The academic community in the US calls the modern form of  Literary/Classical Arabic "Modern Standard Arabic" or MSA for short.  An  American who has only studied Modern Standard Arabic will be well  received but will not understand much of the spoken discourse going on  around him in an Arabic speaking country.  For the most part Modern  Standard Arabic is not used in spontaneous speech situations.  In  situations where a person has a prepared text in front of him/her, and  keeps his/her remarks within the framework of the prepared text there is  very little regional difference between what a reasonably educated  speaker would produce as Modern Standard Arabic.  As the remarks stray  from the prepared text, so will the remarks also stray from Modern  Standard Arabic.  Some interviewers on TV and the radio are very skilled  at staying in MSA for an entire interview.  This form of the language  is remarkably similar in all parts of the Arabic speaking world  (including Dearborn, Michigan).  Meanwhile the interviewee who does not  have these MSA skills will start negating in dialect pretty early on,  and by the end of a longer remark will probably be speaking almost  entirely in dialect.  King Hussein of Jordan can stay in MSA for an  entire interview.  Arafat doesn't even try, but he will read his  speeches in pretty high fuS-Ha.
Since World War II the situation has been characterized by the end of  overt colonialism.  Since the end of colonialism the Arab governments  have initiated mass education campaigns and have done almost nothing to  stem the tide of mass rural migration to urban centers.  The motivation  has been that they wanted to turn their territories into modern  industrialized nation-states.  As a result of these social changes  (disruptions?), I think we can safely say that the linguistic situation  has been quite fluid during this time period.
In attempt to show how the linguistic system of modern Arabic works,  El-Said Muhammed Badawi of the American University of Cairo has offered  us the diagram in Figure 1.

 Badawi's Diagram "Levels of Egytian Arabic"  The names of the five levels, from top to bottom, translated into  English mean: the Classical Language of Tradition, the Modern Classical  Language, the Colloquial of the Educated, the Colloquial of the  Enlightened and the Colloquial of the Illiterate.  It should be noticed  that in this five level model every level includes mixing from all the  other elements of the system.  This is different from Ferguson's  description of diglossia which states that the two forms are in  complementary distribution.  In this picture we can see that even the  speech of the illiterate contains elements of the High variety (fuS-Ha).   This picture gives a pretty good idea of the speech of an individual  within the system as a function of the level and type of education that  s/he has received.
Another popular model is two idealized poles, as in Figure 2.
  
MSA is at one end and dialect at the other with a length of  speech continuum in the middle.  This is essentially the Badawi diagram  without specifying any of the details of the intermediate steps.  The  problem with both of these models is that they don't show the unity of  fuS-Ha across the entire expanse of space and time at the High end of  the spectrum nor the atomization of the dialects by person and location  at the other.  Keith Walters at the University of Texas at Austin has  done a lot of work with Tunisian Arabic.  He describes a situation of  intrasentential diglossic switching between MSA and Tunisian Arabic  where because of lexiacal overlap and morphophonolgical reductions, it  is often hard to seperate the MSA from the TA.  This situation has also  been described by Heath in Codeswitching in Moroccan Arabic.   Keith Walters in more than one article has presented us with the  picture shown in Figure 3 as workable model for Tunisian Arabic.

 Keith Walters' diagram "System of ETA"   This picture gives us a good picture of the complexity of the system  in place in Tunis.  It is also, I believe, a transportable enough model  for the linguistic situation in just about any other nation in the  Arabic speaking world with the proviso that in the gulf and in Egypt the  codeswitching is between English and Arabic and not between French and  Arabic.  It deserves mention that in Tunis many speakers are truly  bilingual in French, having learned it in the home, but this situation  is extremely rare in Egypt or the Persian Gulf region.  I also must say  that I am pretty dubious about any purported MSA/CA used in  extemporaneous speech.  These situations are pretty much limited to  University lectures, TV interviews and press conferences by heads of  state and even then the level of dialect use can be quite high.
Walters' diagram, like the Badawi picture, fails to show the fundamental  unity of the High variety across the entire Arabic speaking world and  across the entire history of the High variety.  Unlike the Badawi  picture, it fails to explicitly model the place of the individual within  the system, i.e. not all participants can participate equally at all  levels.  The third weakness in this model is that it only shows the  system as it exists in Tunisia.  Keith Walters gives a companion diagram  shown in Figure 4, that shows the system for diglossic switching and  French/Arabic codeswitching in Tunisian Arabic.  It also shows the  influence from other Arabic dialects on MSA and ETA, as well as the  influence of TA on North African French.
  
All four of these models are very useful in trying to understand  Arabic diglossia.  My claim that stills needs to be substantiated is  that they all fall short of giving us the complete picture.  Dr.  Badawi's picture shows the elements that might be included in a single  person's speech as a function of education, but it fails to model the  variation that occurs as a function of location, i.e. that the caammiyya  is not uniform as we move from location to location.
Now the Walters' diagrams also fails to model the spectrum of dialects  as a function of location, although he is very careful to label his  diagrams as being only specific to Tunisian Arabic.  Additionally, these  two diagrams do not attempt to show the individual's system in the same  way that the Badawi diagram does.  I will state again that an important  fact to bear in mind is that MSA is nearly uniform throughout the  Arabic speaking world, and since it is intimately linked with Classical  Arabic, nearly uniform across a span of 1400 years.  It is almost  impossible to overstate the status of Classical Arabic in the culture of  Arabic speakers.  Many Arabs will state that Classical Arabic is "the  real language" and that the dialects are "corrupted" or "impure" forms.
Allow me to propose a rope structure.  Included in the system is  everything that has ever been written that is still accessible to the  average literate reader of MSA.  Each such document belongs to the MSA  grammar of the individual who can still access that document.  The  individual Arabic grammar and lexicon of everybody who claims to speak  Arabic can be represented by a single strand.  These strands come  together on the MSA end of the scale and form a more or less cohesive  rope like structure.  This rope separates into 22 less cohesive smaller  twine structures as we move down the rope into national dialectal  varieties.  As we move down the scale from more public varieties to  confessional and neighborhood varieties the fraying becomes more  pronounced.  These most frayed ends represent peer group "in-talk" or  local trade jargons and the like.  Wherever a person's lexicon, syntax,  morphology or phonology match another person's, we can model that as the  strands touching in that location.  As we move down the scale the rope  becomes ever more frayed.  As per Badawi's model, an individual's access  to the higher end of the rope is a function of education.  Owing to the  Palestinian diaspora most Arabic speakers have a passive knowledge of  the Palestinian dialect, and because of the Egyptian dominance of Arabic  TV and cinema most Arabic speakers have a passive knowledge of the  Egyptian dialect as well.  Presumably no strand will have any length of  its individual strand where it does not touch at least one other strand.
I see this model as combining the Badawi model with the Walters' model.   Each strand can be expanded into the Badawi picture, and the Walters'  model is a more complete blow-up of the system at the point where it  breaks out into 22 separate systems.  The rope shows the inherent point  of contact between all the systems, which is the still viable MSA.

 Andrew Freeman's "rope" diagram In closing this section I want to point out that if we try to add in  every national variety of Arabic to Walters' picture we end up with  something very similar to the author's "rope" picture.  It bears  mentioning that the Egyptian dialect has some influence on the  vernaculars of the entire Arabic speaking world.  Conversely, the  Maghrebi dialects of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are heavily  stigmatized and do not exert much influence on any dialects outside of  their region.
The question still remains how long can this structure remain in place  before individual national strands fray off the rope completely and  become their language, with their own literature.  The answer to this  question still seems to be that it is not likely to happen soon due to  the high status that Classical Arabic has.  The only variety of Arabic  so far to break off and form its own language is Maltese, and most  scholars agree that this happened because the Maltese are Christians and  don't consider the Arabic language sacred in the same way that Muslims  do.
Another phenomenon that receives attention is the so-called "Middle  Arabic" or "Educated Formal Arabic", that is a very classicized version  of dialect or a very colloquialized version of MSA.  The debate revolves  around whether this is a stable form or a set of ad hoc accommodation  strategies between educated speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects  or if it is merely unsuccessful attempts at speaking MSA.  Is this the  direction of the current language change in progress for Arabic?  Are  the dialects moving closer to each other and to MSA at the same time,  while MSA continues to be simplified and move in the direction of the  dialects?  These questions are very controversial.  One thing that  everyone agrees upon is that the national dialects are undergoing a  leveling process and that there are a lot of recent borrowings from MSA  into the dialects.  European languages, especially English and French,  still reign supreme in the realms of Science and International Commerce  in the Arab world.  No doubt there is lots of opportunity for ambitious  linguists to study code-switching and language contact phenomena for  years to come.
    
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