Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Just as you won't win over a crowd of Mexican villagers by speaking Latin, the United States can't sell democracy and reform to Arab populations by speaking to them in modern standard Arabic--and ignoring the Middle East's more widely understood vernacular languages.

The challenge of winning hearts and minds among populations with high illiteracy rates is doubly complex in the case of the Arab world. Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites.

Most everybody else prefers to speak a version of their country's vernacular. Ninety percent of Moroccans, for example, can only understand their unique brand of Arabic, which is heavily infused with Berber phonics and French vocabulary--testimony to the country's multiethnic and colonial history. The Moroccan language, in turn, is barely comprehensible to, say, Iraqis, whose unique idioms and usages reflect more ancient Mesopotamian tongues as well as the country's proximity to Turkey, Iran, and the Kurdish mountains. These vernaculars, derided by pan-Arab ideologues as "dialects," are in fact the region's major living languages. ...

The proliferation of Arabic-language blogs means thousands of webpages are updated daily in the versions of Arabic spoken in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Tunis, and so on. Rather than fall behind this curve, the United States should adjust and adapt its strategy for reaching Arab audiences. We stand to gain considerably from speaking to the Middle East in languages that Arab majorities, not just elites, can understand.

The specific complaint I've heard, dialect-wise, is that most of the personalities on Al-Hurra [the U.S. backed TV alternative to Al Jazeera] speak with heavy Lebanese accents which is bad because Christian Lebanese are held in some ill-repute among the Muslim Arab majority. Certainly the Angry Arab Guide to Middle East Media seems to indicate that things with Lebanese involvement are ipso facto suspect. Obviously, though, this is a bit hard for non-speakers of Arabic to weigh in on. I suppose the analogy would be that if you were trying to win "hearts and minds" in the United States you wouldn't put a British Muslim on the air.

If you start speaking in vernacular, you'll have to have separate efforts all over the Arab world, as Egyptian Arabic differs from Iraqi differs from Gulf and so on. Modern Standard Arabic is at least a lingua franca for educated people around the region, which it's used. And more people know it than did a few decades ago - I've heard at least one professor say that in Morocco he used to go to villages where people who ask him to translate the radio news into Moroccan Arabic, but that hasn't happened in recent years. If Moroccans are learning MSA, everyone probably is.

While MSA is a lingua franca, it's the Cairene dialect [the dialect of Cairo, Egypt, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic]that dominates Arab television:

The Cairene dialect is today used in television, radio, and political speeches. Through the 1950s and 1960s, it gained prominence because it was seen as a way of promoting democratic populism. Cairene is widely understood throughout Egypt and beyond because it is used in Egyptian films, plays, popular music, and television dramas, which are popular nationally and in other Arabic-speaking countries.

Almost the opposite of 'BBC English', really. And the written language is another thing entirely.

(And Moroccan Arabic has always been an outlier here. If anything, Moroccans are picking up Egyptian, and particularly Cairene forms, a bit like the way young British speakers started showing signs of uptalking -- ending sentences on a rising cadence? as if asking a question? -- that may have been picked up from watching Australian soap operas.)