Cairene Colloquial Arabic

The Purim Scroll of the Cairene Jewish Community (megillat
pūrīm il-miṣriyyīn) was probably composed by the spiritual leader
of the Jewish community in Cairo, Rabbi Samuel (or Solomon)
Sidilio. The Scroll records events following the deliverance of the
Jews from the tyrannical rule of Ahmad Pasha, self-appointed
governor in Ottoman Egypt in 1524. The community established
the 27th of Adar as a day of fasting and the 28th of Adar as a
festive holiday to be celebrated after the manner of Purim. On
that day the Scroll was read in the local synagogues. There are
two versions of the Scroll among the Cairene Jewish community.
One is more detailed, mentions names of people and places, and
exists in both Hebrew and Egyptian Judaeo-Arabic. The other is
shorter, more general, and has survived only in Hebrew. Both
versions are critically edited using several manuscripts, translated,
and linguistically analyzed in Hary (1992). This chapter exhibits a small paragraph from the scroll in Judeo-Arabic; Arabic transcription; translation into English and a short linguistic analysis.

Despite the impact of online social media language and applications on translation theory and practice, Arabic translation studies are so far largely based on what is referred to as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) with little regard to colloquial and spoken forms of Arabic which represent the main bulk of online social media. As thus, this study argues for the importance of incorporating social media language and colloquial forms of Arabic into translation studies and addressing the sociocultural aspects (including, in particular, the dialectical and linguistic changes) that impact the translation accuracy and reliability. This study explores the role of linguistic variation as reflected on the use of intensifiers in Egyptian and Libyan Arabic Dialects on the translation accuracy and reliability. For the purposes of the study, a corpus is designed of 12, 723 Twitter Posts on the Egyptian and Turkish intervention in the Libyan Conflict. Four intensifiers were identified. Two of these co...

This research is concerned with studying politeness and conversational patterns in cross-gender political media discourse in Cairene colloquial Arabic of the educated. Its significance lies in the fact that gender studies in Arabic are few, and hence it aims at participating in filling this gap in the literature of Arabic linguistics. The main purpose of the study is to investigate in which ways men and women use politeness strategies and conversational patterns in spoken Cairene colloquial Arabic of the educated.  Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness formed the theoretical framework of the study. In addition, conversation analysis, namely Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's (1974) turn taking model, is used as a toolkit in analyzing the data. The data consists of institutional conversations from Egyptian talk shows in which there are one interviewer and two guests, a male and a female, debating a political topic. The researcher made a broad transcription of the data, using the turn taking model. Two variables related to this model, namely the turn length and interruptions, were examined in the data. Moreover, the negative and positive politeness strategies according to Brown and Levinson's theory were analyzed. Finally, the aggregate results of the participants were compared with one another.

Keywords: Politeness, gender differences, conversation analysis, turn-taking model, political media discourse, Egyptian talk shows.