FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

The point of departure for this project is the hypothesis that the Arabic language system, a famous case of DIGLOSSIA, has come under pressure as a result of the information revolution. We hypothesize that the Arabic dialects, in theory only used as spoken varieties, are increasingly being used in writing, and that this fact is connected to cultural and social changes. We investigate the current trends in the written language and in language attitudes in two central countries (Egypt and Morocco), and see how these trends are connected to social and political factors. A central part of the project is the design and implementation of two surveys about language attitudes and practices in Egypt and Morocco. The Cairo survey comprises 2529 households and was published by Fafo in early 2014. A similar survey was carried out in Rabat, Morocco, in September 2015, with 959 respondents. The two surveys provide information about language practices and attitudes to the Arabic written language in Egypt and Morocco on a scale hitherto unknown. The main findings is that dialectal Arabic is written to a surprisingly large extent, and that there is wide acceptance among ordinary, literate Egyptians and Moroccans for having the dialect as a written variant. The project leader, assistant and survey director at Fafo published the article "Writing Change", based on the Egypt survey, in the journal Arabica in 2016. The second main element of the project was a series of three workshops for the international research team. The first was held in Cairo in 2012. It was largely dedicated to crafting the survey and to refine the research questions in the project. The project's second workshop took place in Oslo 3-5 June 2014. The workshop mainly revolved around presentations of draft papers to an edited volume. The third workshop took place in Rabat. The main idea here was to connect the project's researchers with Arab scholars from Egyptian and Moroccan universities in order to facilitate better communication and exchange of ideas between European/American scholars and Arab ones. As for publications resulting from the project, the two main ones are an edited volume (edited by Høigilt and Mejdell) entitled The Politics of Language in the Arab World, and a monograph entitled Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture: Politics, Language and Resistance (written by Høigilt). Both books are due to be published in 2017 - the edited volume by Brill and the monograph by IB Tauris. The edited volume comprises 12 articles by researchers from Norway, the UK, France, Egypt, Canada and USA. Most of the case studies are from Egypt or Morocco, with a detour to Kuwait. They show that dialect is written on a substantial scale, not only in digital media, but also in paper media, and that this development seems to have come to stay. Writing in dialect may be associated with a kind of cultural nationalism, as in Morocco, or a trend towards a more informal style in the public sphere, as in Egypt. There is, moreover, a political potential in the use of dialect: Some voices, especially young ones, express their dissatisfaction with society and comment satirically on it, in digital as well as paper publications of different kinds. The monograph investigates how the new medium of adult comics relates to language and politics in Egypt and Lebanon. The main argument in the book is that these independent comics criticize and ridicule the patriarchal ideology that undergirds the authoritarian systems in these two countries. They also promote a fresh youthfulness through both form and content. Language is a major part of this picture, and the comics are among the foremost media to use dialect for serious as well as playful messages. The last element in this research project is a PhD thesis to be submitted to the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. The thesis is due to be submitted in April 2017. This work treats satirical literature in Egypt, a well-established genre with substantial impact in the culture field. Much of this literature is written in a mix of dialectal and standard Arabic, and some of it is even written wholly in dialect. The thesis maps the language choices in this literature and connects them to the content of the books and the social and cultural context in Egypt.

This research project aims at mapping and explaining the use of and attitude to the Arabic language among Arab youths by analyzing popular writing practices and conducting surveys in two Arab countries, Egypt and Kuwait. By connecting language practices a nd attitudes to social and political change in the Arab world in a research project that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, the project will contribute to Arabic sociolinguistics in three ways. In relation to the issue of diglossia, it promise s to offer a description of how writing practices in existing and new genres of Arabic uphold or change positions on the dialect-classical Arabic continuum. However, it goes beyond such description and analyzes the language ideologies that are propagated and challenged by specific writing practices. Finally, it connects the results from these two investigations to the issue of social change and power, drawing on recent literacy studies and Bourdieu's theory on language and power. The sociolinguistic stud y of written Arabic is a very promising field, not least at present, when social and political turmoil rocks the Arab world. A new political order is already imposing itself in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, and the written word will play an immensely important role in this process: during the Egyptian revolution, the total circulation of daily newspapers was doubled in the course of a couple of weeks. The study of writing practices as opposed to spoken Arabic is a relatively little studied field, howe ver, and this project promises to contribute ground-breaking insights and open new paths for research on language and power in the Arab world.