veiled4allah: speaking the right language

Steve Gilliard points to an article in the New Republic with an interesting point to make about America's attempts to win hearts and minds in the Arab world: we're not speaking the right language:

But there's a problem with these initiatives. 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. They are the contemporary Middle Eastern equivalent of Romance languages, which, of course, were all derived from Latin and were also once known as dialects--but now are known as Spanish, Italian, and French.

Linguists call this diglossia:

No discussion of Arabic is complete without at least a cursory discussion of diglossia. Charles Ferguson is credited with first using the term diglossia in an article which he wrote in 1959 called Diglossia. He identified four languages, Arabic, Greek, Haitian Creole and Swiss German as being prime examples of languages which fit into his definition of diglossia. Very simply stated, he said that diglossic speech communities have a High variety that is very prestigious and a Low variety with no official status which are in complementary distribution with each other, for instance the High variety might be used for literary discourse and the Low variety for ordinary conversation. His original definition of diglossia was that the two varieties which are in a diglossic relationship with each other are closely related, and therefore diglossia is not bilingualism. In his defining examples he points out that the High variety is always an acquired form, and that some educated native speakers might even deny that they ever use the Low variety. An important component of diglossia is that the speakers have the personal perception that the High variety is the "real" language and that the Low variety is "incorrect" usage. In Arabic people talk about the High variety as being "pure" Arabic and the dialects as being corrupt forms... ...From the 15th century on, most of the Arabic speaking world was under foreign domination, either Ottoman or European. The Ottomans produced all of their official documents in Turkish and their religious documents in Arabic. The French in Algeria, between 1830 and 1962, tried to actively suppress Arabic. The British in Egypt at one point tried to make the Egyptian dialect the official language. Literary Arabic stagnated during the Ottoman and colonial period.

There are roughly four major dialect groups, a) Maghrebi (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and western Libya), b) Egyptian (eastern Libya, Egypt and the Sudan), c) Levantine (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine) and d) the Arabic of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and Kuwait). These categories tend to ignore the split that has always existed throughout the history of Arabic between Bedouin, Rural and Urban varieties For instance the speech of a Cairene is closer to the speech of a Damascene than it is to the speech of a Bedouin dweller of Egypt, even though I have placed Damascus and Cairo into different dialect categories. There are also some dialect isolates and relic dialects in Central Asia and in the Sahara desert.

All of the dialects share features which do not exist in Classical Arabic. For Arabs they are mostly mutually intelligible with the exception that the Maghrebi dialects are generally unintelligible outside of the Maghreb. For non-Arabs who have limited exposure to the dialects the difference between dialects can be startling...

...The academic community in the US calls the modern form of Literary/Classical Arabic "Modern Standard Arabic" or MSA for short. An American who has only studied Modern Standard Arabic will be well received but will not understand much of the spoken discourse going on around him in an Arabic speaking country.

The New Republic article concludes:

Meanwhile the natural evolution of new media in Arab countries is bolstering the use of local vernacular all by itself. 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.

I wonder how many people involved in the Bush Administration's efforts are even aware of this issue.