reem bassiouney
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Egypt is a diglossic community, i.e. a community in which two varieties of Arabic—namely, MSA and ECA—exist side by side (Ferguson 1959). Switching between MSA and ECA does occur in television advertisements. In Ferguson’s scheme, the ‘high variety’ (=H, in this case modern standard Arabic, MSA) is the “highly codified” language used in education, for example, while the ‘low variety’ (=L, Egyptian colloquial Arabic, ECA) is the one used in everyday situations. Ferguson proceeds by giving situations in which H is appropriate, like university lectures, mosque sermons, political speeches, and others in which L is appropriate like soap-operas, conversations between family and friends, etc. Diglossia in Egypt has been examined by a number of linguists (Holes 2004, Mejdell 2006, Bassiouney 2006). These linguists concluded that speakers in Egypt tend to switch between H and L in the same stretch of discourse. Following Ferguson, some linguists such as Badawi (1973) and Mitchell (1980) claimed that there are more than two levels. They claim that there is in fact a linguistic continuum. Badawi was the first Egyptian linguist to use levels in analysing the linguistic situation in Egypt from a sociolinguistic perspective, in relation to education. Badawi based his study on the output of the Egyptian media. His classification is both more crucial and more problematic than other linguists, because his labelling of varieties implies both stylistic arrangement and a social hierarchy. Badawi tries to explain which levels of the spoken language are typical of which types of speaker and which type of situation in Egypt. The levels he identifies are listed below. 1.
2.
‘heritage classical’: this is the classical Arabic of the Arab literary heritage and the Qur’an. It represents the prescriptive Arabic grammar as taught at traditional institutions like AlAzhar University (Egypt’s oldest university). It is a written language, but is heard in its spoken form on religious programmes on TV. fuṣḥā al-ʿaṣr, ‘contemporary classical’: this is what I, as well as western-trained linguists call MSA, which is a modification and simplification of Classical Arabic created for the need of the modern age. It is used in news bulletins, for example. It is usually read aloud from texts and, if the speaker is highly skilled may also be used in the commentary to the text. fuṣḥā al-turāṯ,