Arabic Sociolinguistics

Arabic Sociolinguistics Author(s): Jonathan Owens Reviewed work(s): Source: Arabica, T. 48, Fasc.
4, Linguistique Arabe: Sociolinguistique et Histoire de la Langue (2001), pp. 419-469 Published by: BRILL Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4057667 . Accessed: 01/06/2012 06:43
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ARABICSOCIOLINGUISTICS
BY
JONATHAN OWENS Universityof Bayreuth
JNthe 1960's Sociolinguisticsemerged as a semi-autonomousdiscipline, a core methodology and theory developing around the work of William Labov, and adjunct perspectives being added by various scholars.* Arabic sociolinguistics has grown up largely in the wake of this development, though in certain respects was present, as it were, at the founding of the discipline. At the same time, what can, on a necessarily post hoc basis, be identified as central sociolinguistic issues have been a part of Arabic linguistics from its very inception. Taken broadly, any aspect of language which correlates with sociological categories may be included in sociolinguistics. An exhaustive coverage thus entails not only a consideration of the behavior of specific linguistic forms relative to social constructs, but also the embeddedness of holistic concepts like 'language' and 'dialect' in a social matrix, via such linkages as language planning and language politics. Rather than say a little about many topics, I will attempt to focus on what I consider (as of 2000) the core areas of sociolinguistics, namely the association between linguistic forms and social categories. Above all the status of linguistic variants is a central issue, for each variant, supported by a social scaffolding, conveys information about the society it is used in. Furthermore, in the Labovian paradigm, understanding linguistic variation ideally gives insight into language change, which is seen not as abrupt, but as spreading outwards from various loci of social innovation. Linguistic variation is seen as an index of the spread, maintenance or regression of linguistic features. Embedded in the modem linguistic tradition, sociolinguistics has concentrated on the spoken word. It thus stands in close relationship to dialectological traditions, though in contrast to dialectology, the main
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I would like to thankPierreLarcherfor giving an initial orientation this article. to Arabica, tome XLVIII
C Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001
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focus of variational sociolinguistics has been on urban areas. These are ecological niches which are hard to define with traditional dialectological methods, though given the high degree of urbanization in the Arabic world,' indispensable to an adequate coverage of Arabic. In all these respects, Arabic sociolinguistics has followed the broader developments of the discipline. The concentration on the spoken word has had the effect of creating a distance from the traditional (mainly European) Arabicist philological tradition, with its focus on the written text. While there are, doubtlessly, unbridgeable differences between the two foci (e.g. by their very nature, written traditions tend to suppress the type of variation found in spoken language), one can attempt to mediate the differences. I will suggest in section 1 that sociolinguistic readings of the Arabic grammatical tradition are compatible with the analysis of written texts. The rest of the article focuses on the status of variational phenomena in modern Arabic. 1. Proto-socioingpistics While the standard Western grammars of Classical Arabic (e.g. Wright, Reckendorf, Blachere and Gaudrefroy-Demombynes) describe the language effectively and exhaustively, they approach the language as a product to be packaged, described, and consumed by the interested public. Such is the nature of descriptive grammars. What is singularly missing from them, however, is the recognition that Classical Arabic as it has become known to us today, is itself the result of an evaluative process whose input was a considerably wider and more disparate set of linguistic values than is commonly recognized today. Probably this heterogeneity is nowhere more in evidence than in the work of the father of Arabic grammar, Sibawayhi. The question of heterogeneity in Sibawayhi is one which has hardly been broached in the Arabicist literature, and it is hardly the place here to attempt a summary. One illustration may be offered, however, indicating that the Arabic language which Sibawayhi 'constructed' (a grammar by definition is a formal construct) was a variable object, one parameter of whose variability was defined by the social categories which Sibawayhi drew on to orientate his thinking. In his Kittb, Sibawayhi described a good deal of linguistic variation.
Nearly half of Egypt's 60 million inhabitants, for example, are urban dwellers.
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This may be broadly divided into variation of two types, internal and external. The internal variation, which is probably the dominant category, derives from Sibawayhi's linguistic theory. A topicalized noun, for example, appears in nominative case, but, according to the logic of linguistic rules, it may equally be accusative (e.g. I: 31 ff., see Owens, 1998a). The external derives from variation which is legitmized through its association with groups of various sorts. By way of example, in the first 100 pages of the I?itdbI count 26 such references, which may roughly be grouped into seven different categories, as in (1), (all references are to Book I). (la) Areal - tribal variation (h`igazT tamimi),2 vs. e.g. ma al-higazzya (21.20, 94.9) (b) Tribal variants, e.g. Bana Sulaym(51.6)3 (c) General group, e.g. "Bedouins", 'arab(62.13, 95.15) (d) Unspecified groups, e.g. "some", "some Arabs", "someone whose Arabic I trust" (62.14, 97.16) (e) Groups defined by other linguistic characteristics, "those who say x also say y", e.g. "those who say 'akalini al-bara-gt"(30.17) (f) Majoritygroups, common knowledge,e.g. a formn "betterknown" is ('a'raf) or "more common in speech" ('aktar al-kaldm) (66.9, 90.10) (g) Sibawayhi's evaluative criteria, e.g. "good Arabic", "eloquent Arabs" (21.15, 66.11, 91.15) Each of these in its own way reflects the social embeddedness of Srbawayhi's linguistic thinking. In all instances Srbawayhi legitimizes the citation of a particular form by associating it with various types of units that must have been recognized in the late eighth century Abbasid empire. In (la, b) the groups have a geographical or social basis. (lc) attests to the normative value of Bedouin speech (see Blau 1963). (1d) shows that the ideolect may have normative value and (le) indicates that bundles of features may be associated with another feature stereotypically associated with a particular group (unfortunately in this case, never specified more closely by Sibawayhi). (lf) suggests that degree of numerical extension can be a basis for preferring one form or another. Finally, (1g) draws attention to the institutionalized role of the linguist in deciding what is good and bad in the language (see Carter 1972).4
2 hiazt is a geographical designation; tamimt tribal, though eponymously may serve is as a designation of an eastern variety. 3 Here, and often elsewhere, Sibawayhi's reportsare mediated by other language experts. 4 Carter emphasizes the socially-orientated metaphorical vocabulary which Sibawayhi
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If Sibawayhi's Aitdbis a work which a sociolinguistic reading would help elucidate, there are other segments of the Arabic grammatical tradition where variation was institutionalized by the grammarians themselves. Notable in this respect are the different Koranic reading traditions, the qira'at. The canonization of certain reading traditions, the seven of Ibn Mugahid (d. 924) for instance, represents a formal categorization of a fixed set of variants which in and of itself is mainly of grammatical and perhaps exegetical interest. The existence of the variants, however, reflects a socio-political tension in early Islamic society whose history has been traced in the work of Beck (1946), Kahle (1948), Jeffery (1948) and others. They show that Arabic Koranic readers were subjected to ever tighter strictures in their choice of Koranic variants, culminating in the official proscription of the readings of Ibn Miqsam and Ibn Sanabiud in the early part of the tenth century. Crucially, a scholar like Ibn Sanabiud argued that he was, within the limits set by the consonantal mushaf (Koranic text), free to use certain readings so long as they represented good Arabic. This viewpoint was challenged by the authorities of the time, who forced him to bow to general consensus of the Koranic readers ('i^mci','amma; see Gilliot 140) in his choice of variants. It is thus clear that the Arabic grammatical tradition itself gave explicit recognition to the existence of linguistic variation in the language, a variation which was tolerated, legitimized or proscribed according to social and political institutions with which the varation was associated.5 and 2. Variation language histo'y Both in the Arabic grammatical tradition, and in its western reception, variation was either channeled into categories which effectively reduced it to formal linguistic variants, as with the qira'dt described above, or ignored. The latter was the favored approach of many Western Arabicists and Semiticists. Thus, the work of Beck (1946), Kahle (1948), Vollers (1906) and Spitaler (1953) among others, which emphasized old traditions parallel to or even interacting with standard, orthodox ones, was
uses to describe utterance acceptability (e.g. "good, upright"), not the institutionalized social role of Sibawayhi as linguist, a role which Carter in fact would probably deny (Carter 1985). 5 See Daher (1987 part 1) for further sociolinguistic interpretations of Arabic in the classical period.
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overshadowed by that of Brockelmann (1908, 19822) N6ldeke (1910), BergstraBer(1928, 19772) and Fuck (1950). Although these latter writers recognized the existence of varieties of Arabic, in particular old 'dialects', contemporary with Classical Arabic, they never developed a conceptual framework explaining the functional co-existence of and linguistic between these varieties, nor their historicaldevelopment. interrelationships A crucial step in this direction, a step which probably marks the beginning of Arabic sociolinguistics as an academic entity in its own right, was made by Ferguson in his well-known article "Diglossia" (1959a). In the article Ferguson gave theoretical flesh and comparative generalization to a situation which had long been recognized and described, in particular by French linguists working in North Africa (e.g. Marcais 1930, 31). In an idealized model diglossia is a socio-politically regulated linguistic situation, where one linguistic variety has a higher status than another (or others), and in which linguistic functions are partitioned between the two in complementary fashion.6 In what I term 'classical diglossia' (following Fasold 1984), the H and L varieties belong in some sense to the same language, yet are distinguished by clear structural differences.7 High functions include the use of the language in formal occasions, and literary and religious functions, while low functions include language activity in the home, talk between friends, and the marketplace. One important element of the high variety is its link to a valued cultural past. In the instance of Arabic, of course, it is the Standard language, a variety whose grammar is largely derived from Classical Arabic, which is the high variety, and the so-called dialect (see n. 7) the low. The appeal of Ferguson's model is that it provides an explanation for the maintenance of more or less structurally divergent forms in one and the same speech community. It is notable that Ferguson's model incorporated the spoken language, thus marking a shift away from the philological Arabicist tradition orientated mainly towards the interpretation of written texts.
6 Dichy (1994) characterizes the Arabic situation as 'pluriglossie'v understanding this term to refer to different lects of the same language. This allows one to distinguish Arabic from diglossic configurations where different functional domains are filled by completely different languages (see n. 7). 7 Opposed to classic diglossia would stand both Fishman's functional diglossia (1971: 74), where different languages may fill different functional niches, and register-based varieties, where in both structural and functional terms differences between H and L varieties are not so sharply delineated as in Arabic.
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Although there is not the space here to develop the argument in any detail, it may be suggested that Ferguson's undeniably elegant synchronic characterization of the status of linguistic variants in Arabic has not had desirable consequences for a diachronic interpretation of the language, especially the Labovian integration of modern variationist studies with questions of language change. In particular, Ferguson not only described contemporary diglossia, but also projected its origins back into the time of the early Arabic diaspora in the seventh and eighth centuries. Ferguson (1959b) argued that the dialects developed out of a koine which arose in the military camps of the Arab conquerors. Contact (see section 8) produced a degree of simplification and leveling among the dialects, while a variety akin to Classical Arabic continued to be spoken, for a time at least, among Bedouins. Developments of Ferguson's koine hypothesis, in the sense that the dialects are viewed as being derived from and innovative with respect to Classical Arabic, are Versteegh's (1984) proposal that the dialects underwent a stage of pidginization before stabilizing in the form ancestral to the modern dialects and Blau's model (1966/67, 1981) whereby the synthetic language of the Bedouins, close to Classical Arabic, gave way to an analytic Middle Arabic, under the influence of widespread Arabicization of non-Arab urbanites.8In this perspective, the clear diglossic dichotomy Standard Arabic vs. dialect is projected back to the early origins of the language, with the modern low variety, the dialect, being seen as derivative from and a corruption of, Classical Arabic (see Versteegh 1983 for origins of this idea). Since the dialects are perceived as being younger than Classical Arabic, whatever interest their study may have for modern Arabic society, they can make only a temporally limited contribution to understanding proto-Arabic. If, on the other hand, Classical Arabic is itself the endpoint of a development (as argued for by Corriente, 1976), which is shared by other varieties of Arabic (e.g. Rabin's 1951 dialects), it follows that the modem dialects themselves represent a heritage as old as that of Classical Arabic. In this perspective the ancestors of the modern dialects did not arise diglossically after c. 700 AD, but rather existed contemporaneously with and contributed to the development of Classical Arabic. Logically, they derive with Classical Arabic from a common ancestor
8 Notwithstanding Blau's more recent interpretation of Middle Arabic as a stylistic "Mischsprache" of Old and New Arabic (1982), his earlier interpretation continues to serve as one possible model for the conceptualization of the history of Arabic.
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in a yet to be reconstructed proto-Arabic. In other words, one must distinguish between the social construct of diglossia and the individual linguistic histories of the entities constituent of diglossia. It may be suggested, for lack of space without exemplification (see Owens 1998a), that adopting Corriente's perspective will have consequences for evaluating modern linguistic variation, particularly that discussed in 4.2 below, for, assuming Labov's (1994: 21) uniformitarian principle, the variation associated with different contemporary groups may allow insights into the earlier development of the language, even those prior to the Arabic diaspora of the seventh century. 3. Spoken Arabic:Levelsand Gradients Ferguson's diglossia model is valuable not only for its heuristic value in defining language varieties in terms of two idealized types, Standard Arabic and dialect. It is also important for the fact that only with the integration of the two types within a single conceptual framework could serious comparative work between the varieties begin. This took two directions. On the one hand purely structural studies were carried out defining similarities and differences between the two (e.g. Altoma 1969). On the other, a more fruitful line of research was opened up in the attempt to define the use of the two in contemporary Arabic society. Observation of the spoken language quickly revealed that in practice native speakers of Arabic who had access to both the standard language and the dialect in any given stretch of speech rarely used purely one or the other variant. The initial approach to this descriptive problem was to posit a series of discrete levels ranging between the ideal Standard/dialect poles. This, for instance, is the approach followed by Blanc (1960). He defined five levels of speech, (1) plain colloquial, (2) koineized colloquial, (3) semi-literary, (4) modified classical, (5) standard classical. Each of these levels is characterized by linguistic traits. The koineized colloquial, for instance is a "plain colloquial" into which leveling features have been introduced, which is to say highly characteristic colloquialisms, such as the f sg object suffix -c such as is found in Jordan, southern Iraq and western Arabian varieties, are replaced by common koine forms (see below), such as f sg -ik. "Modified classical" is Classical Arabic with various dialectal admixtures. Badawi (1973) develops a typology along similar lines. Similar characterizations have been applied to the written language as well, notably Blau (1981: 25) who distinguished three main levels of Middle Arabic, Classical Arabic
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with Middle Arabic admixture, semi-Classical Middle Arabic and classicized Middle Arabic. The discrete levels approach ran into problems of two sorts (see Owens and Bani Yasin 1991). One was the sheer methodological problem of dealing with variation across features which ranged over the entire language, from phonology to semantics. As Blanc realized from the beginning (1960: 85), assigning a given text to one level or another was difficult simply because it might be variously classified according to the classificatory criteria used or the stretch of text chosen (Tarrier 1991: 7). A second problem pertains to the relative status of the two ideal poles, Standard Arabic and dialect. While the two may be presented as structurally opposed to each other, in terms of actual competence they are not of equal status. Whereas the dialect is a native variety of Arabic9 and hence, by definition perfectly leamed by all Arabs, the Standard language is a variety learned as a second language (see 4.1). The recognition of this state of affairs is of conceptual and descriptive consequence. Diem, for instance, in his description of Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian Arabic texts operates with a simplified levels classificatory system. He describes the speaker in one text (1974: 76) beginning in dialect with SA interference, then switching over to SA. Given the nonnative nature of the Standard, however, it is not clear in what sense one can speak of interference from the Standard in a dialectal text. The notion of interference in second language learning usuaHly pertains to the appearance of traits from a speaker's native language in the target. Furthermore, while theoretically interference from the dialect in the Standard may be recognized, it is not self-evident what precisely the nature of the Standard is that educated Arabs speak when they target this variety (see below).'0 The problem is not solved by terminology from within Arabic itself. While an ideal contrast, analogous to Ferguson's H-L exists in Arabic etc. vs fiu4&), Parkinson (1991) points out that there ('dmmfyya ddnrga is no consensus within the Arabic world (or Egypt, Parkinson's locus
9 In fact, I believe the term 'native Arabic' = 'NA' is a better designation for this variety than 'dialect', and is the term I henceforth adopt. Conventionally, the regional variant of NA will be indicated with a prefixed letter or letters signifiying the region; E-NA = Egyptian native Arabic, for example. '1 In a recent work, Holes (1995: 279 ff.) also adopts a levels approach to the description of Cairene Arabic. The fact that Holes' work has a pedagogical orientation suggests that the levels approach is more appropriate as a broad summarizing tool than as a precise categorization of linguistic variation.
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stands for. Parkinson illusof research) as to what, in particular trates his point on the basis of a matched guise he carried out with seven different versions of a nearly identical text, the only differences between them being a gradually decreasing degree of SA features. Versions 1-3, for example had full final short voweling, version 1 c = t, C = [d3], version 2 t = t, r = [g] (note, Egyptian [g]), and so on, each lower version adding, relative to the SA prescriptive rules, more E-NA traits. Asked to rank the versions on a '>ad" scale from 1-7, generally the rankings followed the structurally-planned sequences. Version 1, for instances, had the "best"fiq.b4d ranking (though version 7 ranked better than 6, 4 better than 3). Such consistency suggests that at least according to the variable traitspicked out by Parkinson,Egyptians do react consistently to stereotypes of what fusha is. On the other hand, the large majority of all evaluators considered all seven versions to be fus4d. The boundaries where fu.shd end are enigmatic. It is in the mid-70's that an alternative approach to the analysis of linguistic variation in spoken Arabic emerged. In addition to the idealized poles, SA and dialect, T. F. Mitchell developed the idea of Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA), the variety of Arabic spoken typically by educated Arabs consisting of elements from both SA and the dialect, and possessing hybrid forms unique to the ESA level." Mitchell's main interest was in an interregional koine which he and his co-workers studied in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. The actual model used to describe ESA varied from scholar to scholar. Mitchell himself (1976, 1980, 1986) continued to work with discrete levels. He argued that speakers chose from a range of comparable forms according to parameters set by stigmatization and degree of formality. His presentations tend to be rather programmatic and at times hard to generalize. The notion of stigmatized forms is not defined, though they appear to be those which are associated exclusively with one dialect, and which are clearly distinctive from SA, Jordanian hdd "this m", for example.
" Two earlier works adumbrate Mitchell's approach. Bishai (1966) speaks of "modern inter-Arabic", ostensibly CA without case endings, though in fact a more mixed variety. The account, however, does not generalize beyond a summary of the data in two texts. Kaye's (1972) characterization of spoken Modem Standard Arabic as an illdefined system is similar to Mitchell's ESA in the sense that both authors describe a system open to variation along a range of parameters. Talmoudi (1984: 143), basing his study on a short text produced by speakers from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, speaks of classicization, interdialectalization and colloquialization of features, descriptively adequate terms from a structural perspective perhaps, but barring more subtle differentiation open to the criticisms directed against a levels approach.
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Unstigmatized forms themselves are divided between formal and nonformal. Syrian Arabic kabir "big" (without case ending and hence part of ESA, not SA) for instance is classified as formal, whereas kbfr(deletion of a) is informal. The problem with Mitchell's approach is that however much his examples in isolation appear to be intuitively correct (though see Abd-el Jawad and Sulaiman 1990: 296), his classificatory categories are not always readily discernible in complete texts, where forms of potentially different categories frequently stand cheek by jowl. Papers by two of Mitchell's co-workers, El-Hassan (1979) and Sallam (1980), gave a more detailed and elucidating account.'2 El-Hassan studied the occurrence of demonstratives in about 21 hours of recorded speech by Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian Arabs. In the m sg category, for instance, five forms were used with a high degree of frequency, h&da, h/za, hdda, haydaand da "this". The last two forms are limited to one region, da Egyptian and hayda Lebanese, while hdza is mainly Egyptian. hdda and hada make up nearly 60% of the forms. ElHassan began his analysis under the assumption that hdOa,nearly identical to SA h&dd, was the least stigmatized form, hada medially so, and locally restricted forms, like Jordanian had (hardly attested), most stigmatized. He hypothesized that among the speech of educated Arabs, the less stigmatized forms would be preferred. His results, however, only partly bear out this assumption. Not only is hdda nearly as frequent as hdda, but there are also presumably stigmatized forms with high degrees of frequency as well. Egyptian da, a form restricted exclusively to the Egyptian speakers, makes up nearly 71% (94/113) of all m sg tokens among the Egyptian speakers. Following Mitchell, the study carefully distinguishes between speech situations where a given nationality is speaking to his or her own nationality and where the speakers are of mixed nationality (cf. Bell 1984 on variation and audience design). Even when the Egyptians were speaking with other nationalities, however, the percentage of da did not decrease (in fact, it increased slightly). El-Hassan (p. 42) explains this as a desire to "sound Egyptian", though in fact, the equation: the further one moves away from SA, the greater the stigmatization, is not born out by the facts, which calls into ques-
12 Meiseles worked within the 'levels' framework, and suffers from all of its shortcomings (see Owens and Bani Yasin 1991 for criticisms). Mitchell continues to employ a basic formal/informal dichotomy in a largely formal account of tense and modality in Arabic (Mitchell and El-Hassan 1994).
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tion the usefulness of stigmatization as an ordering category. El-Hassan further shows (p. 51) that the variants to not appear to be collocationally determined either. He cites the three examples, all from the same Syrian speaker, hdda/hza/lhdda min nahyi "this is so from one angle", where the collocation min nd4yi,an expression of SA origin, collocates equally with three different variants. On the other hand, Sallam's study does show clear instances where the notion of stigmatized form is useful. His study concentrated on the four variant realizations of *q found in the region, namely g - k - ' - q, a set of variants which reappears in many sociolinguistic studies in the area. He notes (1980: 92) that speakers from Beirut, who vary between the local k and the SA pronunciation q when speaking with non-Lebanese show a markedly higher use of q than k, as if avoiding their local form. The point that emerged from the study of spoken corpuses drawn from a cross-section of speakers is that the classification of variants according to a pre-set scala ranging between SA and NA was problematic. In some instances, as with Sallam's Beirut speakers, discrete correlations do emerge, but with others, as with El-Hassan's demonstratives, they do not. One of the central themes of Arabic sociolinguistics has been the identification of the parameters defining this variation. 4. Social Correlations The use of linguistic corpora as the basis for defining Educated Spoken Arabic brought Arabic sociolinguistics into the domain of quantitativelybased sociolinguistics, a tradition dating back at least to 1958 (Fischer 1958), and which today is the dominant field of sociolinguistics. In this tradition an attempt is made to explain that part of variation which is not explicable linguistically (e.g. phonological, morphophonological), in terms of sociologically-defined variation, via statistically significant correlations with various extra-linguistic categories. In the different studies which have been carried out within this framework different points of emphasis have emerged, some inspired by the theoretical orientation of the researcher, some by empirical tendencies deriving from the data. In this section I will summarize the main parameters which have been shown to correlatewith variationin differentArabic-speakingcommunities.
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As already seen in section 3, education is one of the most important elements contributing to variation in modem-day Arabic. Since World War II education has expanded enormously in Arabic countries. Because the Arabic used in instruction is, in theory, Standard Arabic, this variety has become accesssible to a large segment of the population in a way it has never been in the history of the language. Its use in education is reinforced by its use in many public forums, including the media, religious contexts and communication between Arabs of different regional origin. I will adopt Mitchell's 'Educated Spoken Arabic' (ESA) as the name for the variety which results from this variational parameter. The type of variation engendered by literacy in SA has already been illustrated in section 3 above. As an idealization, ESA is open to input from its two constituent varieties, SA and native varieties of Arabic (NA), traditionally called dialects (see n. 7). However, these two opposed poles are not of equal importance in defining the form of ESA. Rather, NA serves as the basic input, which, depending on any of a number of factors, will be modified in the direction of SA. While this assertion is uncontroversial for most who have experience in living and working (e.g. linguists)in Arabic countries, the distinction between natively leamed native Arabic and a formally learned SA is of such fundamental importance that more clarification is necessary. Three reasons may be adduced for this directional interpretation of ESA. First, the high variety, SA, is learned formally in school, whereas NA is learned at home (Ibrahim 1983). In regards to the second point, at least two observed patterns of variation suggest that NA serves as the base variety. One may first observe an asymmetry in the morphemic distribution of the two varieties in the following sense. There tends'3 to be an implicational relationship between lexical stems and affixes such that SA stems (see next paragraph) cooccur with NA affixes to a greater degree than do NA stems with SA affixes (Holes 1995: 297). Thus, in the production of hybrid forms a token such as bi-yu-qal "it is said" (Meiseles 1980: 133 on Egyptian Arabic), with Egyptian Arabic modal prefix bi- prefixed to SA preformative vowel + passive verbal stem is more likely than the opposite, (?)yu-n'al "it is said" with SA passive imperfect prefix yu- attached to the Egyptian Arabic passive stem -n'dl. Given that affixal material is
With heavy emphasis on 'tends'; see Owens and Bani Yasin 1991: 23.
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generally regarded as crucial in the definition of 'matrix' language' (see e.g. Meyers-Scotton 1993: 98 ff.), the wider distribution of NA affixes in ESA points to NA as the basis variety. Further to this point, nearly all variationist studies have identified a lexically defined distribution in the occurrence of SA material. For ' instance, in a detailed study on uvular variation in Amman, q g - k (see section 3 above), Abd-el Jawad (1981: 205) shows that the SA phonological variant q strongly correlates with words of SA origin. Moreover, these words with the q variant tend to be those which belong to the 'cultural domain' of vocabulary (e.g. q&'a "lecture hail", mustaqqat "derivatives"),words which tend more easily to be borrowed. Those in the three NA variants, on the other hand, tend to be either basic vocabulary (gaddes"how much", izra' "blue")or belong to the less formal cultural domain (ibrik"jar", igiid "necklaces" 1981: 367 i.).14 It appears possible here to speak of a borrowing of cultural words of SA origin into an NA core (see section 5 below). Thirdly one may adduce emotional and physiological factors. When speakers are excited or angry, they will tend to use NA variants (how often does one hear a curse in SA; see Parkinson 1985: chapter 8), and fatigue tends to favor NA (Tarrier 1993: 104). NA is a refuge in extreme emotional and physical states. Early studies focusing specifically on ESA concentrated on the distribution of single linguistic features, without defining, other than in Mitchell's and Meiseles' rather programatic terms'5 the range of styles which may be found within it. Parkinson (1994) is probably the first study which attempted to characterize the extent of variation found in texts of speakers who were specifically asked to produce oral texts in fusha. Out of a large corpus he chose four speakers with education ranging between one year of high school and four years of university. While recognizing that a full study must range across a broad spectrum of variables, Parkinson concentrated on the presence of SA short final vowels,'6 both lexical (bind')and inflectional (Qirdb). The four speakers display a great deal of variation in their use of vowels, the rate
See also Abd-el Jawad and Sulaiman (1990: 298). Meiseles (1980: 125) distinguished between oral literary Arabic (the spoken language of educated Arabs attempting to approximate LA) and ESA, though his main distinguishing feature (presence vs absence of case vowels) is, as Parkinson (1994) shows, more programmatic than a reflection of reality. 16 Parkinson counted as SA vowels only those with a characteristic SA form. The epenthetic Egyptian Arabic -i was excluded from the count.
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ranging between 2 and over 50 per page (his unit of counting). Three of the speakers, however, have only 12 occurrences or less. Generally the use of the vowels was correct.'7 Parkinson concludes that although there are individuals capable of speaking fluently with SA final short vowels, the lower percentages are more typical of Cairene ability generally. While Parkinson notes, impressionistically, that degree of voweling tends to correlate with other SA features (1994: 184), his study makes no attempt to teeze out correlations, even of a tendential sort, between final voweling and other linguistic structures. Before moving on to the next section, the work of Eid (1982, 1988) may be mentioned as an alternative framework to the analysis of spoken Arabic in terms of a medial ESA variety. Eid is concerned with the type of spoken Arabic treated in section 4.1 under the rubric Educated Spoken Arabic. She assumes two opposed varieties, NA and SA, with switching between the two. She herself is aware of the difficulties in this approach, noting that the form ra'-et, for instance (1988: 56), consists of a SA stem, ra'- and an NA suffix, -jt (vs. SA -aytu),a typical ESA hybrid form. Eid, however, must assign each token to one of the two varieties, here, for example, recognizing the stem ra'- as being criterial, hence SA. Eid is interested in defining structural constraints between the two varieties. The interest in her work is not so much in the proposed constraints,'8 but rather in the very application of the codeswitching model to her data. Her own data is based on Egyptian radio and television programs with panel discussions by learned participants. Such a group will probably come closer to fulfilling a usual prerequisite to codeswitching than do most Egyptians, namely that they have a fluent command of SA. Even if such an approach can be applied to such a group-and the example of ra'et above cautions that compromises of uncertain theoretical status must be made-it is doubtful that it could be efficiently applied in less formal settings or with speakers with a lesser command of SA.
17 Unfortunately, Parkinson does not use a precise index, with actual occurrence of vowel-final forms expressed as a percent of all contexts where a final vowel is expected. 18 As Daher (1987: 140) points out, the universality of Eid's examples are limited to her own corpus. Contradictory examples can be found even within the corpus of ESA, as for example her constraint (1982: 69) that the structure "x = SA + tns = NA + y (verb) = SA cannot occur. In Meiseles (1980: 133) one finds nahnu bi-naqil 'anna "we say that.. ." with the Egyptian bi- tense prefix sandwiched between SA material (see 8.1 below and Wilmsen 1996 for recent discussion).
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These criticisms aside, the codeswitching approach is an interesting one. One may ask, however, that its theoretical underpinnings be more explicitly formulated than hitherto in regards to its application to two varieties of the same language. Walters (1996: 180) points out that Myers-Scotton's (1993) markedness model of code choice, developed on the basis of codeswitching between discrete languages, appears to make the wrong prediction about the type of code switching (specifically intrasentential) which one finds in Arabic diglossia. Aside from the invocation of such overly general parameters as 'formal' vs. 'informal' (see section 3 above), there is lacking extensive research on the discourse/ pragmatic and social'9 framework of Arabic diglossic 'switching'. Two approaches to the study of spoken Arabic emerge here. On the one hand one can assume a variety which has been termed ESA and attempt to define the range of structures which occur in it. The codeswitching model, on the other hand, proceeds on the initial basis of only two opposed varieties. Exploring the implications of adopting one approach or the other or a combination of two would undoubtedly enrich our understanding of spoken Arabic. 4.2 and Ethnici_y nationaihy
The work of Mitchell and his colleagues referred to in section 3 above took broad-based nationality differences as an important independent variable. In the data summarized in section 3, nationality is, potentially, one parameter explaining differential language behavior. Syrians, for instance, switched to a far greater degree from their NA hdda towards SA hdd& "this", than did Egyptians, who by and large retained Egyptian Arabic da. Clearly, El-Hassan's parameter of stigmatization, the dialectal form being more stigmatized than the SA, does little to explain the differential behavior, since all speakers in the sample are educated. Rather, one may propose that Egyptians may be less reticent about maintaining their local norms in formal situations than are certain other nationalities. However, interpreting variation in terms of nationality is difficult for at least two reasons. First, in the above example, (hda - hada - da) internal linguistic differences may play a role. In purely structural terms it is a smaller step for a Syrian to switch from Syrian Arabic h&dato
19 The formerinclude factorscuing the 'codeswitching', for instancetopic, entry of new interlocutor, hesitation, highlighting, emphasis, Socialfactorsincludethe symbolic etc. value of the codes within the community,role relationbetween interlocutors code and choice.Walters, oddly,makesno reference Eid'sworkin his discussion codeswitching. to of
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SA hada, potentially nothing more than a phonetic substitution, than it is for an Egyptian to change from da to hada, involving a complete lexical change.20 Secondly, and more generally, 'nationality' may mask a good deal of internal ethnic variation, a point I turn to now. By 'ethnic' I understand any of a number of social parameters by which, non-national social groupings are distinguished, including religion, shared history, skin color, kinship, lineage and place of origin. The relevant criterion or criteria defining ethnicity may differ from place to place, so the present category is potentially a very large one which may eventually have to be broken up into finer component parts. A classic instance of ethnic difference correlating with linguistic difference is Blanc's (1964) study of communal dialects of Baghdad, where he showed that Arabic-speaking Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities in Baghdad were marked by sometimes striking linguistic differences. Beyond the purely structural description of these differences, it is of equal interest to know the manner in which they are distributed in the community, and what the distribution tells us of the social relations between the groups. An enlightening study in the respect is Holes' work on sectarian differences between the 'Arab and Baharna communities in Bahrain. These two groups are differentiated historically, the 'Arab being more recent immigrants, and confessionally, 'Arab being Sunni, Baharna Shia. There are found considerable dialectal differences between the 'Arab and three different Bahama groups. Holes (1987) isolates 19 variables for comparison. On the whole, I am being brief here and simplifythe Bahama groups somewhat, the contrasts mark 'Arab vs. three different Bahama (Baharna) dialects, e.g. 'Arab t 4 y vs. Baharna f d, 21 in the realm of phonetics, or 'Arab drisat"she studied",ykitbuin "they read" vs. Bahama darasat - dirsat, in ykitbun - yiktub2n22 the morphophonogical realm. Holes study shows two trends worthy of mention. First, Bahama tend to move towards cArab phonological variants, whereas the reverse does not occur. Thus, Baharna will switch from their own g to 'Arab y to some degree (e.g. ya - ga "he came"), whereas 'Arab make the reverse switch to a far smaller extent (ya, Holes 1986, 1987: 57 ff.). This asymmetric movement is explicable through the fact that the 'Arab are the
20 Not to mention syntactic differerences as well: both SA hada and Syrian Arabic hada (Cowell 1964: 557) occurs pre or post N, whereas Egyptian Arabic da is exclusively post-nominal. 21 One of the three Baharna dialects (Ba4amaII) has y as the norm. 22 Differing for the three Baharna dialectal groups.
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dominant political group in the country, and hence their variety commands a degree of local prestige (see below). Secondly, variation is governed not only by communal norms, but by SA influence as well. In this respect both the 'Arab and Baharna communities display the same bifurcation, namely that educated speakers adopt SA forms to a far greater degree than do illiterates. These two tendencies interact in ways which render a simple explanation of many variational phenomena difficult. For instance, the 'Arab have a diachronic guttural epenthesis rule of the form *Cgu,C-+ CgutaC, hence *rnab -- mgarib "west". The Bahama do not have such a rule, hence magiib, identical to SA magrib.Holes observes (1987: 172) that whereas there is a slight tendency for "Arab to move towards the SA form magrib,23 there is also a small tendency for the Baharna to adopt the 'Arab mgarib.In respect of morphophonological rules, generally speaking the Baharna move in two directions. Where the 'Arab and Bahama share a common form which contrasts with SA, the Bahama show a stronger tendency to move towards the SA variant. Where, on the other hand, the 'Arab and Bahama differ, even where the Baharna variant agrees with the SA form, there is a small though consistent tendency for the Bahama to move towards the cArab form (as in the example above).24 One point which emerges from Holes' study is that the 'Arab community evinces a greater degree of linguistic security in that 'Arab speakers tend to move away from their native norms to a lesser degree than do the Bahama, and when they do it is in the direction of SA. The Bahama deviance from native norms, on the other hand, goes in two directions, towards 'Arab and towards SA. Why some Bahama features react in one way and others in another is not obvious. The reasons for it are not discussed by Holes (see below). One effect of the Bahama strategy in those cases where their native forms potentially serve as the prestige target variant (e.g. magib cited above, where Bahama = SA) is to ensure that their variants do not define communal norms. If this
23 The reason this is interpreted as a movement towards the SA variant, not the Baharna, is that there are no instances where SA and Baharna forms differ in which the 'Arab converge towards the Bahama. cArab mja7ibis realized phonetically as [mqarib]. 24 A third trend suggested by Holes (1987: 146) is of potential significance, namely that (SA) literate speakers of both communities tend to move towards a set of common variants to a far greater degree than do illiterates, particularly in the morphophonological realm of verb stems. Holes argues for a covert SA normalizing factor, though the data is too complex to allow for a simple summary, and may support different conclusions.
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is intentional, it would be interesting to know whether they do this to maintain the 'communalness' of their own forms (see below), or out of deference to the dominant 'Arab group. A second example of ethnically-based variation is attested in the four reflexes of proto-Arabic *q in Jordan. The variation is particularly widespread in urban areas, where speakers of different backgrounds have settled. Abd-el Jawad has studied reflexes of this variation in Amman g' k (qala and Irbid (northern Jordan). The variants are q - kdl "he said"). For the most part, q is associated with SA,25 'dl gal ' with speakers of urban origin, k with central Palestinian rural dialects, and g with other rural Palestinian and Israeli dialects (e.g. Galilee and Negev) and rural Jordanian.26 The ' and k variants were brought to Jordan largely by refugees from the Israeli-Arab wars. Each variant thus has specific socio-political associations, q the standard (see this section below), ' urban Palestinian,k rural Palestinianand g largely ruraljordanian. Leaving q aside for the moment, it appears that a bipolar prestige system is developing in urban areas, with ' and g in competition. k, on the other hand, seems to be regressive in urban Jordan, according to Abd-el Jawad's data at least (see section 7). This emerges from Abd-el Jawad's corpus-based study comparing parents and children (1986: 56) where in both Amman and Irbid the following trends are discernible. Among k speakers there is a sharp decline in the usage of k from the parental to the children's generation. Furthermore, no speakers of original g or ' dialects use k forms. Both original ' and g speakers maintain the forms over two generations, ' somewhat more than g, though a significant contrast is developing between younger men and women, with women strongly favoring ', men somewhat favoring g. There is also a geographical contrast, with Amman showing a stronger ' orientation than Irbid.
25 A very few dialects in the area have q as the native variety, Nablus town, for instance (Abd-el Jawad 1987: 361), and the few rural Druz communities in Jordan. 26 Traditionally the g variant is referred to as Bedouin, though this is a misnomer. Bedouin applies to a very specific, nomadic lifestyle, though the majority of g speakers in Jordan are in fact sedentary fanners. Moreover, many nomads (e.g. eastern Jordan and on into Saudi Arabia) have further conditioned variants of *q, such as d5 and dz. Ingham (1976) correlates the Bedouin-sedentary dichotomy with characteristic linguistic variants among different groups in southern Iraq and Khuzistan. He has some degree of success in this exercise, though also describes groups who do not fit into the proposed language-lifestyle correlation at all (e.g. where long sedentary groups have classical 'nomadic' features).
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It would appear that ' vs. g have crosscutting symbolic political and social values. ' represents Palestinian norms, though is also historically urban and hence may take on overtones of modernity, while g is originally Jordanian, but also tough, slightly macho and rugged (Abd-el Jawad 1981: 176, see section 7 below). Perhaps because it has no strong constituency to represent-Palestinian interests are, as it were represented by ' and it never was an urban variety-k has established no niche in urban Jordan. Tying together the two types of variation discussed in this and in the previous section, education and ethnicity, in the course of the corpus-based study of Arabic a certain puzzle arose. Numerous Western studies have established that standard variants generally are prestigious in various senses: change tends to work towards them; they are the target of hypercorrection, they represent the norms of society at large as opposed to local, communal values of the vernacular variants, etc. This may be termed the standard-vernacular model. As early as Schmidt (1974, unfortunately not available to me) a different sort of pattern became evident in Arabic. This is particularly prominent in regards to the present *q variable. In Bahrain, for instance, there are three values for this variant, q - g (g) g k (back velar k). q is the SA value, g and ' largely phonologically conditioned 'Arab norms, g (no variation with g) the norms of one Bahama community, and k the norm of the largest Baharna community (most ruralites).According to the standardvernacular model one would expect movement towards the standard q variant. Holes, however, encountered a more complex pattern of variation. First, he found that there were some words where q always occurred. These are usually words of SA provenance (Holes 1987: 54; see section 3 above). A second set of words, termed 'core items', includes those where q never replaces the local variant, and a third set shows variation between q and a local variant (see section 6 below). Most telling for the standard-vernacular model, Holes found (1987: 70) that the dominant 'Arab tended to maintain their own native variants, both g and the marked (in the sense that it is unique to the 'Arab) g variant to a high degree, while those literate Baharna speakers who have k as a native variant, if they switched at all, switched almost categorically not to SA q in the core vocabulary, but to 'Arab g. In short, there are two tendential movements, one to a pan-native variety g, one to q. Ibrahim (1986) has given a name to this sort of bifurcated variation, distinguishing between standard and prestige variants.
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'Standard' refers to the codified SA while 'prestige' describes the local norm or norms which, constitute an alternative to the standard. The prestige varieties derive from regional native Arabic varieties, in the present example the g variant. I will return to the standard-prestige distinction in 4.4 and 5 below. As a last topic in this section, I would like to switch the geographical and socio-historical orientation to a new focus. Arabs have been in the Lake Chad area since at least 1400. In present-day Borno in NE Nigeria they constitute an important minority of about 500,000. Between 20,000-50,000 of these (modern demographic statistics are impossible to come by) live in Maiduguri, Borno's capital, where they represent the largest concentration of Arabs in Nigeria. Whereas in the previous cases ethnicity was an intra-Arab affair, in the present one it is primarily an Arab-non-Arab one. The dominant political group in the area are Kanuri, and Kanuri and Hausa the main lingua francas. In Owens (1995) it was argued that minority status played a decisive role in explaining the type of variation observed among Arabs in Maiduguri. The issue may be illustrated on the basis of one particularly clear variable. Maiduguri has an Arabic population which is no more than three generations deep. Generations one and two are comprised almost exclusively of immigrants from rural Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad, and from urban Ndjamena in Chad. These source areas are linguistically distinctive in various ways. One variable pertains to the realization of the lpl marker in the imperfect verb. In rural Nigeria it is almost categorically n-, n-uktub"we write", while in Chad and parts of Cameroon, where the dialect boundary appears to lie, it is n-. .. -u.,n-uktub-u. migration, both variants have established themVia selves in Maiduguri. Migration follows certain patterns, one prominent one being the tendency of Arabs to settle among kinsmen and Arabs from the same source area. One thus finds areas populated largely by immigrants from the eastern Nigerian dialect region, from Ndjamena, and so on. While the linguistic norms from the source area tend to get carried over into the newly-settled urban areas, the correspondence is less than perfect. Thus, in a sample of rural Nigerian speakers (N = 52) 99% of the speakers use exclusively the n- form. While there exist no corpora-based statistics relating to Chadian Arabic, all grammars of the language which I am aware of give only the n-... -u form. On the other hand, in the areas of Maiduguri, areas settled largely by Nigerian Arabs, those Arabs (N = 30 in the survey) of Nigerian ori-
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gin have only 82% use of the n- form (18% of n-... -u). Speakers in of Chadian origin in a 'Chadian' neighborhood have nearly the mirror image percentage, 17% n-, 83% n-... -u. It thus appears that there is a two-way movement relative to the ancestral norms: speakers of Nigerian ancestry have increased the non-Nigerian n-... -u form, while speakers of Chadian ancestry have increased the Nigerian n-. In contrast to the other cases examined so far, what this data shows is the lack of a clear defining norm controlling the direction of variants. Speakers are aware of the existence of other variants, though none of these have normative value in the way, for instance, the g variant of *q has in Bahrain, or the ' and g variants of *q have in urban Jordan. Moreover, in Maiduguri SA has no significant affect on spoken Arabic. It was argued in Owens (1995, also, 1998c) that the status of Arabs and Arabic in Maiduguri inhibited the formation of a single prestige value of this and other variables. Being a communal language, Arabic is not used widely in Maiduguri in public places, a situation which restrictsthe forums where single norms might be negotiated. Furthermore, Arabs themselves are aware of their minority status, and as such contrast themselves with other ethnic groups (vs. Kanuri, Margi etc.). It may be surmised that this confrontation with other groups deflects attention away from internal differences in Arabic. It also appears to be the case that Arabic dialectal differences do not correlate with political and social groupings, a fact which further lessens the potential symbolic importance of the different Arabic variants. It may be noted that the variational status of Arabic in Maiduguri falls outside both the standard-vernacular paradigm, and the diglossic paradigm, which will be introduced and discussed in greater detail in section 5 below. 4.3 and interpersonal variables Style,context
Ferguson's original formulation of diglossia described not only an ideal dichotomy between linguistic varieties, but also an ideal socio-functional matrix into which these varieties are distributed. High varieties are used in formal situations, for writing, between strangers,for example, whereas low varieties are for informal contexts, not used in writing, and conversation nor between friends. Just as the linguistic reality proved to be more complex than could be accounted for by a simple H-L dichotomy, so too do contextual factors correlate with linguistic usage in various ways.
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Although Mitchell's original conceptualization of ESA defined it primarily as stylistically-controlled variation, studies locating linguistic variation along contextually-definedparameters are far fewer than variation studied in terms of socio-demographic categories. This weighting is understandablein that logically it is necessary to define what significant types of variation occur and with which sociological entities they are associated with before detailing the use of one form or another according to different interactional criteria. Nonetheless, such studies are necessary for the light they shed on the question of maintenance of the different varieties, SA and NA, or different ethnically-based NA varieties. Furthermore, there are aspects of linguistic structure which readily lend themselves to contextually-defined study such as address systems, conversational structure and leave taking and greetings. One of the earliest corpus analyses of spoken Arabic pertained to a contextually-delimited variety, namely Harrell's (1960) study of Egyptian Radio Arabic news broadcasts. Harrell's focus is basically the extent to which this variety maintained SA norms, or introduced ENA forms to one degree or another. The study generally shows that the texts have SA as their basis, with deviations largely, though not always, attributable to ENA. What is surpnsing in Harrell's study is not so much the consistent level of SA, but rather the fact that colloquialisms should enter at all into what basically is the recitation of written text. Following traditional (though difficult to verify) Labovian practice, Abd-el Jawad (1982: 152) divides his corpus into four styles, public, formal, semi-formal, and casual and suggests that the public style correlates with the greatest degree of SA traits, defined largely in phonological and lexical terms, the casual style with NA traits. In a short study, Schmidt (1986: 60 ff.) identified no less than seventeen different types of address forms used by a ticket collector on a 20 minute Cairo Metro ride. In the same study, he sketches the way in which telephone sequencing rules differ between Egypt and the US. The most detailed study of a contextually and conversationallydefined linguistic subsystem is Parkinson's analysis of a large corpus of address terms (some 6,000 tokens) collected over the course of a year in Cairo. With such a large corpus Parkinson was able to provide a statisticallybased orientation to many of the terms of address. The address system is based on a simple linguistic system, usually containing the vocative particle ya and/or a second person independent pronoun plus either a proper name and/or a simple noun (ya 'ammisf?eh'ali). Parkinson summarizes his data in terms of semantic (e.g. kinship names as terms of
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address) or illocutionary categories (to abuse, show respect). Statistical summaries for different terms yield different contextual profiles. The highly formal term afandim (1985: 155) for instance will tend to be used by upper class speakers addressingmiddle aged or older speakerswhereas 'a4i a4iiya, u4ti are often delivered with a slightly impatient or angry tone to coevals or those lower in the social hierarchy. Parkinson illustrates the statistical tendencies with the use of the various terms in actual speech. It is noteworthy that few of the terms in the large corpus derive directly from SA. Holes (1986b) approaches address terms from a slightly different angle, relating usage to the communal differences discussed in 4.2 above. Following Brown and Levinson (1979), Holes distinguishes three types of address contexts, 'solidary'(based on Yassin 1977), 'ritual' and 'deictic'. His focus is on the use of second person pronouns in these three contexts, which fall into three different, though overlapping systems, one associated with the 'Arab dialect, two with different Bahama groups (B1, B2). On the basis of corpus material, he examined usage according to whether the addressee belonged to the same dialectal/social group or not. The least amount of variation occurred in in-group contexts. The 'Arab (A) and Bl never deviated from their local norm. The B2 group varied only in the ritual and solidary reference, though even here subconditioning factors are identifiable. B2 tended to use 2msg -k in ritual formulae which are widely used throughout the region, e.g. Aayydk allah "May God preserve you".27 Formulae specific to the B2 community, however, (cabb-cim "May God destroy you pl") usually appear in the alla B2 variant (-cim rather than A, B1 -kum).In inter-group exchanges a clearly asymmetricpattern is evident. A and B1 always maintain their own systems, regardless of whom they are addressing. B2, on the other hand, shifts completely to the A system in all types of reference when addressing 'Arab speakers, and shifts variably to that of their B1 co-religionists. It is clear that there are two factors involved in these patterns. One is intra-linguistic. A and B1 differ only in the 2fsg (A -c vs. B1 -I), whereas B2 with -c, -s, -cim differs by two or three features from the other two groups. The B2 group has the linguistically most marked system. A second factor is social status, where it appears the B2, being mainly rural and uneducated, represent the least prestigious social group. Taken in conjunction with a remark in Holes 1983, the present discussion relativizes in an important way the variationist data which forms
27
As if the B2 speakers have borrowed the set of formulaic expressions.
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the basis of Holes' (1987) description of language usage in Bahrain. Holes notes (1983: 452), that the same Bahama speakers who showed a movement towards 'Arab norms in his interviews, would switch to Baharna norms in informal contexts, as when speaking among friends. He unfortunately does not have extensive corpora to illustrate this, though the differential use of address forms, particularly by B2 speakers, appears to exemplify this point, with B2 norms much stronger in in-group than in out-group contexts. A rather complex diglossia is apparently operative here, reminiscent of what Fasold (1984: 48) has termed 'double-nested' diglossia.28The Bahrain community at large is marked by a H-L, SA-native Arabic diglossia. Within this diglossia is a more local diglossia, with Bahama norms to a greater or lesser extent subordinate to 'Arab ones in public exchanges. Holes (1993) has also investigated the choice of SA and ENA in the political speeches of Gamal Abd Al-Nasir, showing that Nasir would move between the SA and NA poles, sometimes discretely, though often in the murky area of ESA, for various rhetorical purposes. Use of NA vs. SA varieties marks solidarity with the audience vs. authority over them, the explanation of practical day to day politics vs. the expression of abstract, all-embacing ideals, of local nationalism vs. pan-Arabism. Stylistic choices are here seen as means to rhetorical ends. In a similar, though more ambitious study, Rabie (1991: 305 ff) the interaction of linguistic varieties and speech act type of various Cairene radio programs. Topic, for instance, clearly determines the use of a pure Classical Arabic in the call to prayer, while other segments of speech, as marked NA, may be decisively influenced by the by the relative use of SA relationship between participants or genre of speech act. It may be remarked, however, referring to the caveat expressed at the end of 4.1, that both of these studies ultimately depend on an impressionistic set of technical terms (e.g. "mixed style, colloquialism, lack of case end28
Though a better metaphorhere might be the 'L box within the H box diglossia':
In contexts where the H box is not operative, another type of diglossia may be
switchedon in the L box.

FIBnj1
L_AJ
SA
B2 = Baharna 2 dialect, A = 'Arab dialect, SA = Standard Arabic. The deeper inside one goes, the more L the variety is.
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ing"), which detracts from a rigorous treatment of the relationship between language form and type of speech act. In functional terms, these studies bring out the social and symbolic linkages which underlie the different varieties and variants, thereby 'explaining' their maintenance within the society. 4.4 Sex and gender
Quite early in Arabic sociolinguistic studies it emerged that there were significant sex-based differences. In an instrumentally-based study, Kahn (1975), for example, showed that in a sample of Saudi Arabian speakers, women tended to differentiate more sharply than did men between emphatic and non-emphatic consonants,29to a degree greater than physiological differences can account for. Beginning with Schmidt (1974, 1986: 59), a number of studies carried out mainly on Egyptian and Levantine Arabic showed a bifurcated usage of the *q variable: men tend towards greater usage of q whereas women tended toward ' (Sallam 1980: 93, Abd-elJawad 1981: 171 ff., Bakir 1986, Haeri 1991, Daher 1998). Indeed, it was just this difference which led Ibrahim (1986, see 4.2 above) to distinguish between 'standard' and 'prestige' variants in Arabic. Palatalization of Cairene dentals (Royal 1985, not seen by the author but summarized in Haeri 1991, 1997b) is a further sex-based study from this region. While numerous studies have documented sex-based differences, a unitary interpretation is difficult. One reason is that not all variables necessarily show significant sex-linked differences. Parkinson's study of address terms in Cairene Arabic, for instance, both in terms of sex of speaker and addressee, generally reveals that such significant differences as exist are of a smaller magnitude than variables like age, tone of voice, and status relationship between interlocutors (see n. 31). In Owens 1995, sex-based difference were insignificant for all 6 variables treated. A second reason pertains to the fact that suggestions, interesting in themselves, proposed for one region do not generalize to, or are even contradicted by data from other areas. A good example of this is Haeri's rationalization for the consistently documented preference of Cairene women for using the local prestige ' rather than standard q. She suggests that the female orientation towards non-SA variants reflects a symbolic
29
The women had a greater difference between first and second formants than did
men.
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rejection on their part of traditional Islamic values and an orientation towards a secularly-based economic order.30 Studies from other areas define different patterns of female linguistic behavior, however. In Iraq, Bakir found that men tend to use more SA features than do women in Basra (1986: 4), including a greater usage of the SA internal passive, but Abu-Haidar (1987), using a Baghdad corpus, found precisely the opposite, that womenused a greater percentage of SA forms, including higher percentage of the internal SA passive (1987: 476).2 The puzzle is extended by Dekkak's (1979: 96) study of sex differences in Tlemcen in western Algeria, unfortunately ignored by sociolinguists working in Egypt and the Levant. Though his study lacks quantitative rigor, as a native of Tlemcen Dekkak has an insider's perspective. In Tlemcen ' (< *q) is strongly associated with female speech, men using it only in informal situations. Unlike Cairo, where ' is the city-wide NA prestige variant, in Algeria, Tlemcen is one of the few places in Algeria where *q = '. The usual A-NA reflex, and the variant of general prestige, is g. Women in Tlemcen therefore appear to favor neither the standard q nor the variant of wider prestige, g. Rather, their usage is emphatically local.32 A frequently invoked explanation for these divergent patterns has been in terms of the linguistic marketplace (Sankoff and Laberge 1978). Thus Abu-Haidar (1987: 479) commenting on the differences between her results and those in other parts of the Arabic world (see above) notes that women in Iraq, or at least Baghdad, historically are professionally active outside of the home and therefore have access to SA. When they are confronted with this variety, they will use it to a greater degree than do men (see also Haeri 1997a for further variations on this perspective). The problem with attributing explanatory status to such suggestions is the difficulty in developing an independent measure of 'linguistic marketplace', as opposed to invoking it for a post hoc explanation of a statistical trend.
30 Haeri, however, offers no extra-linguistic matrix by which the use of non-SA variants can be correlated with particular world views. 31 Facts such as these tend to make nonsense of Chambers' attempt to incorporate Arabic sociolinguistic data in explaining frequently observed sex-based differences. His generalization is that women tend to use more standard forms than do men (by which in the Arabic context Chambers means 'local prestige', not SA, 1995: 142 ff.), which makes sense only if he is willing to circularly allow that whatever forms happen to predominate in women's speech in any community are by definition the standard ones. 32 On comparative grounds, Dekkak's data may suggest that sex-based variants like are of considerable historical depth, that the association predates more recent H-L variation.
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4.5
Social class
In contrast to western sociolinguistics, analyses in terms of social class are conspicuously absent from most sociolinguistic studies. For a number of address terms studied by Parkinson, social class is an important variable,33though hardly ever the most important one, and Haeri (1991: 57 ff.) suggests that upper middle class women are the dominant group in introducing weak palatalization of dental stops. However, her sample is not evenly distributed across social classes (e.g. only 2 upper class females vs. 9 upper middle class women), and the variation interacts with education (type of school attended), which may play an equally or more important role than class. One crucial problem with defining class as an independent variable, seems to be how it can be defined in Arabic-speaking societies. Often lacking hard economic and social data, researchers must build their own socio-economic profiles. These are useful, but suffer from a necessary make-shiftness which renders cross-study comparisons difficult. It may also be suggested that much class-based variation is reflected not only in use of Arabic, but use of prestige foreign language varieties as well, French in North Africa, for instance (sections 7, 8), and increasingly English in the Middle East. Such is certainly the case in the spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, where the communal language Arabic interacts in the wider society with various African lingua francas (Hausa, Kanuri), and the pan-Nigerian standard, English. It may be the case that in diglossic sociolinguistic profiles (see section 5) education and ethnicity play a more decisive role in defining language variation within Arabic than does socio-economic class.34
33 For instance, respectful address terms such as had7-tak "your presence" and siyadtak "your mastery" are highly sensitive to the perceived social class of the addressee (though not that of the speaker, 1985: 21). Parkinson correlated 14 address terms with 9 different social categories. The average ranking of the first 10 terms shows relationship, tone of voice and addressee age to be the most important correlates. Addressee social class comes in fourth, tied with acquaintance. The three lowest ranked categories are sex of speaker, sex of addressee and speaker's social class. 34 Haeri (1991, 1997a) introduces the notion of linguistic market to describe the behavior of two phonological variables in Cairene Arabic. This is noteworthy for its attempt to combine political ideology, education, social class, and access to linguistic varieties as extra-linguistic variables influencing linguistic usage. However, lacking an overall index of linguistic market, such as developed in Sankoff and Laberge (1978), the explanatory thrust of her discussion is considerably diminished.
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4.6 Written Arabic
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To round out this section, it may briefly be noted that variation occurs in modem written Arabic. It is premature, at this point in research to suggest that it is variation situated along a SA-NA continuum parallel to that defined above for spoken Arabic. Walters (1996: 171) would appear to see such a development. Certainly the tension between a non-standardized and non-taught native variety and an official standard language learned in schools will be reflected in similar structural continua such as are found in the spoken language. It should expected, however, that the greater expectation that norms for correct written SA norms be reached will generate a quantitatively, perhaps qualitatively different set of variational patterns than are found in the spoken language. Indeed, whereas in the spoken language it is the native variety which is the basis form (see above), in the case of the written language it is the written form which provides the model. Moreover, the uncertainties inherent in the imperfect learning of orthographic conventions (Meiseles 1980: 127) will add further sources of variation. 5. 7he Variants What features vary will differ from region to region and even ostensibly identical types of variation may derive from different sources. For example, the *q variable is a rich source of variation throughout the Levant, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula, with variants, depending on ' region, q g (g) - k. In Nigerian Arabic, on the other hand, g is nearly the only value for this variable. There does exist a q - ' variation in Nigerian Arabic, though this derives from a different etymological source, via the series of changes, *y -+ q -+ q ' (e.g. qasal 'asal "wash"). Variational features studied35have included the *q variable discussed above (+ Amadidhi 1985 for Qatar), dental stop palatalization (Cairo), emphasis (Cairo), k- c variation (Amman, Irbid),f t d d (Bahrain), o u fiaa] (Korba, Tunisia, Walters 1992), all in the realm of phonology. Morphological variation has received less attention, though studies in Bahrain (Holes cited above) give a rich description of stem form variation, in Nigerian Arabic n- - n-... u lpl marking, b -0 imperfect verb marking, ba- - n- 1sg imperfect verb marking and a - i preformative vowel variation have been scrutinized
35
I cite the sources only where they have not yet been mentioned.
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and the passive verb form has been used as a variable in Basran and Baghdadi Arabic. Syntax has received the least attention. Agreement in Jordanian Arabic is one such study, and a similar study was carried out for Cairene Arabic (Belnap 1991). El-Hassan's study discussed in section 3 may be considered lexico-syntactic. Among all the variants and potential variants a basic question pertains to the form and status of the different variables. The question has two aspects. In the first instance it is necessary to determine what variables are subject to variation. For instance, in a study of 13 variables in Damascene Arabic (Tarrier 1993), it is apparent that not all variables have the same degree or pattern of variation. The sample is based on the speech of eight Syrian doctors, the purpose of the study to determine to what extent SA or NA variants were used. The range of values is considerable, ranging from categoricness of NA variants (e.g. NA e, o to the exclusion of SA ay aw) to near categoricness of SA (SA q vs D-NA '). What has been lacking to date are studies defining the relations between the different variables. In the initial state of investigation one descriptive mechanism will be the establishment of tendential variational hierarchies. It was noted above in 4.1, for instance, that there was a greater tendency for an SA stem to occur with an NA inflection than an SA inflection with NA stem. Parkinson's preliminary study on the occurrence of short final vowels (1994: 185, 189, 197) showed the greatest tendency towards final voweling of verbs among 3msg perfect verb forms (kataba"he wrote"), followed by the occurrence of a final vowel before a pronoun ending (yaktub-u-ha- yaktub-a-habut also yakwith voweling of the 1sg perfect suffix and suffixless imperfect tub-ha),36 verb least likely to be voweled (e.g. katab-tmore likely than katab-tu). As an initial descriptive step, the three observations discussed here may be summarized as follows. Given a mixture of SA and NA forms, then: q will be standardized before (the SA reflexes of) o and e inflection = NA, stem = SA a final vowel will tend to occur in the order:373msg perfect > stem + V + object pronoun > lsg perfect - suffixless imperfect verb
36 A further parameter Parkinson summarized was whether or not the chosen vowel was grammatically correct or not, according to the prescribed SA rules. 37 This is a perhaps unwarranted extrapolation from Parkinson's data. It is safer to say "a final vowel will occur to a greater degree in the order" rather than, "added in the order of".
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As they stand such summaries are a necessarily happenstance collection of observations, too few studies having been conducted to warrant models accounting for the structural variation leading from NA to SA. Nonetheless, consideration of such hierarchicalizations may find resonance in theoretically orientated accounts of second language learning, codeswitching (cf. 4.1 above and 8.1 below), as well as having a home within the general framework of diglossia. Ideally these hierarchies will be established not only in terms of textbased analyses, but also by perceptual tests. For example, a short study by Owens and Bani Yasin (1991) explored the hierarchicalization of features via a matched guise test. Two identical mixed tests were prepared and recorded, where one had the SA variant q and the Horan fpl agreement (see above), while the other had Horan g and the SA fsg agreement pattern (e.g. 'alaq-at sdr-an "relations became" (SA q + Horan fpl) vs. 'alag-dt sar-at (Horan g + SA fsg). Using a modified matched-guise format (see section 7 below), power and solidarity questions were posed. The q variant scored higher among the 'power' questions' whereas the g variant scored higher among the 'solidarity' questions. The differing agreement patterns appeared to have no influence on the responses, supporting the conclusion that the speakers responded to the q - g variants to the exclusion of the agreement variation. In the Middle East at least, the use of q, and perhaps q alone, appears to move the discourse to a more formal SA level, where other variants, agreement or diphthongs for example, lack such strong symbolic character (see also Parkinson 1991, discussed in section 3 above).38 There has been no convincing explanation, to my knowledge, as to why some features figure more prominently in variation than do others. 6. Variation Change and Before addressing the question of variation in terms of language change, the naive question may be posed, why one of either SA or NA does not simply become the unique norm in the Arabic world, or phrasing the question in terms of language maintenance, why both varieties continue
38 Parkinson (1991: 58) suggests that phonological variables play a particularly important role in defining text level. Before appealing to global domains, phonology vs. morphology, however, it appears necessary to define hierarchies within each as well (pronunciation of *q vs. diphthongs, for instance; see Parkinson 1991: 40 ff. for evaluation of SA/NA in mixed, written texts).
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to eNist.It is easier to explain the maintenance of SA. In the first instance, SA is structurally identical in most respects to Classical Arabic, which is the language of Islam and a link to classical Arabic culture. SA is sustained through this cultural association. Secondly, SA is arguably the most prominent vehicle symbolizing Arabic unity in the modern world. In contrast to the relatively weak and disunited national states, a modernized SA symbolizes a uniform standard throughout the Arabic world.39 The reasons for the maintenance of the NA varieties are more complex, as they cannot be subsumed under the rubric of official policy.40 To the contrary, NA (alias dialects) has no official status or recognition in the Arabic world. Briefly, the diglossia, SA-NA dichotomy has existed at least since the eighth century, when Classical Arabic was codified by the Arabic grammarians (i.e. Siibawayhi),producing a variety different from rural and urban dialects. The situation today, though more widespread than in the past as access to SA increases, is thus inherited. A second reason may be termed 'mechanical compatibility'. The basic phonological and morphological structure of SA and NA are very similar. Lacking compelling reasons for switching to SA, the average Arab could well ask what the necessity is of changing one's native variety to another, similar one. However, the key reason relates ultimately not to language structure but to general social and political motivation. Should these become impelling enough SA would doubtlessly become the spoken norm throughout the Arabic world. Lacking such motivation, however, and at present there are probably as many reasons for maintaining NA as for adopting SA, diglossia will continue to prevail. Turning to the question whether the variation described in sections 3 and 4 can straightforwardly be interpreted as describing language change, a qualified answer needs to be given. The most important qualificaton pertains to what the parameters of variation are, whether defined by the introduction of SA material via, primarily, the speech of educated speakers, or by inter-ethnic variation. Additive change may be opposed to replacive change, with Arabic exhibiting both types to a high degree.
3 These two linkages are partially independent variables. As Grandguillaume (1991: 51) points out, the relative weighting given to the Islamic or the modernist legitimization for the use of Standard Arabic within the modern Arab state is a significant index for a range of attitudes and policies relating to languages other than SA. ? Hence maintenance of NA rarely receives the attention from political scientists and historians which Arab policy towards SA does (e.g. Holt 1996, where mainly SA is considered).
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Beginning with the first, the degree of influence of SA on spoken Arabic in modern Arabic countries can hardly be understated. Its influence is, however, largely of an additive rather than replacive nature. That is, SA is integrated into spoken Arabic by adjoining it to the NA base (see 4.1) rather than by displacing it. The linguistic mechanism by which this is accomplished is via the introduction of SA lexical structures into the NA base, i.e. borrowing. If the introduction of SA material may generally be characterized as borrowing (Owens and Bani Yasin 1991), it is borrowing of a special kind because the donor variety, SA, is always present among a large population of speakers, and educated Arabs with a reasonable knowledge of it may employ it for both conceptual and stylistic purposes. In the simplest case SA words, usually new concepts, are introduced in their SA guise.4' qd'a "lecture hail", for instance, is a word more prevalent in the Irbid region of Jordan since the opening of Yarmouk University in 1976 than before that date (see e.g. Abd-elJawad 1981: 352, Holes 1987: 49, Abd-el Jawad and Sulaiman 1990, Haeri 1991). The introduced lexical structures may also bring entire blocks of rules with them. Bani Yasin and Owens (1987), for example, show that plural non-human nouns of SA provenance almost categorically require fsg agreement, as in SA, as opposed to a mixed fsg or natural fpl agreement found in the native Horan Arabic of the region. Moreover, the agreement will often be imposed on words of purely NA form and meaning, yielding a mixed syntagm, with noun of SA origin, SA agreement, realized on a word of NA form and meaning. The infiltration of SA into NA is difficult to conceptualize precisely because it proceeds along two dimensions simultaneously. One dimension, at least in its initial impetus, is straightforward, the borrowing of SA lexemes encoding new ideas, described in the previous paragraph. The second, alluded to in sections 3 and 4.3, is stylistically and situationally controlled and hence is always in a state of flux. In part reflecting this multiple motivation, words may appear in a number of different guises, even in the space of a single text from a single speaker, from fairly pure SA form, to mixed forms having attributes of SA and NA. All studies which have given serious quantitative attention to the matter suggest that the situation can be idealized in the following dichotomy, Sallam (1980: 79), studying the q variable (see section 5 above) being among the first to address the question. A given corpus will contain
41
Excluding certain SA features, like case endings.
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words which always occur in a certain SA guise. In his data, qura "villages" always has the SA variant q for example. Other words will alternate between SA and NA, both qal and 'dl "he said", for example. Following Mitchell, for Sallam the q - ' alternation is stylistically-controlled, with q being a formal variant, ' a casual one. This situation may be represented as in (2), describing the realization of the *q variable in two lexical sets, according to two contexts. (2) Set 1 Set 2 Formal
+
Casual
-
l)42 (qdl(always qura)
This, however, is an idealization, which rarely, if ever, admits of a categorical classificationof lexemes into two discrete sets. Holes, for instance, divides his Bahrain corpus into three lexical categories in respect of q occurrence (1987: 51 ff.), those words which only have g (or one of its morphophonological variants), those only with q, and those varying between q g. gdl "say" is listed in the first category, mustaqbal "future" in the second (only q). Abd-el Jawad (1981: 367 ff.) has a more precise listing, giving the actual percentages of SA q or NA ' - g - k in his Amman corpus. Here mustaqbal occurs with q in 55% of the tokens,
one of the NA variants in 45%; qdl occurs in 9% of the tokens as q,
Amman data is 91% in the NA guises. The comparative Bahrain suggestive of different explanations. It may be, for example, that in Amman a 'nativization' of certain words like mustaqbal, originally from SA, is further along than in Bahrain. The higher percentage of q in qal in Amman may also suggest a greater degree of style shifting there than in Bahrain. In any case, what this discussion shows is that borrowing and stylistic variation may dovetail in such a way that as (mainly) learned words introduced originally in formal contexts become more widespread, they loose their exclusively SA traits. At the same time, most lexemes, of whatever provenance, may be formalized by delivering them in an SA guise. The logic of this process is such that its interpretation in terms of linear historical development, such as for instance Labov attempts (1994: 345-6) is by its very nature impossible. The second type of variation, inter-ethnic variation, represents variation which may point to replacive language change. Most of the data
42 Whether the q - ' (and SA - NA alternation in the same lexical set generally) is a phonological or a lexical alternation, or a combination of the two, is a question needing greater research; see e.g. Holes 1987 chapter 8).
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discussed in 4.2 may be given a diachronic interpretation in this light. It appears, for instance, that the rural Palestinian k variant of *q has not strongly established itself in Jordanian cities, and may one day disappear entirely. Such a development would not mean the disappearance of the k variant, since it continues in the rural West Bank and in Israel, though its disappearance in one area would represent a loss and regression for this one feature. Arabic, with two different patterns of variation, is unique enough that it deserves a special place in the typology of sociolinguistic variation. Such a conclusion is not one followed by all sociolinguists. Chambers, for instance, a sociolinguist with no background in Arabic,
would have it that ". . . literary Arabic does not form part of the lin-
guistic continuum in Arabic communities but is removed from it by a gap." (1995: 142). Such simplificatory summaries may make presentation of the Arabic situation easier for the outsider to grasp, though at the expense of distorting the sociolinguistic reality. Without developing the components in detail (Owens, 1998c, 1999), it may be suggested that a typology of sociolinguistic variation is necessary to account for the differences obtaining between the West and Arabic-speaking countries. In the West (perhaps elsewhere) a single, well-profiled standard (standard English, Hochdeutsch, Classical French) stands opposed to various local vernaculars, what was referred to in 4.2 as the standardvernacular dichotomy. A second position on the typology is represented by Arabic, defined by three parameters, a standard variety = SA, a local prestige variety (in Ibrahim's 1986 sense, see 4.3, e.g. the 'Arab variety of Bahrain), and other non-prestigiouslocal varieties (e.g. Bahama varieties). Arabic in Nigeria fits neither position, which implies that the typology will require further defining parameters, which I will not go into here. (3) standard = prestige vs. vernacular (western countries) standard vs. prestige vs. vernacular (Arab countries) no standard, no prestige (Arabic in NE Nigeria) 7. Attitudes and usage Language variation is related to a set of attitudes and value judgements pertaining to the different variants. Two approaches to studying this relationship are sometimes termed the direct and indirect. The first asks speakers directly their evaluation of different varieties, frequently in con-
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junction with questions about domains of language usage. In this vein of research, Diem (1974, 92 ff.), provides a good overview about Arab writers' attitudes towards SA and NA. Examples of the direct approach are Kahtany (1997) and Dweik (1997) who asked a sample of Arab students in America about attitudes towards and policies concerning the use of SA as opposed to NA, Kahtany's study concentrating specifically on Damascene Arabic. Generally speaking they found an attitude tolerant toward NA, and aware of its broad functional spread, but also one agreeing that SA is a variety of greater prestige whose dominance should be maintained in the media and education. The indirect approach is often used in conjunction with a version of a matched guise test, made famous by Lambert (e.g. 1967). In this test versions of the same text differing only in terms of the features under scrutiny, often read by the same person, are played before an audience, who answer questions about the personality of the speaker. The questions are often arrayed along scalar poles of solidarity (e.g. friendliness, honesty, neighborliness of speaker) and power (wealth, education, respectability of speaker). In addition, subjects are often asked to identify the variety being spoken, and under what circumstances (e.g. at home, in a mosque) it would be appropriate to use it. Two of the earlier studies in this second genre of Arabic sociolinguistics were carried out with Egyptian subjects in Cairo. El-Dash and Tucker (1975) presented subjects with five language guises (Egyptian Arabic, SA, Egyptian, British and American English). Generally the SA guise received the highest scores on all counts (intelligence, likeability, religiousness, leadership) with the British English speaker (!) receiving the lowest. The Egyptian Arabic guise achieved his highest ranking on the likeability scale. The subjects were asked to rate the suitability of each guise for five domains. The SA guise scored highest for school, work, radio and television, and formal speeches. Only in the home domain did the SA rank lowest of the five, with the Egyptian Arabic guise scoring highest here. This, the first study of its kind in the Arabic world, showed that Arabic speakers differentiate consistently between different varieties of Arabic according to domain and personality assignment. Herbolich (1979) was interested in defining to what extent Egyptian speakers could identify the speech of other Arab nationals, and what the associated character traits of each were. For this study subjects were played tapes of Egyptian, Libyan, Saudi and Syrian speakers, plus
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speakers from these countries trying to speak in an Egyptian manner. Whereas the subjects could identify the pure Egyptian with 86% accuracy, they were quite poor in identifying the other three. The Libyan was highest after the Egyptian, though with only 23% correct identification. Despite this, the guises did receive consistent and statistically significant assignment of character traits: Egyptians were generally ranked best, followed by the Syrian guise, Saudi and Libyan. Herbolich further showed that perceived identification of speaker, even if incorrect (e.g. Saudi speaker perceived as Sudanese) may affect the judgement of personality characteristics. Saudi's identified as Sudanese, for example, rate slightly higher than Saudis identified as Saudis. Both studies had evaluators from different educational levels, with subjects tending to make more accurate judgements about the speakers' identity the more education they had. The first two studies inquired about global reactions to different language varieties, without keying in on which linguistic variables it was that served as identificatory clues to a particular variety. In this respect they are hard to integrate into the detailed, variable-based analysis of Cairene speech which characterizes the corpus-based approach. Two studies in Jordan, on the other hand, concentrated on the question of attitudes towards specific variables, Sawaie (1986) and Hussein and ElAli (1989). In both, matched-guise tests were constructed around the ' variants q k. Both studies found the SA variant q consisg tently received the most positive scores. The situation is more complicated with the other variables, however. Since both studies were carried out among Yarmouk university students in Irbid (Horan dialect region), the findings may be compared directly. Generally speaking, Sawaie found that among the three NA varieties, ' received the most positive evaluation. The speaker of this guise, for example, was more likely to be assigned a higher professional status, like doctor or university teacher, than were speakers of the other guises and the speaker was assigned a higher social class. At the same time, other variants did not necessarily have negative associations. g, for example, was associated with a masculine way speaking (see Abd-el Jawad 1981: 335), and although ' was considered the most "pretty" (of the the NA variants), it was also considered the most "pretentious and affected". It is interesting to note that each variety had strong geographical associations. g was associated with Jordan, k with Palestine, and ' evenly divided between Jordan and Palestine. On the whole Sawaie's attitudinal study correlates with the corpus-based study of
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Abd-el Jawad (1981, 1986). q and ' appear as standard and prestige varieties respectively, g perhaps a covert prestige form, these the three variants which dominate in Abd-elJawad's corpus (see 4.2). Even more so than in Abd-el Jawad's work, ' emerges as a geographically-neutral urban prestige variety. This happy state of correspondence is disturbed, however, by Hussein and El-Ali's study. In contrast to Sawaie's, here the g variant emerges as the most positively-evaluated variant, while the ' guise was ranked as lowest. Speakers of each variety tended to rate their own variety most positively, except the k speakers gave the g variant a higher rating. One can imagine a number of explanations for discrepancies between the two studies: the actual respondents may have come from different backgrounds, the phrasing of the questions was different and so on. Certainly the relatively positive evaluation of the k variants, variants which Abd-el Jawad's data suggest are regressive in both Irbid and Amman (see 4.2), deserves closer scrutiny. Such discrepencies underscore the importance of conducting integrated studies in which the same sample is evaluated according to both self-reported information about language attitude and usage and on the basis of actual textual data, preferably in a range of speech situations. To date, no study has correlated reported language usage with observed, corpus-based usage. Thus far little has been said about Arabic in North Africa. The reason for this is the dominant position of French in North Africa, with the result that the majority of sociolinguistic studies in the region include French as one of the language variables. The dominance of French is so such that it often overshadows the SA-NA dichotomy,43 that a number of studies when contrasting French-Arabic either do not explicitly distinguish between SA and NA, or concentrate on NA, as the spoken variety, alone. There exist, I believe, no corpus-based studies of the type summarized in 4.1 and 4.2 which have investigated the status of three (or four, with Berber) varieties simultaneously, French, SA and NA. As an introduction to this geographical area, 7 studies on language attitudes using both direct and indirect techniques may be briefly summarized. The languages involved alone, French and Arabic, and Berber
43 It is interesting to observe how sociolinguistics themselves tend to be drawn towards questions of power in language usage. SA vs. NA figures strongly in the Eastern Mediterranean, whereas French-Arabic dominates in the western. The more recent interest in Berber (e.g. IJSL 1997) appears to reflect a Berber power base. Previously sociolinguistic studies in North Africa rarely included Berber.
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in one of the studies give the reader a preview of the very different type of language issues which tend to occupy linguistic studies in this area. In Dichy's (1994) 'glossic' terms the relation between the varieties is complex. Ostensibly French and SA constitute H varieties, NA and Berber low. The reality is more complex, however, as will be seen presently. Bentahila (1981) collected a number of questionnaires enquiring into the domains of Arabic (usually undiffierentiatedbetween NA and SA) and French. Generally speaking, Arabic was the preferred choice in more informal domains (home, grocery store, for joking, speaking with mechanics) whereas French was preferred in formal contexts (speaking to a doctor, attending lectures, filling out a job application, most media). Bentahila similarly found that in matched guise tests using French and Moroccan NA guises, the French guises were generally given a more favorable rating. In one variant of the matched guise test, Bentahila contrasted a French and an Arabic with a codeswitched version, both the French and Arabic guises receiving a much more positive rating. Chebchoub's (1985) study focusing on French, SA, (irregularly, NA) and mixed French/Arabic in Algiers largely replicated the results of Bentahila's study. French has a formal profile, both NA and mixed French/Arabic being favored in familiar contexts. In a matched guise there is one notable point of difference from Bentahila's. Whereas in Bentahila's Moroccan study there was no significant difference between the French and (Moroccan) Arabic guises for the category "patriotic", in Chebchoub's Algiers study the SA guise achieved a significantly higher rating, perhaps a reflection of the more overtly nationalistic role of SA in Algerian politics (Grandguillaume 1983: 154). Brahimi (1993), using situated scenarios, studied attitudes among Algerian university students in Oran towards SA, NA, and French. Her findings run according to expectations: French is the preferred language of scientific discourse, modem culture, SA of religious discourse and law, and NA in the market. These tendencies were replicated for two groups of subjects, students in the medical faculty (Francophone) and students of law (Arabophone), with the former having a relatively more positive orientation towards French than the latter. Kuhnel's study (1995) based mainly on questionnaires collected at universities in Fez, Oran and Algiers, tend to complement Brahimi's in that SA emerges as a vaniety which has to share its domains, even official ones, with other varieties. NA and French, depending on domain and city, are both often preferred to SA.
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Brahimi (1995) adds Berber to the repertoire of North African languages. Brahimi's study centered on Berbers living in Tizi Ouzu, a Berber-dominated area SE of Algiers (in the Kabylei) and Arabs and Berbers living in Arab-dominated Oran. Two findings of Brahimi were, first, that there was a marked ethnically-defined difference between Berbers and Arabs to a range of questions about language use and policy. Whereas Algerian Arabs were highly favorable towards SA, Algerian Berbers were not, while attitudes towards Berber took precisely the opposite attitudinal values among the two groups. In terms of positive evaluation, NA and French took a middle ground, with much more agreement between the two groups. A simple diglossic model thus fails to capture the nuanced symbolic values which each variant may take for the different groups. A second finding was that Berbers living in Oran tended to have more positive values towards Arabic than those in Berber-dominated Tizi Ouzu. A study which stands apart from all others methodologically is that of Lawson-Sako and Sachdev (1996). They considered the phenomenon of convergence and divergence from the perspective of accommodation theory. In Sousse, Tunisia, strangers were asked in French and T-NA by Europeans, Tunisians and African Blacks for directions to the train station. Overall it was found that there was a high degree of convergence-interpreted as answering in the same language as the questioner-though the greatest degree of convergence was recorded for European questioners, whether they posed their question in T-NA or French. For Arab questioners, a second question would often produce a codeswitched (T-NA + French) response. This brief study-it did not go beyond a second turn-indicates that factors of personal identity, both of questioner and respondent, are important in language choice, not only language competence. This study adds a new 'glossic' factor to those summarized above. The fact that the European questioners commanded the greatest degree of convergence suggests that so long as there is a dominant foreign group, the language of that culture (in North Africa it could one day be English), will represent a powerful alternative to SA in the H domains (see 8.1). Benrabah (1994) uses a matched guise technique to investigate the relative status of "a" variants in Oran. Unfortunately, the sociolinguistic status of the variants, a pharyngealized vs. non-pharyngealized a, the former said to be rural, the latter urban, is too vaguely defined (e.g. via quantitative studies) for the results to be readily interpretable to the outsider.
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Finally, in a questionnaire-basedstudy conducted outside of the Arabic world, Shorrab (1986) sketches domains of language use among ArabAmerican families in Buffalo, New York. Among children, Arabic usage tends to decrease with age, the home environment being the main one where it has currency. 8. Contact Arabic is spread over a huge geographical area, coming into contact with a large number of languages of various types. The synchronic workings of this contact unfortunately have rarely been closely described in descriptivework.4 This is somewhat surprising,since substrateinfluence on spoken Arabic has been invoked to explain various phenomena in the history of the language, including the purported development of the Classical language into dialects (see section 2). In this section I will describe contact under two non-parallel categories, code-switching and creolization. A third category which could be included here, Arabic as a second language, including the role of Arabic in non-Arabic Islamic societies, is too large a topic to be included.45 8. 1 Code-switching
As mentioned in the previous section, the interests of linguists working in North Africa, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, have a different focus from that in Middle Eastern countries. Whereas in the Middle East SA is the undisputed high variety, in North Africa it is only in postindependence times that SA began achieving parity with French as the language of education and official business.46
44The lack of interest in this field in an interesting reflection on the sociology of Arabic linguistic academia. The field of Creole studies, for instance, has been seized upon by European language departments (especially English and French) to expand the range of languages studied within them. Creole Arabic, on the other hand, receives hardly passing mention in Arabic department curricula and Arabic linguistic journals. In Germany, for example, the only two studies initiated from within the country which I am aware of on East African Nubi were carried out by Africanists (Heine 1982, Khamis 1994). 4 Rouchdy (1992) is a collection of articles on Arabic in America, a number focusing on the role of Arabic among Americans of Arab descent. I do not referee most of the articles, as they tend to deal with matters of social history, aspects of Arabic viewed from a structural perspective (e.g. borrowing), or language teaching. 4 See Grandguillaume (1983) for an enlightening discussion of language politics in North Africa.
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Given its long history in North Africa, French is widely spoken and French-Arabic codeswitching prevalent. It is so ingrained in North African linguistic habits that the codeswitched variety has a name of its own, 'Frarabe', "Aransiyya' or 'Franco-Arabe'. Bentahila (1981), Bentahila and Davies (1983) and Chebchoub (1985) have studied FrenchArabic (NA) codeswitching in functional and structural linguistic terms. In their 1983 study Bentahila and Davies examine internal linguistic constraints to codeswitching, showing that many structural constraints proposed up to that time (1983) were found in their data.47It appears that French-Arabic codeswitching is very flexible with few absolute limits on switch positions. Even the one general constraint which they propose, that there be no violation of the subcategorization rules of either language (1983: 321) is contradicted in their own data. The adjective in dak l-warqa bleue "that blue paper", for instance, lacks the definite article which a definite Arabic head noun requires on it.48 Chebchoub (1985) includes a similar, though less detailed study of French-Arabic codeswitching in Algiers, which largely coincides with Bentahila and Davies' findings. Atawneh (1993) describes codeswitching among three Arabic children in the USA, showing, in the manner of Bentahila and Davies, that absolute structural constraints on switch positions are very difficult to define. Eid (1992) considers the same languages in terms of language roles (language structure and competence of speakers), though her conclusions are exploratory. Thus far no studies have explored in structural and interactional terms the coexistence of different diglossic codes available in North Africa, the classic diglossic H-L contrast implicit in the SA-NA dyad and the functional diglossia inherent in the presence of competing H varieties, French and SA. 8.2 and Creolization Pidginization
The special sociolinguistic interest of pidgin and creole phenomena lies in the social processes which give rise to pidgins and creoles, and ensuing processes of decreolization, all of which imply a intensive contact
47 For example, that a PP acting as complement to a noun or verb cannot be in a different language from the head, disproved by the Moroccan, gadytnen ville "going into town", (1983: 314, similarly Chebchoub 1985: 168 on Algiers codeswitching). 48 As in dak l-warqa l-bleue,attested in Bentahila 1981 (p. 201; see also Nortier 1994: 210 on Dutch-Arabic codeswitching).
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between speakers of different languages. Once formed, a creole like Nubi, a creole Arabic of East Africa, is a language as independent of its Arabic source as is Hebrew from Arabic. One of the focuses of this section will thus be socio-historical. While there is evidence that simplified Arabic-based trade languages existed as long ago as 1,000 AD (Thomason and El-Gibali 1986), the only well-attested pidgin/creoles (p/c) come out of what is today Sudan, East Africa and Chad.49 So far as our knowledge of these varieties go, they arose in the turbulent southern Sudan of the second half of the nineteenth century. After 1850 there developed camps of ivory hunters, which within twenty years had developed into slaving camps. The southern Sudan at this time was broadly divided into a three-class society, two of them found within the camps (Mahmud 1983, Owens 1990, 1997). At the bottom were the indigenous groups, who had, at best, fleeting contact with the camps, and at worst were the victims of their predations. At the top was a ruling elite of mixed origin. There were many Arabs from Egypt and the northern Sudan, some European adventurers, often in the service of the Egyptian government which nominally ruled the Sudan, and Nubians from the Nile valley in northern Sudan. In the middle were southern Sudanese who had either volunteered or been forced to work in the camps. It was in the milieu of the camps that a creole Arabic arose. In the multilingual South there was no single ethnic group dominant in political or economic terms whose language could serve as a lingua franca. Arabic, the prestige language, had too small a number of native speakers, 20% of the camp population at most, to provide an adequate model for the transmission of a normal form of NA. Moreover, strained social relations between the indigenous camp residents and northerners was not conducive to the transmission of NA. What developed instead was a variety of pidgin/creole Arabic (see next paragraph). The decisive factor in ensuring the survival of this emerging variety was the attack in 1886 by the forces of the Mahdi on the southern Sudan, and the subsequent retreat in 1888 of Emin Pasha and many of the camp followers into Northern Uganda. Most of the followers never returned to the Sudan, settling instead in East Africa, where their successors are known as Nubi.
49 Versteegh's (1984) original and overly criticized thesis that the modern dialects arose via a stage of pidginization inter alia (Owens 1989) suffers from the lack of firsthand (seventh, eighth century) material detailing the pidginization of a classical Arabiclike variety.
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Completely cut off from Arabic models, their language of creole origin became their native language.50 Though lexically and phonologically Nubi is derivable from Arabic using classical comparative methods (Owens 1985, Miller 1993), it has almost nothing of Arabic morphology and differs in some respects in its syntax as well. It has lost the Semitic property of deriving grammatical forms via ablaut changes, so that although a word such as shrubu "drink" < *assab-u"drink imp pl", it appears may be derived historically from only in one segmental form in all aspects and tenses. Verbs have no affixal person marking. The language is not mutually intelligible with any form of Arabic. Nubi thus represents a case of contact producing changes to such a degree that a completely new language results. This language continued to survive in the southern Sudan despite the retreat of the Egyptian govemment, and in recent years has established itself even as a first language in urban centers. In the Sudan it is known as Juba Arabic,5' and is mutually intelligible with Nubi, having essentially the same structure. In the Sudan, however, it exists alongside native Arabic varieties, and comes under its structuralinfluence. Mahmud (1979, see also Miller 1985, to appear for alternative analysis) represents this influence in terms of a creole continuum, Juba Arabic becoming assimilated to NA via a series of medial varieties. He outlines a process, for example, whereby Juba Arabic tense/aspect prefixes, like bi- "future",gi- "progressive"are replaced by the S-NA verbal prefixes ya-, na-, ta- (g-asirubu"prog-drinking" -f ya-s'rab "he is drinking"). Mahmud's data, though suggestive, does not appear detailed enough to confirm the existence of a relatively stable continuum such as is found in many Caribbean societies (basi-, meso-, acrolect, e.g. Bickerton 1975). Miller and Abu Manga (1992) conducted a similar study in the Takamul squatter settlement of Khartoum North. This is an area populated largely by non-Arab migrants from the southern and western Sudan. Besides summarizing the results of a survey of language domains, a corpus-based study outiines preliminary hierarchies for the acquisition of Sudanese NA phonological, morphological and syntactic features
50 Tosco and Owens (1993) argue that Turku, a pidgin Arabic of Chad, was originally implanted in that country by the same social movements which produced Nubi in East Africa. 51 The present author (so long as his knowledge of Nubi was fluent) always was able to converse with speakers of Juba Arabic. It is thus not clear to me on what basis the SIL (SIL Homepage, Ethnologue 1996, Creole Arabic)doubts the mutual intelligibility of the varieties.
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among the non-Arab sample. In contrast to Mahmud, Miller and AbuManga do not use the creole continuum model. However, lacking an explicit discussion of the point, one is not certain whether the different approaches are due to different developments in Juba Arabic between the southern Sudan and the North, or due to different theoretical preferences of the researchers. 9. Prospects Arabic sociolinguistics exists in the trivial sense that Arabic has been studied from sociolinguistic perspectives. It should come as no surprise that the collection of studies summarized here lack the feel of an organic whole. Added to the fact that sociolinguistics itself lends itself to quite diverse approaches in the study of the relation between language and society (see e.g. Figueroa 1994), is the reality that scholars approach Arabic from the perspective of methodologies and theories developed in western academia, based largely on languages of the West. One may regret this reality (Owens, 1998b), though reality it is. Of course, it need not automatically be assumed that western theories will not be applicable in the Arabic world. In many respects the well-profiled contrasts between different varieties of Arabic, particularly those diglossically and, in some cases, ethnically defined (4.1, 4.2) find analogies with western counterparts. Standard vs. Black vernacular English, for example, symbolizes a set of cultural and social contrasts different perhaps in content from contrasting varieties in the Arabic world, but not in the saliency with which they are perceived. However, there are socially-defined aspects of Arabic so different in degree from anything found in the West that they represent a type of their own.52 The typological significance of these was outlined in section 6. Put pithily, where western sociolinguistics has to a great degree
52 Versteegh's conclusion (1997: 193) that sociolectal varieties of H/L diglossic varieties in Arabic cannot be defined until correlations with socioeconomic class are available, assumes on a priorigrounds that western, class-based sociolinguistic parameters will provide the best or most important or in some sense significant social parameter for dealing with diglossic variation in Arabic. Without downplaying the danger of reinventing the wheel in ignoring parallels outside of Arabic linguistics, the above conclusion represents an equally great danger of fitting Arabic diglossia into a mould it does not belong in. A similar propensity to search for legitimacy on the basis of constructs developed within western sociolinguistics is in evidence in Haeri's claim (1997a: 227) to have have been the first to document a change in progress in Arabic sociolinguistics, the palatal-
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been established on the basis of class-based variation, variation in the Arabic world is defined by diglossia. Of course, just as class can be used as a variable in explaining variation in Arabic (see 4.5), so too will diglossia be available to western languages (Hudson 1994). Prototypical instances of diglossic or class-based variation, however, are represented by different languages (e.g. Arabic for diglossia, English for class-based variation). It would be a mistake for Arabic sociolinguistics to stop at diglossia, however, as diglossia is not the only concept distinctive of Arabic sociolinguistics. At this juncture, however, one may register a certain disappointment in the failure of Arabic sociolinguistics to adequately define further positions on a prospective typological scale. Admittedly, one reason for this is the fact that Arabic covers sociolinguistic landscapes whose only coherency at times appears to be the almost accidental fact that the language used in each part happens to be Arabic. Nigerian Arabic, discussed in 4.2, is a case in point. It falls outside the prototypical range of Arabic diglossia, though dialectically diverse, does not have opposing prestige norms and non-prestige varieties, is not marked by class-based differences, and so on. In North Africa the social and symbolic values attached to languages (Berber, French, Arabic) and varieties of a single language (SA, NA) appear to shift according to the perspective of the groups using them. As noted in 8.1, the intersection of classic and functional diglossia (n. 7) in North African societies presents an interesting research perspective. Clearly, a truly general Arabic sociolinguistics will ultimately have to deal with Arabic in all its guises, linking what till today have been regional biases, if necessary developing models of sociolinguistic interaction for contexts which are unusual or even non-existent in the West. It is not suggested that Arabic will represent a unique type in every respect. The sociolinguistic status of Arabic in Maiduguri will very likely be similar to that of other minority languages of comparable size in various areas of Africa, and polyglossic North Africa will find parallels elsewhere.53 Orientating Arabic sociolinguistics within a broader
ization of dental stops in Cairene Arabic. What she apparently documents is a possible correlation between social class and variation. Variation, possibly pointing to linguistic change, has been documented in a number of studies, for instance Abdel-Jawad (k - c and k g - ' in Amman) and Holes (inter alia, g - y in Bahrain). In contrast to western studies, however, social class is not a significant extra-linguistic variable here (see 4.2, 6). " For example, the multiglossic language situation in a Nairobi housing estate described by Parkin (1977), where H and L varieties change according to context.
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typology has twofold relevance. Sociolinguistic descriptionswill contribute to a more detailed knowledge of the form and function of Arabic in today's world and in the past and in so doing Arabic sociolinguistics will contribute to a broader understanding of sociolinguistics generally.
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Arabic Sociolinguistics Author(s): Jonathan Owens Reviewed work(s): Source: Arabica, T. 48, Fasc.

JONATHAN OWENS Universityof Bayreuth

C Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001

430 4.1 Education and literay

As if the B2 speakers have borrowed the set of formulaic expressions.

switchedon in the L box.

Excluding certain SA features, like case endings.

l)42 (qdl(always qura)

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