Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

Recensione di Zanelli, P. (2016). L'arabo colloquiale egiziano. Corso pratico-teorico. Livello intermedio. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 372 pp. Il manuale di Patrizia Zanelli L'arabo colloquiale egiziano. Corso pratico-teorico. Livello intermedio è un'opera lungamente attesa dagli italofoni che desiderano studiare l'arabo egiziano, poiché ora hanno la possibilità di imparare la varietà parlata non dovendo più far ricorso ad una 'lingua ponte' come l'inglese o il francese.

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.

In the past decade, Latinised Arabic (LA), a popular form of writing spoken Arabic online, has made the transition from online applications such as internet chat and text messaging to offline mediums. No longer exclusive to computer mediated communication, the diffusion of LA into everyday life has been reported across the Arab world. Today, LA is a popular form of graffiti and can be found in handwritten notes and advertisements. However, the most interesting development in the career of LA has perhaps been in Egypt, where this form has appeared in a number of edited, printed magazines. Some of these have emerged in the wake of the recent boom in the Egyptian publishing industry; while others had already been on the market for longer. In an attempt to investigate the implications of this trend and the motivation behind it, four magazines were singled out and interviewed on the basis of the quantity and consistency of LA use. All of the magazines used LA alongside English, and identified themselves either as English or mainly English magazines. The applications of LA varied from one magazine to another, as did the importance of LA to the magazine’s market identity. Overall, the findings from the interviews reveal the increasing commercial and symbolic value of LA, and indicate its growing popularity and acceptability.

The heroic deeds of the Banī Hilāl tribe of Bedouin Arabs, as they migrate during the tenth and eleventh centuries from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Egypt, and into North Africa, are preserved throughout the Arabic- and Amazigh/Berber-speaking world in a cycle of narratives known as al-Sīrah al-Hilāliyyah. Among several extant Arab epics in written versions from a vast, understudied corpus of manuscripts and cheap folk print editions, only this “Epic of the Bani Hilal Tribe” endures as a living tradition of oral performance by poets and reciters in parts of the Maghreb and Arab East. To this day, performances by epic poets as well as cheap printed books circulate in poetry and prose, written and oral forms.  The Hilali epic may be chanted, sung, and spoken with or without the customary accompanying rabāb (spike-fiddle) and ṭār (frame drum).

abstract in Arabic:


في أواخر سنة ۲۰۰۸ شرعت مجموعة من الشباب المصريين في كتابة "ويكيبيديا مصري" التي أصبحت أول نسخة لموسوعة "ويكيبيديا" الحرّة تُكتب بلهجة من اللهجات العربية هي اللهجة المصرية الأمر الذي أدّى إلى اعتراض شديد لعدد كبير من مستخدمي الإنترنت والمدوّنين المصريين والعرب. تتناول هذه المقالة الخلفية الإديولوجية لهذا المشروع والتي تعتمد على القومية المصرية وتعتبر العامية المصرية لغة مستقلة مختلفة من العربية الفصحى اختلافاً تامّاً. يدرس هذا البحث بعض الخصائص اللغوية المميزة لمقالات ويكيبيديا مصري و يشير إلى أن كثيراً مما يكتبه الويكيبيديون المصريون يمثل مزيجاً من العامية المصرية والعربية الفصحى. وبالرغم من أن الويكيبيديين المصريين يصرّوا على ادعاءاتهم اللغوية الإديولوجية ويصمّموا على الكتابة بما يسمّونه "اللغة المصرية" فأن كتاباتهم تبيّن أن خطابهم المكتوب لا يزال يتّكل على العربية الفصحى بشكل ملحوظ.

The current study aims at exploring the various social functions associated with employing bidialectal code-switching between Standard Arabic (SA), or the high code, and the Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), or the low code. In contrast with the domineering notion that both codes bear opposite social statuses, this study on the Egyptian religious discourse has proved that both codes demonstrate different functions within the Egyptian community. Increasingly, a number of Egyptian religious scholars have been implementing ECA variety in order to develop a diglossic religious discourse, which implies teaching people about the principles of Islam, in a more accessible manner that would appeal to Egyptians of diverse social and educational levels.

This volume contains a study of multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic in addition to a critical edition, annotated translation, and a cultural and a grammatical study of The Purim Scroll of the Cairene Jewish Community, written in 1524 to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews of Cairo from Ahmad Pasha, the governor of Egypt.
'Multiglossia' is a linguistic state in which different varieties of a language exist side by side in a language community and are used under different circumstances or with various functions. 'Judeo-Arabic' has been written and spoken in various forms by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
Part One places the language of the Judeo-Arabic text of the Scroll within the multiglossic history of Judeo-Arabic. Part Two introduces the two critical editions of the Scroll, both in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, with the variant readings followed by an annotated translation. Part Three presents a detailed grammar of the Scroll using the framework of Judeo-Arabic multiglossia.

Notes on Cairene Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

The aim of this article is to present selected issues of characteristic features in which the Cairene Arabic differs from the literary Arabic language.
Colloquial Egyptian Arabic is considered one of the most widely dialects understood and used throughout the Arab world, due to the predominance of Egyptian media, and consequently the most widely studied variety of Arabic. Colloquial Arabic is rooted in the Classical Arabic, nonetheless, the Egyptian colloquial shows great differences in terms of phonology, morphology, lexical choice and syntax compared to the literary language.

Muhammad Husayn Haykal's novel "Zaynab: Country Scenes and Morals" is considered the first modern Egyptian novel, published in 1913.
The book depicts life in the Egyptian countryside and delves into the traditional romantic and marital relationships between men and women and the interactions between the labouring cotton worker and plantation owner classes.
The novel is a seminal event in Egyptian literature, since it was the first to feature a dialogue in the Egyptian vernacular rather than formal standard written Arabic.
The problem is that in the novel form, the writer’s communication with the recipient is not via the aural medium, and yet the question of the use of the colloquial language in dialogue in the fictional genres has been fought out with great intensity.
The question imposed is: what is the best language that serves the realistic description of the Egyptian Countryside?
Therefore, this paper will discuss the following points:
- The plot and its analysis.
- Communication by letters.
- Colloquial dialect and dialogues.
- Critic of realism.
The result concluded is that the arguments offered by the witer were convincing why he made his conscious decision to use the vernacular in his work.

In this article, I intend to argue that in Cairene Arabic the /ɑ, ɑɑ/, i.e. the back allophones of the low vowels /a, aa/ in Standard Arabic, should to be considered as full phonemes. In order to do that, I will give an account of the emphatic phonemes and vowels inventory in Classical, Modern and Cairene Arabic together with the emphasis spread in these varieties. Afterwards, I will illustrate some points in favor of the presumption that it is the quality of the low vowel s what determines the emphasis of what is conventionally called ‘secondary emphatics’ adjacent to it and not the contrary.

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial
Arabic in spoken discourse. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of imperfective verb
morphemes using a corpus of nearly 1400 verbs collected from a total of three hours of spontaneous
speech in religious, political/economic and sports interviews on four Egyptian satellite TV channels. The
computational analysis of the data shows that morphemes from both varieties of Arabic combine in
principled ways. Syntactic considerations play a critical role with regard to the code-switching between
the negative marker and the verb. Directionality bias from colloquial to standard is evident in constraining
the code-switch between the aspectual prefix, person prefix, and verb stem morphemes.

The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 had among the common features of political popular expression in the public space the overwhelming presence of poetry to which Elliot Colla attributes a prominent role from the beginning of the uprising being not an ornament but a soundtrack contributing to the revolutionary act  (Colla 2012:47). The political graffiti of Cairo, a cultural practice brought about and fueled by the revolution is not exempted, with poetry acting as the sound recorded by graffiti, transformed at the same time into a rhetorical device. This article will present an analysis of a selected corpus of graffiti featuring revolutionary imagery and fragments of poetry, focusing on the specificity of the re-appropriation of literary fragments used as elements of a revolutionary, contentious rhetoric, and the creation of an inter-textual topicality that transcends historical contexts. We will follow, at the same time, the relationship between poetry and graffiti in order to clarify the mechanisms of a lyrical dimension of Egyptian protest graffiti.

In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of Al Nahda, the Arab cultural renaissance movement, the concept of the committed artist came to take center stage in the Arab world. Like French Romantics who believed themselves to be spiritual guides for the “masses,” the role of the artist at the turn of the twentieth century in Egypt was to surmount the frontier between art and politics and serve a socio-political purpose. However, as Ahmad Fouad Negm, writing in the 1970s, opens a poem with the phrase, “I am the people”, one could ask whether this limit between life and art was in fact being entirely effaced. The poet functionally stops guiding the people to become them, as the separation between the two is superfluous: the choice to elide the political is as much of a position as commitment, and expression—whether supposedly detached or committed—is always political.
Negm himself was an Egyptian revolutionary leftist poet whose songs have been sung at demonstrations, particularly at the 1971-1972 student protests and the 1977 insurgency. His work was instrumental in transforming the relationship between poet and people from a state of communication through the interface of art to one of fusion between them, and as such his poetry marked a transitory moment in committed literature. This oft-ignored era of Egyptian poetry is now academically relevant as Negm’s poems have been appropriated by Egyptian revolutionary youth and sung in Tahrir Square since early 2011.
This paper will, therefore, examine traits that are characteristic of his poetry, such as the use of colloquial Arabic, a working-class-oriented vocabulary that is nonetheless starkly distinguishable from the regime’s populist rhetoric, and the blending of the lyrical and epic registers. It aims to elucidate the way these elements work together in Negm’s poem to challenge the very supposition of a limit between poetry and politics. It will also tie this shift in paradigm to possible non-Egyptian influences, in particular Sartre, whose Qu’est-ce que la littérature was translated into Arabic as early as 1960.

In this paper, I intend to explain the modalities with which the loan verbs are integrated in Egyptian Arabic
(EA). This paper finds basis in the theoretical background related to the borrowing of verbs, i.e MORAVCSIK
(1975), MUYSKEN (2008), HASPELMATH and TADMOR (2009) and, in particular, WOHLGEMUTH (2009). In fact,
WOHLGEMUTH (2009: 293) suggests that the borrowing of verbs follows one of four 'accommodation strategies':
Direct Insertion, Indirect Insertion, Light Verb Strategy, and Paradigm Insertion.
EA, as a recipient language, adopts only two of them: (a) the direct insertion (either with ‘reduction to root’ or
not; and (b) the insertion with ‘light verb strategy’.
While direct insertion strategy without ‘reduction to root’ is exclusive for imperative loan verbs (in particular
those related to nautical lexemes), the same strategy with ‘reduction to root’ is open for any ‘input form’. To
each loan verb EA assigns a root (mainly triliteral or quadriliteral) and the loan verb assume one of the EA verb
patterns. The paper suggests some criteria for the pattern choice. Besides, other loan verbs are integrated with
‘light verb strategy’, i.e. with use of EA verbs such ‘amal or ḍarab (to do; to make). Moreover, historical
evidences show that many loan verbs are mere denominative, either because the 'input form' in the donor
language is not a verb nor a verb-like, or because the verb developed within the EA from a very old noun
borrowing.
On the other hand, a look on new loan verbs passed to EA through the Social Media (as they are being
integrated) gives us some insights on the process of the integration of loan verbs in general. The paper will
explore this field to better understanding the process of loan verbs integration.

... cf. Guessous p. 34-44). 27 Voir par exemple le poème lītīm « l'orphelin » d'Abdel Majid Wahbin (Guessous 2008, pp. 562 ... Pouyalet (2007). 33 Les chansons de Fatna Bent L'Houcine, Abdel Moula, Tahour, Jedwane et Najat Atabou

Ce petit travail traite de la variation diglossique arabe à l’écrit, en s’appuyant sur les expressions ambiguës (lisibles à la fois en arabe standard et dialectal) : au lieu de les exclure de la dichotomie (standard/dialectal), ces expressions peuvent nous renseigner sur la nature de la diglossie arabe, et éventuellement sur la nature de chacune des “deux variétés” en jeu.
NB: les polices de caractères arabes semblent ne pas fonctionner en lecture en ligne ; mais une fois téléchargé, le document devrait s’afficher normalement… إن شاء الله

Few scholars have addressed Arabic adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew, though it remains among the most popular Shakespearean comedies in the Arab world. The first Arabic performance of Shrew in Egypt in 1930 marked a significant landmark in the history of Arab Shakespeares, as the translator rendered the play in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, rather than in the formal, classical Arabic accessible to the educated elite. As such, the play offered the uneducated Egyptian public – and women in particular – unprecedented access to this work of Shakespeare. Instrumental to the adaptation’s success was Fāṭima Rushdī, owner and lead actress of the company that performed this first Arabic Shrew. In this and other roles as one of Egypt’s first renowned Shakespearean actresses, Rushdī not only effectively recast Shakespeare in an Egyptian mould, but also cast Egyptians in a Shakespearean mould, with effects that still echo today.