The politics of Pro-ʿāmmiyya language ideology in Egypt

Aboelezz, Mariam (2017) The politics of Pro-ʿāmmiyya language ideology in Egypt. In: Høigilt, J. and Mejdell, G. (eds.) The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World: Writing change. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 90. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, pp. 212-238. ISBN 9789004346178.

Abstract

The recent changes in the traditional roles played by fuṣḥā and ʿāmmiyya in Egypt point to the complex relationship between these two diglossic poles. In an attempt to further our understanding of why these changes are taking place, this article looks to extra-linguistic aspects for explanation, investigating the political value of fuṣḥā and ʿāmmiyya in contemporary Egypt. To do this, I draw on two interviews conducted in 2010 with proponents of written ʿāmmiyya. The first is an interview with the Liberal Egyptian Party, a party with an ideology of Egyptian separatist nationalism. The second is an interview with Malamih, a publishing house with a leftist, liberal ideology. My analysis of the interviews adopts a discourse-mythological approach (Kelsey 2014), informed by analytical frameworks such as Eisele’s (2003) ‘regimes of authority’, and Omoniyi’s (2006) ‘hierarchy of identities’. I conclude that the interviewees champion ʿāmmiyya for ideologically different reasons. In the first interview, ʿāmmiyya is predictably prodded as a symbol of Egyptian nationalism, whilst fuṣḥā is constructed as a symbol of (rejected) pan-Arabism. The indexicality of ʿāmmiyya in the second interview is more subtle: it is constructed as a marker of anti-institutional discourse; a form whose mere use challenges the regulatory capacity of the regime.

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