matkunsh 7mar

Carrie and Megan talk with Dr Adam Benkato, Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, about Arabic.

• codeswitching in incarceration

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast. The podcast about linguistic discrimination.  

Megan Figueroa: I'm Megan Figueroa.  

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon.  

Megan: You're bundled up. I'm bundled up. It's actually winter.  

Carrie: It's definitely winter. Yep. Still haven't had any snow yet, this fall to winter, but it might maybe come soon. I don't know.  

Megan: Do you want it to come?  

Carrie: I mean, I enjoy snow.  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: When it it's here, it's like an event. Whereas in other parts of Canada, it's more of a slog, so.  

Megan: Yeah, that's a really good point. For some people, it's like, inhibits them from doing things and stuff, like, in a big way.  

Carrie: I mean, it shuts down the city here because no one has winter tires. The buses can't really get up the hills. Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous, but I still enjoy it just because it's like, not that we don't have that many snow days here, so it's just nice to have.  

Megan: Yeah, that's something that we don't have, but that's okay by me.  

Carrie: Definitely not. Yeah. So later this month, I'm going to go see Judge John Hodgman podcast taping here in Vancouver.  

Megan: Very cool.  

Carrie: Yeah. And Helen Zaltzman, who has another linguistics podcast, is going to be a guest there, apparently.   

Megan: That is very cool. The Illusionist, right?  

Carrie: Yes, that's right.  

Megan: Yes, that's very cool.  

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, I think her husband is the one who's like the... The guest for sure. But, like, it sounded like they were both going to be a... On the show, so that'll be fun.  

Megan: That'll be a lot of fun.  

Carrie: Yeah.  

Megan: It's also... It's fun to see other people do their podcast thing. It's...  

Carrie: Yes. John Hodgman is a... Is a pro. Like, he's been in entertainment for decades. Yes. And I think his co-host has, too, but...  

Megan: Well, he plays a podcast or like a... On Parks and Rec for a brief cameo. He's like... He's like the NPR-ish kind of guy. That is from Eagleton.  

Carrie: That's right. That's right. The snobby... The snobby Eagletonian. Yes.  

Megan: Yes.  

Carrie: I completely forgot about that. I was like, this seems familiar. Yes, you're right.  

Megan: Yeah. There's a deep cut. If you're a Parks and Rec fan, you'll...  

Carrie: Yes.  

Megan: You'll know what I'm talking about. But yeah. 

Carrie: Speaking of Parks and Rec, are you watching Severance?  

Megan: Oh, I need to rewatch the last episode of the last season before I watch it. But yes, I will be watching it soon. Yeah. I'm definitely on that bus. Oh, good. I'm excited.  

Carrie: Yes.  

Megan: Maybe we'll have to do that tonight.  

Carrie: Yes, please do give yourself a little treat.  

Megan: Yeah, I'm excited.  

Carrie: So they're kind of the opposite of a treat. You have something to tell me?  

Megan: Yes, I do. I actually have something for you this time from the Daily Californian, which I believe is Berkeley's newspaper. Linguistic study conducted at San Quentin reveals communication changes among incarcerated individuals. And this is by Parth Mishra, a PhD alum from UC Berkeley. Gabriela Licata conducted a study at San Quentin Rehabilitation center with paroled research assistants, which is very cool. Brian Gonsaling and Habib Watkins, as well as incarcerated research assistants Mesro Coles[?] and Rob Tyler. And they wanted to see if they could see any changes in the language of incarcerated people and who bears the greatest amount of so-called sociolinguistic labor, which refers to the necessity of an individual to change the way they communicate within their environment. Which seems like a really cool thing to do with incarcerated peoples because of course, like, there's going to be like power dynamics and stuff at play here.  

Carrie: Yeah, that's absolutely true. So how do they know what... How they sounded like before they went into prison?  

Megan: That's a good question. So this was an interview type research project where they had interview questions and they had 40 interviews with incarcerated people asking them a set of predetermined questions which allowed them to answer questions about their personal experiences. And that they found through these questions that most incarcerated individuals had to code switch or change their form of communication into a formalized type of English called bored speak.  

Carrie: Wait, what? 

Megan: Bored speak. 

Carrie: Like as in B-O-R-E-D. Like I'm bored?  

Megan: No, as in B-O-A-R-D.  

Carrie: Oh. What?  

Megan: Yeah, so like you go in front of the board for parole.  

Carrie: Oh, okay. That I understand that they have to like, speak in a specific way before, like a parole board or whatever. But are they using that speak when they're just in the regular part of the prison or? 

Megan: They say this occurs really quickly, though interviewees generally frown upon its use, which is interesting because you have to kind of use it to survive it seems like if you're going in front of the board.

Carrie: Yeah infront of the board. Okay. That makes sense. But I thought this was going to be more about like how they speak within the prison, like, to each other.  

Megan: It says that they're forced to use it during parole hearings and interactions with officers. So this will be in front of... This could possibly be in front of other incarcerated individuals.  

Carrie: Yes, but... But only with their... If a guard is around or talking directly to the guard.  

Megan: Okay, yeah.  

Carrie: Yes, that makes more sense. Okay.  

Megan: Some of the people in the interviews said this way of speaking was inauthentic and embarrassing.  

Carrie: I mean, inauthentic makes sense.  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: Embarrassing is interesting because, like, you know why you're doing it. So it shouldn't feel embarrassing exactly, but more just, like, irritating.  

Megan: Well, it's so irritating because, like, your lives are on the line here when you talk to officers or you're in front of parole boards, that you have to change the way you speak. It's just... I mean, that doesn't feel good. That is to know that the way that you speak is "good enough to kind of get you out of trouble." 

Carrie: Yeah. Because of the way it's going to be perceived. It's going to be perceived as not formal enough, I'm guessing.  

Megan: Yeah, exactly.  

Carrie: You have to be very formal, particularly in front of a parole board, just because of the way it's all very formalized and set up.  

Megan: Yep.  

Carrie: But it's interesting they have to do it in front of the guards, too, just because, like, that's still a lot less formal.  

Megan: Here might be an explanation. So Licata said, if an incarcerated individual is misunderstood and there's no means carried out to understand them, the solution for penal authorities is to write them up. That affects their parole. That affects a lot of things for them. So, I mean, I just wonder how many times this happens where the guards or the authorities don't understand a certain incarcerated individual.  

Carrie: Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it happens somewhat regularly.  

Megan: So they have to be very careful here because they can get written up, apparently, for being misunderstood, which is horrifying. Like, what can't you get written up for then at that point?  

Carrie: Yeah. Yes.  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: Whenever there's a miscommunication, I could see, like, the guards being like, oh, you're... You're saying you're admitting to this even though you're not? Just because I know, like, different varieties of English are just so different. I can see how it could happen without anyone being malicious. And then you put on top of that people being malicious and... Yeah, a nightmare.  

Megan: Yeah, it's a nightmare. But this research is really cool because it lets incarcerated individuals with a lived experiences actually, like, lead the research.  

Carrie: Yeah, no, it's great. That's like such a... It shouldn't be unique, but it feels very unique.  

Megan: It does feel unique. 

Carrie: At least for prisons.  

Megan: Exactly. I was going to say for prisons particularly, it feels very unique. So I think that was really cool. And thought I'd share.  

Carrie: I definitely want to learn more. Like, I'm also interested to know, like, do people change around, like, each other, like the prisoners around the other prisoners?  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: I'm assuming the answer is yes for some people.  

Megan: Right.  

Carrie: But yeah, board speak.  

Megan: Yeah, I know.  

Carrie: It's not really surprising. It's really not surprising because, I mean, you have to, like, say things in a certain way, like not even just changing your, like, like grammatical features or anything or your vocabulary. You definitely have to change your vocabulary. But you also have to like, talk in a particular way. Showing... Showing remorse in the right way. You know what I mean?  

Megan: Yep. Absolutely.  

Carrie: Anyway.  

Megan: Yep. You got to do it the right way. The "right way".  

Carrie: Which sometimes that means people who are actually kind of nefarious.  

Megan: Yes.  

Carrie: Get paroled earlier than people who might actually be sincerely...  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: Upset. But anyways. Yeah. Very interesting.  

Megan: Yeah. And we have an interesting episode too today with a Berkeley professor, so.  

Carrie: Yeah, there's a Berkeley connection, so that's kind of cool.  

Megan: Yeah. And I'm really excited about this one. He's also a friend of mine, so it was fun to inter... It's always fun to have friends on.  

Carrie: Yes. Yes, it is.  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: And it's definitely always very interesting. I mean, we don't... We haven't had anyone on to talk about Arabic yet. And we've been known into... For a long time.  

Megan: We have for years.  

Carrie: For years.  

Megan: So we finally did it. 2025.  

Carrie: Well, I guess that's one good thing about 2025. It's been kind of a weird, rough year already.  

Megan: It's been rough one. It's been a rough one. Can't believe it's not February yet.  

Carrie: I don't know that's going to be any better, but that's true.  

Megan: Not here, not in the States where filming... Or we're taping. Filming. Filming. Taping. What, what, what genre medium am I in right now? We're recording this a day before.  

Carrie: Yes.  

Megan: Donald Trump becomes our president. So.  

Carrie: Yeah. And then... And LA is on fire. And I know at least one person who lost their house and their car in a fire.  

Megan: That's terrible.  

Carrie: Yeah. And of course, there's many, many, many, many, many more. You've been affected.  

Megan: Yep.  

Carrie: Thinking of y'all.  

Megan: Definitely.  

Carrie: And before... Before we get to our interview, we have two people to thank.  

Megan: Yes.  

Carrie: For becoming patrons of ours. Stacey Amling.  

Megan: Thank you, Stacey.  

Carrie: And I am really apologetic. I'm not sure how to pronounce this name. Schnade... Saintl.  

Megan: Maybe Schnadde. Well, thank you so much. And we're sorry if we mispronounced your name.  

Carrie: I almost guarantee that I did.  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: Anyway, enjoy.  

Megan: Enjoy. We are so excited today to have Adam Benkato, who is a Libyan American academic and archivist. His research investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, social sociolinguistics, and archive studies, particularly focusing on sources in modern Arabic and medieval Iranian languages. He currently works as an associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. Thank you so much for being here, Adam.  

Carrie: Yeah, thank you.  

Adam Benkato: Thanks so much for having me. I'm very thrilled to be a guest on the Vocal Fries. I'm a long-time fan, as I think both of you all know. I love this podcast very much, and so I'm really happy to actually, like, be on it and have the chance.  

Megan: To talk to you.  

Carrie: Thank you. Yeah.  

Megan: And this will be something you can possibly, like, give your students to listen to because you'll be on it.  

Adam: I will make them listen.  

Megan: Listen to yourself.  

Carrie: Can I ask you a question? What is Material philology?  

Adam: So Material philology basically is an approach to looking at usually pre-modern texts in their manuscript sources, but with an attention to the manuscript as sort of a material and cultural object. And so not just looking at like, how do we reconstruct an archetype based on 10 different manuscripts? How do we reconstruct the sort of original text, but looking at, like for example, one manuscript in particular and trying to understand like the social context that it was created in. How do people create the physical object? Why is it decorated the way it is? And how does that relate to the text that is written in it?  

Megan: Okay, very cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. So thanks for asking because I was just going to pretend like I knew what that was and just move on.  

Carrie: Well, I mean, even if I knew, which I definitely did not, what about our listeners?  

Megan: Yeah. What about your co-host? You never know. Oh, my goodness. Okay, well, can you tell us a little bit about the history of Arabic?  

Adam: Yeah, so maybe I'll start with a little bit of a brief basic facts. Yeah, it's one of the... I think it's like in the Top five of languages in the world with the most number of speakers. It's extremely widespread. And Arabic is a Semitic language, which means that it's related to languages like Hebrew and Aramaic, but also to languages like the Ethiopic languages like Amharic and Tigrinya, and to ancient languages like Akkadian. So Arabic starts being attested in a bunch of kind of dialectal varieties in writing in the first couple centuries of the common era, in more or less like the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. And so it sort of emerges out of this like Semitic kind of dialect continuum where Semitic languages are basically spoken across sort of late antique Levant and Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula and obviously all the way down into Ethiopia. But where Arabic really sort of gets going is with the emergence of Islam in the seventh century. So of course the Quran is revealed in Arabic. And so Arabic takes on this status as a kind of sacred language, but also as a language of like, religious learning and so forth, and is spread as a spoken language and as a language of religious learning and literature through the spread of Islam east and west out of the Arabian Peninsula into Northern Africa, through Iran and Central Asia, and then to wherever else Muslim communities take it. So there's kind of two trajectories, two historical trajectories to Arabic. One is of Arabic as a classical language that people learn for various reasons or have learned throughout history, for various reasons relating to the practice of the religion. So Muslims learn to recite the Quran and say the prayer and do other kinds of things in Arabic. And people over time have learned Arabic as a language of scholarship and education. So you get a lot of classical Arabic literature and poetry and sciences and mathematics and so forth that's written in classical Arabic by people who are not sort of L1 Arabic speakers in the medieval period, right? So they speak Persian or some other Iranian language, but produce this mass of classical Arabic literature. And so that's still the case today, of course, where far beyond where people speak Arabic as a first language or even as a sort of second language in a day-to-day setting. Arabic is used by Muslims around the world as a language of religion and learning. So it has a fairly significant presence, for example, in parts of Africa where people don't speak Arabic as a daily language, likewise in central and south and southeast Asia where people don't speak Arabic as a daily language or even in Iran. So it sort of functions in this kind of like classical learned language way. And then the other trajectory is that with the spread of Islam out of Arabia and through the Levant, actual Arabic speakers moved into Northern Africa and into Iran and Mesopotamia and Anatolia and so forth. And so communities of Arabic speakers got established along the way. And so you have this kind of second trajectory of people speaking different Arabic varieties as a sort of primary language or as sort of trying to avoid saying the word native language because it's also the case that people are perfectly bilingual in Arabic, and it is an important language for those communities, but it's not the only native language that they have. So you have basically the emergence of all of these very diverse Arabic dialects across this huge swath of space from Morocco all the way into Iran and Central Asia.  

Megan: And so how many varieties are there of Arabic?  

Adam: That's a great question to ask a dialectologist.  

Carrie: That's why we asked.  

Adam: We can just count endlessly, but it kind of depends on how you divide it up. So with respect to spoken Arabic, there's basically this big dialect continuum or spectrum stretching across northern Africa and the Middle East, and there's just a huge amount of variation. So within each of these different countries that are predominantly Arabic speaking, there are loads and loads of regional varieties, and they are not all mutually intelligible or very mutually intelligible. Typically, the ones that are geographically closest to each other are more understandable, but this isn't always the case. So, for example, as a speaker of Libyan Arabic, I kind of understand Tunisians much better than I understand Egyptians, even though geographically both of these are neighbors. And that has to do with the way that the dialects emerge. And the dialects of Libya and Tunisia sort of belong together in a kind of dialect area, not really a branch, and Egypt doesn't. And so that's part of the picture. But there's also various reasons that speakers of Arabic in close physical proximity have very divergent dialects. So in places where there are Arabic-speaking, or there were Arabic-speaking Jewish communities like in Northern Africa, or Arabic-speaking Christian communities like in Iraq and Syria, for various reasons, those communities, while even living in the same urban area, would have very distinct dialects, distinct to the point of having, presumably a kind of lowish mutual intelligibility. But speakers from one of those religious minority communities sort of being bi-dialectal and being able to shift into, say, the Muslim Arabic of the place that they're in when they're out and about, and then using their own kind of variety at home or within their own community. So these are different ways to cut it. But there's also kind of this dialect versus standard language dichotomy or continuum, even so we have kind of classical Arabic and modern Standard Arabic being a little bit different, but the kind of same type of language. There's like a lot more inflection, there's a kind of different kind of morphology. And classical and modern Standard Arabic are varieties that nobody speaks natively, but that people learn and can actually speak pretty fluently depending on their training. These days, Standard Arabic is the variety that's used, like in print media for the most part, although the dialect media is increasingly kind of becoming a thing. But also people like news anchors are sort of trained to speak in, or religious scholars are sort of trained to speak in Standard Arabic and can do so actually with a great amount of fluency. But that's not the language of everyday people, although it has a very high prestige. So there's also this question of kind of the way people view the dialects is often there's this internalized view of the dialects as a kind of like, corrupt version of Standard Arabic or lacking a grammar, that kind of thing. And so this kind of actually even comes about in the way that people name these different varieties. So Standard Arabic is often referred to as [inaudible], which means most eloquent. So [inaudible] is the most eloquent Arabic, literally, that's how the standard language is called. And people will talk about the dialects as being, for example, [inaudible], which means like common in the sense of the common people. And very often when you're talking about language and you say [inaudible] meaning Arabic or [inaudible] people assume that you mean standard Arabic and not dialects because the dialects are not Arabic. In that way. So there's kind of this and of course, this comes along with like class and education, people's ability to actually use Standard Arabic. So there's sort of some built-in kind of assumptions about that as well. But it is very much something that one has to be trained in to produce well or even to sort of read well. So it very much is a question of education, not just of kind of basic level of exposure or something like that.  

Megan: So do they teach it in schools, like, for young children?  

Adam: Yeah. So in the Arabic-speaking world, and very often in Muslim communities where Arabic is not the main language it is used in, like, school materials are taught sort of in Standard Arabic, the teacher might be actually explaining things in dialect, but the materials are in Standard Arabic the literature, everything else. Yeah, there's some other ways to kind of figure out how many varieties there are too. So there's also kind of question of national varieties, all of these nation states where Arabic is the predominant language, people typically refer to those as being varieties. So you have Egyptian Arabic, Libyan Arabic, Syrian Arabic, which are only very approximate terms because all of those places actually have a number of varieties, dialects, and sociolects within them. But with the rise of nation-states and like the accompanying like project of like homogenization and like one national identity and the closing of borders and people becoming less mobile than they used to be, this has all kind of resulted in a slow shift towards actual sort of national dialects or koine's. So there is a way that you can speak of a kind of Egyptian Arabic, which of course not all Egyptians actually speak and to a large extent depends on whatever the kind of most prominent or salient or prestigious variety of that country is. So in the case of Egypt, it's the variety of Cairo, the kind of Egyptian Arabic that you get taught if you have the opportunity to study colloquial Arabic in air quotes in Arabic programs. So Arabic programs often just teach Standard Arabic in this country, but they have increasingly been developing dialect courses so that you can actually like go and people in the language they actually speak. So they'll teach something like Egyptian Arabic, which is more or less the dialect of Cairo, and not lower prestige varieties of like southern Egypt or whatever else. But these kinds of things are emerging kind of national koine is, or national dialects. So you can also kind of count them up that way.  

Carrie: Can you explain what a koine is? Because I don't think we've heard that term on this podcast yet.  

Megan: I don't think we have.  

Adam: Oh boy. So my understanding of a koine is something that's more or less kind of like an averaging out of different input varieties. Usually this is like because of social context. So a bunch of people like say moved to a place and they bring their different dialects and over time the different features of these different dialects are kind of like negotiated into kind of like an average dialect that has some of all these bits, but is pretty close to all of them, but distinct from all of them. So this is a term that's common in Arabic linguistics. I guess maybe not in all linguistics, of course.  

Carrie: Yeah, no, I mean, I've seen it before, but yeah, I've just never used it or thought about what it actually meant. I just tried to figure out from context and that was a very good explanation because it was not what I had figured out from context.  

Adam: Oh, what do you mean you figured out from context? That might also be.  

Carrie: I guess I just thought it was like some kind of like, variety, a special variety. But I couldn't figure out, like, what was actually, like, this sort of mixing or melting pot or whatever version of it never would have crossed my mind. And I, like, I really... That's an interesting phenomenon.  

Adam: I just wanted to add one more thing to the question about varieties and types of varieties, which is that there's actually a massive amount of diversity across all levels of the language. I mean, in terms of lexicon and grammar, morphology and phonology, all of this stuff varies massively from one variety to another. And sort of also between classical or Standard Arabic and spoken Arabic, so it comes across as pretty daunting. But this is also a language that has been spoken in a huge geographical area for 1500 years, roughly. So you, of course, are going to expect a lot of variation. And then of course, that brings up the question of, like, is it a singular language? Which is like a super political question, like, on the ground. It's sort of obvious in a subconscious way to a lot of speakers that it's like, not because you go to places and you meet other Arabs who also speak Arabic and you can't understand them, or you can sort of only understand them with, like, a lot of negotiation. So I have a friend here who's Lebanese and we speak Arabic together. And she had never really heard much Libyan Arabic before. And so there's like a lot of, like, oh, is that what you say for this? Or, like, oh, is that what we pronounce this way? Just in the course of a regular conversation.  

Megan: I think this feels like a Mythbusters moment because I feel like a lot of people are like, well, Arabic is Arabic, right? You can just... If you speak Arabic, you understand someone else speaking Arabic. But that's not necessarily the case here.  

Carrie: I mean, it's a little bit true in English. It's just that we don't normally get exposed to as many different. Like, the closest experience for me, actually, I guess I had two of these kinds of experiences, visited some family in Glasgow, and I could not understand my great uncle or cousin or whatever he was like, at all, but his wife, I could. And then in Newfoundland, sometimes I couldn't understand some of the people there. Mostly, yes. But there would just be, like a few people that I was just like, oh, is this English? And it was. It was.  

Adam: Isn't Glasgow like a famously kind of distinct variety of English?  

Carrie: Yes, yeah, it is. Especially my cousins or whatever his relationship to me was. Certain people in Glasgow, I think most people in North America can understand, but like certain working-class varieties would be harder, I think. Anyway, let's talk about politics now. So why is Arabic stigmatized in most of or all of the West?  

Adam: Yeah, that's a great question. It definitely has to do especially in this country, but also in Europe with recent politics, particularly with wars mostly conducted by Western countries in the Middle East and the resulting association of Arabs with terrorism and violence. And also the sort of conflation of Arabs and Islam and Islam as being a conservative religion or a religion of violence. And those kinds of discourses, I think, as many people have talked about in episodes of the Vocal Fries, there's these processes of sort of racialization that happens of a particular group of people that are stigmatized for various reasons and that gets sort of transferred onto the language and the language kind of becomes this marker of terrorism, or of violence or whatever. So obviously I probably goes without saying, but the two Iraq wars, 9/11, the past 20 years of like American-led violence in the Middle East and North Africa and like a very prominent discourse in the media about that region. And so sort of purely by association and also because of its like general incomprehensibility and people's fear of not understanding. So of course I'm sure that on your social media you've come across instances of people like in airports saying very normal, regular, everyday things in Arabic and you know that getting reported or those people getting harassed or police coming or whatever it is. And what they said was something they were just on the phone saying something completely normal. And non-threatening. But the use of the language itself is enough to be threatening. It's kind of interesting too because I feel like over my lifetime there's become an increased awareness of the identity of Arabs and what the Arabic language is and who uses it and what it signifies about who you are and sort of how you come across. There's also kind of what just crossed my mind was there's also this association of like the Arabic language as sounding harsh or sounding angry. And I'm sure some of that is like auditory perception, like consonants like [inaudible] and [inaudible] and so forth that English doesn't really have. But I think it's a lot of it is transferred from people's ideas about like who Arabs or Muslims are to the language they speak must be like a harsh sounding language, which is really different from my experience because there's some Arabic varieties to me that sound very sort of elegant and smooth and other ones that sound kind of like strange and not that pretty. And it's like just within Arabic, there's all these different perceptions of the varieties that people speak. But I just remember like growing up in the 90s and stuff and people not really knowing like what Arabic is or what an Arab is or what any of the countries are and that awareness like kind of just increasing in the population around me mostly like not in a good way as time has gone on.  

Carrie: Yeah, I definitely remember this shift post 9/11 because I took Arabic for a couple of years in university pre-9/11 and it just, it just seemed like a totally normal, interesting thing to do. But after that I think it would have been interpreted so, oh, you want to be an interpreter or something like you would have want to work for the Canadian equivalent of the CIA or something. And no, that was never what it crossed my mind in the first place. But then also it didn't have that association.  

Adam: I'm sure a large part of people who took Arabic in the 90s were language nerds or doing Islamic studies.  

Carrie: Yeah, I was just in linguistics. I was just a language nerd. Yeah. And my professor happened to have also taught my mother because he was also... I think she took religious studies with him or something. Anyway, he remembered her. I was like, what?  

Megan: That's wild.  

Carrie: I know. He was great. I really loved that class. It was a lot of fun.  

Adam: It is true that in Arabic instruction increased a lot in this country after 9/11 and the start, the invasion of Iraq, actually quite a lot. And then it has sort of dipped and then there's always like a little bit of a recovery with like a new disaster in the Middle East which is kind of like a shitty reason for a language to become popular for learners. Like that's just you kind of wish that people were just learning it because it was interesting or because they thought it was cool or because they wanted to know something nice.  

Carrie: Yeah, no, it was really sad and I don't know, speaks badly about us, I think.  

Adam: I guess also to that larger question, I think the perception and the stigmatization of Arabic in Europe is a little bit different. There's largely the same reasons at play as there are in this country, but there's that added layer of kind of European direct colonization of Arabic-speaking lands going back a century or two and a larger amount of immigration, particularly recently to places like Germany for example, where I don't think that this, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Syrian war went to Germany or passed through Germany. And so there was sort of this... The kinds of negative perceptions and stereotypes that this country has from migrants from south of the US border, Germany has of like, particularly Turkish and Arab, mainly Syrian and Lebanese immigrants. And so there's sort of this additional association in the minds of like Arabs as being kind of like conflated with like gang violence and like urban violence and thuggishness and that kind of thing. So the sort of result is the same, but there's like slightly different trajectory as to how these things develop.  

Carrie: Yeah, last time I was in Europe was a while ago now, but yeah, you can definitely feel the racism there.  

Carrie: It is of a different flavor, but it's definitely there.  

Megan: Yeah. Where else in the world is Arabic stigmatized outside of the West?  

Adam: Largely in occupied Palestine, some people know as Israel, arguably the west, if you believe like Israel's participation in Eurovision and things like that, and a sort of colonial outpost of the west anyways. And this goes hand in hand with colonialism and occupation and the subject population, in this case the Palestinians being oppressed and demonized by Zionist discourse and by mainstream Israeli society. And so in Israel, previously since its founding, Hebrew and Arabic were sort of co-official languages. And I guess part of the reason for that was the fact that a large number of people there spoke Arabic and so that sort of had to be accounted for, if only in like a bureaucratic way. But in 2018, Israel developed this so-called nation state law, which sort of officially, I mean, this is what Zionism claims, of course, but officially declared or codified that Israel is the home of the Jewish people and therefore that only Hebrew is... Hebrew is the only acceptable official language. So it sort of demoted Arabic from...  

Megan: Being as recent as 2018.  

Adam: Yeah, it's kind of interesting because that obviously was what everyone thought and what the sort of Israeli ideology was anyways. But it wasn't codified in law in such a way until 2018.  

Carrie: Yeah, I assume that was Netanyahu's idea.  

Adam: Where probably I don't know the origins of it, but I think he's been perceived as a kind of middle of the road Israeli leader up until recently, but was obviously very receptive to the far right kind of Israeli political movements. So.  

Carrie: I didn't know he was ever perceived as middle of the road.  

Adam: I always thought, I don't know, maybe not. But he was not... Yeah, he was not sort of officially and maybe he still is not officially a kind of part of the far right political...  

Carrie: Oh, I guess that's true. Technically. He was a little bit further to the center versus...  

Adam: Yeah, but of course, like, even the Israeli left is pro-colonialism, so.  

Carrie: Yeah, it's true.  

Adam: So-called left. I don't know.  

Carrie: Yeah. 

Adam: I mean, we're in a country which also lacks a non...  

Carrie: I mean, yeah, even Canada, which I feel is, like, slightly too far to the right, at least has like... Actually, if you look at the political grid, all the parties are on the left except for the conservatives, so anyway. Whereas if you look at the Democrats, they're like center at best.  

Megan: Yeah. In the United States. Yeah, well, yes, that's...  

Carrie: Yeah, that's what I meant. The Democratic Party of the United States, which I don't... 

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: So we haven't talked about this yet, but I think that obviously Orientalism is a thing that exists that is like part of the conversation. So what is Orientalism and how is it related to Arabic?  

Adam: Yeah, that's sort of been underlying some of what we've talked about already, particularly like the depictions of the discourse about Arabs in the Middle East in the media and so forth. So Orientalism is kind of, especially in its common usage, is a kind of shorthand for like a stereotypical or offensive representation of Eastern quote-unquote, like Middle East, North African, South Asian, East Asian, even cultures. So people see something be like, oh, that's Orientalist, or, oh, isn't that like.... Isn't Aladdin like a little bit Orientalist or a lot bit. You know, and there's like, there's like that meme. I don't know what you say. I don't actually know what the origin of that meme is. It's like a sort of white man, like, picking up a phone, and then the phone says, like Edward Said on it. And then people are like, but, okay, so. But that's sort of the common usage. But I think as a critique and as a term that's critical of something, it goes back to this formulation by Edward Said, who was a Palestinian academic, primarily a scholar of literature at Columbia University, who wrote a famous book called Orientalism, which kind of shat on the negative ways that people were studying the Orient up until then. And the people who were shat upon by it were not happy. Still aren't actually, which is hilarious. But in his formulation of Orientalism, it means several things. One of them is kind of what anybody who teaches or writes about or researches the Orient does. And obviously defining the Orient is both critical to Orientalism but also very broad because the kinds of blanket statements and depictions and stereotypes that exist are not specific, and they are actually meant to sort of categorize this whole part of the world as being fundamentally the same. So in addition to that, Orientalism is also kind of what Edward Said calls a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between Orient and Occident. And then thirdly, it's kind of what he calls a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient, meaning anything from, like, making statements about it to teaching it, to researching it, to ruling, to settling and ruling over it. So the study of like, Muslim parts of the world, of South Asia, even of East Asia, is very much caught up in European colonialism. And the ways that scholars going back hundreds of years had access to cultures and texts and artifacts from those places is because they got that access through colonialism and through colonial administrations. And there's like a very close connection between that kind of scholarship and often the people who were colonial administrators in, like, places like French Algeria or British India, who were ruling over people, but also on the side producing, like, translations of like, Sanskrit or Arabic historical works or whatever. And there's this kind of function of, like, learning all of this stuff and developing a field of study of whatever Islamic studies of Arabic in order to better rule over the natives, even if it's sort of implicit in the work. But it's also like very explicit. So part of the reason that these fields of study exist and have existed is due to colonialism and how they represent those subject populations very much feeds into how we, even today, the kinds of stereotypes we have of whatever Arabs or Indians or Chinese people and so forth. So how it's related to Arabic, specifically in terms of the study of language is partly for that reason. So one can come to the study of Arabic with a lot of preconceptions or stereotypes about its people. And those can, of course, leak into one scholarship, as we all know, even unintentionally. But I think it's kind of generally accepted in the field. Less so, but it has been generally accepted that one doesn't really need to examine one's bias as a Western subject. One is already sort of free of bias. The texts speak for themselves and whatever else. So in Arabic linguistics and dialectology, which is a field that is in great part not exclusively, but to a great extent sort of founded by the colonial enterprise, British and French and Italian colonialism, those kinds of ideas about things that are seemingly like mundane facts, like the history of people and dialect features and how you account for different kinds of linguistics things those are also sort of get caught up in this framework that results from colonialism about how to divide and understand people such that you can govern them better. And a lot of the early Arabic linguists and Arabic dialectologists were themselves colonial administrators, like in French Algeria. And those kinds of stereotypes, and often very explicit, very negative stereotypes about the Arabic language permeate their work. And you find claims like the natives should eventually abandon Arabic for French and that kind of thing. And so that's sort of been part of my research is trying to understand like the kind of history of scholarship and the kinds of assumptions that have led to untenable frameworks for understanding, like the history of Arabic dialects and even understanding why certain linguistic features are the way they are in certain places and not other places. Even that kind of can have a background to it that comes from prejudice or the needs of a colonial administration and so forth.  

Megan: Oh, I'm like thinking of who must be studying Arabic these days and how it must not always be someone within the community and how that interacts with scholarship from people within the community.  

Adam: Yeah, that's very true. Probably there are a decent number of Arabs and Arabic speakers who are linguists of Arabic. The most prominent ones are typically Western scholars, particularly European, where it's a little bit more of an established field than it is in the US. Although linguistics of Arabic as opposed to dialectology is pretty well established here. But yeah, I think one thing that you observe again a little bit less so in Arabic linguistics than in things like Islamic studies or modern Middle East politics or whatever is people not necessarily being able to speak the language well. So a lot of linguists are also of course language nerds and can be quite good at language learning and do end up speaking. And then of course the necessities of fieldwork, meaning that you need to speak the language to a decent degree. But yeah, you do sort of come across ways in which scholars don't seem to have an idea of how people sort of actually say things or kinds of basic terms. So for example, this one is sort of just funny to me. There's a study of Libya, of eastern Libyan Arabic that was published in the 80s. That to a great extent is kind of the background of some of my own work on Libyan Arabic as a previously existing resource. And in eastern Libyan dialects in particular within Libya, there's a kind of distinctive word for father, which is [inaudible] , like in western Libya it's [inaudible]. And in this work, which is a book length grammar of Eastern Libyan varieties. He doesn't once mention this extremely distinctive Eastern Libyan. It's so distinctive that... So my father's from Benghazi, and the kind of Arabic that I speak is predominantly Benghazi variety. And so when I go to Tripoli in the west of Libya and I say [inaudible], meaning my father, they immediately anyone is just like, oh, you're from the East. Like, is that obvious? And then there's nowhere in this book. And I'm like, okay, but how did you spend a year doing fieldwork there and not but on a different level. One thing that I've done research on is the origin of dialects, particularly in Northern Africa. The sort of, I guess, historiography of the origin of dialects and how Arabic speakers migrated to Northern Africa and why that results in a particular distribution of dialects. And there's a certain narrative built into the literature that very much was part of French colonial administration. And then when you go to actual communities and ask about what their own sort of origin story is about where that community comes from, they have a completely different sort of narrative migration that doesn't necessarily accord well with linguistic facts in air quotes as we understand them, but also not with the sort of narrative and scholarship. It's just its own narrative. And that's completely fine and has a particular value for how that community understands itself, but it plays no role in how people have tried to understand the history of those dialects. 

Carrie: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that would be... It should play some kind of role. In my experience, like, all the people I know that have ever worked on Arabic have been speakers of a variety of Arabic because there were just so many students at ASU and, like, I would read their work, so I would see all their references, and it was a lot of Arab names. So I'm glad that it's, like, shifting or has shifted. It's not just a bunch of white dudes anymore.  

Adam: Yeah, there are definitely a number of great linguists of Arabic who are Arabs and are like, L1 speakers of Arabic or heritage speakers of Arabic like myself. And so that is... Yeah, that is shifting. And it's also kind of a question of access, too, which is also kind of like a colonial framework in a way. But, like, since Americans can't typically go to a lot of countries that are Arabic speaking these days, it's easier for people who are sort of already from there or have a passport or have extensive like family and diaspora connections to do that research and meet the speakers and be involved in those Communities. And that kind of is just like a default thing that's happening because of political situations, but is also kind of good for people with pre-existing connections to those places.  

Megan: Speaking of those places. So Arabic is stigmatized in the west, but it's a dominant language in the MENA region. How does Arabic interact with other languages in the area?  

Adam: So, yeah, Arabic, there are other languages which are sort of minority or less prestigious languages in relation to Arabic in a number of countries, primarily Berber or Amazigh in North Africa and Kurdish in Syria, Iraq and Iran. And those languages, while being fairly widespread and having a fairly large number of speakers depending on the variety and community, especially since the advent of Arab nationalism and the creation of nation-states in the 20th century, have sort of existed in a context of suppression driven by the kind of political ideology of Arab nationalism, of these nation-states like Morocco and Iraq and Syria and Libya and Egypt being defined sort of ethnically as Arab. And also having one nation-state equals one language, which as a side note, that language is usually... It's actually always standard Arabic and not any Arabic dialect, which is a point we can come back to. So, yeah, also other languages like Aramaic, where it's spoken and so forth, in most cases, actually in all cases, up until recently, languages such as Kurdish and Amazigh were not official languages and had no status or were forbidden in all of these countries. So in Libya, for example, it was illegal to use Amazigh in public. It was illegal to give your children Amazigh names to publish anything. Likewise in Syria, technically still, although, after 2011, like the government's ability to actually enforce this has waned. It was illegal to publish anything in Kurdish. And so you can imagine that this has led to a situation of widespread language shift and the resulting kind of negative stereotypes of those languages which accompany it. So for a lot of Arabic speakers, many of whom not always sort of self-identify as Arabs, the Berber Amazigh people and their language is very much considered to be sort of inferior. And likewise with Kurdish in Iraq and Syria and of course, along with this like lack of recognition or oppression comes lack of educational opportunities, lack of media, lack of places to actually use the language. So this has changed to a certain degree for the better. So after the US-led toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, that actually created an opening for the Kurdish language, where I think it was even in 2003 or shortly thereafter given a kind of official status. And then more recently in North Africa, in Morocco and Algeria, Tamazight which is the, I guess, the technical name for the language is like a feminine noun. Tamazight has official status in Morocco and Algeria now, which also kind of comes with its own difficulties in the sense that there are still not institutions they've been developing, education and media and so forth. And then the way it's developed and promulgated as an official language is also interesting because in both of those places you have multiple dialects or varieties of Tamazight, which are not recognized individually as such. But this whole, I mean, Berber or Tamazight itself is like a language family with many varieties. And so the state doesn't necessarily recognize all of these individually but just sort of this, like, mass of like whatever that is official. But that has gotten better to some degree. But in other places, not, for example, in Libya, there have been efforts to make provisions for like, the two major minority languages of Libya, namely the various Berber Amazigh varieties, and Tebu, which is a language that's indigenous to the Sahara. And those have all failed. And people have not been receptive to that in the process of like, redrafting the Libyan constitution after 2011. So Arabic is in this particular position of in the places where it's spoken typically as a daily language by a large number of people sort of dominating other linguistic communities, but in other contexts itself being stigmatized and having all this other stuff.  

Carrie: So it's a complicated world picture, just like most things. It's more complicated than most people know. So what role does Arabic play in Arab nationalism? I know that's a big question.  

Adam: Yeah. So Arab nationalism is a kind of movement that emerges in like, more or less in the early 20th century. It's partly a response to Arabic speaking communities being dominated by the Ottoman Empire and partly to European colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa. And the discourse early on sort of settles on Arabic as being the key feature that defines an Arab or the Arab identity. There was kind of a question about, like, what religious communities belong in it. Like, do Arab Christians belong in Arab nationalism? Do Jewish Arabs belong in Arab nationalism? And a lot of the Arab nationalist discourse is sort of conceived of and promoted by Christian Arabic speakers as well as Muslim Arabic speakers. So it's really like settled on as anybody who speaks Arabic is kind of an Arab or anybody whose language is Arabic is an Arab. But then when all of these nation states emerge in the post-colonial era, they are led by an Arab nationalist ideology which is exclusive of other kinds of identities and communities, is not necessarily conflated with religion, in many places, it's sort of explicitly not religious. In other places, there's this complicated kind of interaction with whatever Islamic legal norms and so forth. So what ends up happening is that these nation states sort of end up enshrining only Arabic as an official language, sort of pushing aside all other kinds of languages, if not actively sort of whatever, persecuting them and sort of making provisions for nothing else. So this is actually sort of the status quo up until recently, with these few exceptions, where Arabic. But Standard Arabic is the official language of these different countries. And even the dialects are not really recognized as having a kind of value or having the capacity to be official languages. So in no place is any form of dialect actually, like, on the books. The only kind of nod toward this that was made was like, I think in 2014 in Tunisia, the Tunisian constitution was released in three languages, in standard Arabic and in French and in Tunisian Arabic version. As far as I know, Tunisian Arabic as a sort of dialect or a spoken variety doesn't actually have any kind of official status. So there's this weird way in which, like, the close association of Arabic with Arab nationalism, like, also erases the actual language which everybody speaks every day, which is their variety of spoken Arabic.  

Carrie: Yeah. So it's kind of ironic, but also that's just how humans are, I feel.  

Adam: Yeah. Nationalism, it's not good for anyone.  

Carrie: No, it's really not.  

Megan: No.  

Carrie: Yeah. It was kind of hanging over this conversation. Is that the election just happened?  

Megan: Yeah.  

Carrie: This is coming out a little bit later. So people, by that point. Oh, God, dude will be president again or close to.  

Adam: Totally.  

Megan: So is there anything else you would want our listeners to know about Arabic?  

Adam: Yes. So don't be scared by the reputation of Arabic as being hard to learn. I don't know what your experience is like, Carrie, I was going to ask you.  

Carrie: I mean, I don't think it was that much harder than other languages. But it is different, right?  

Adam: Yeah.  

Carrie: But, yeah, don't be scared.  

Adam: It's definitely different. But I think that reputation puts people there like, oh, it takes you five years to reach, like, an elementary level. Like, if you get into it and avail yourself with the right opportunities as you would for learning any language, then it's very doable. And I will also say that there is loads of popular culture in Arabic that is great and also cringe, which is sometimes something that you need in your life and you know, your life.  

Carrie: You can't escape cringe.  

Adam: The listeners, your lives will be better once you know enough Arabic to understand what they're actually saying in Arabic pop songs, which I'm not saying is good. It might be cringe, but it will make your life better.  

Carrie: I mean, isn't that kind of true of all pop songs? It's a bit cringy as soon as you understand whatever language it's in.  

Megan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great way to end our conversation. I really appreciate you coming on the show and teaching me so much. I learned a lot during this episode, which I always love to happen. So I appreciate you.  

Adam: Yeah, that's great.  

Megan: Thank you.  

Adam: Really grateful to y'all for having me on, and it's been fun. I always up for talking about Arabic in any capacity.  

Megan: Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you did it on the show.  

Carrie: Yeah, I'm also glad we finally got a chance to actually talk about Arabic in any meaningful way.  

Megan: It's been, what, seven years that we've been doing the show? So we finally got to Arabic. It's a crime.  

Carrie: Yeah, Crime. It's one of the big ones.  

Megan: So I'm glad we got to do it with you, Adam, and I really appreciate. Yeah, appreciate it. And we always leave our listeners with one final message.  

Carrie: Don't be an asshole.  

Megan: Don't be an asshole. Oh, how would you say it in Arabic?  

Adam: So, funnily enough, in Arabic, sort of like ask. Like, the word for donkey also kind of means, like, jerk, so you would say it's masculine or feminine.  

Megan: Awesome. Perfect.  

Carrie: I love that. Thank you so much.  

Megan: Thank you so much.  

Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at vocal fries pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com, and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

[END]