Saturday 10 September 2011

Of Peasantry and Pigeonage

This picture has very little to do
with this blog post
I'm sitting in Qaranshu at 3am, having consumed a nescafe with Egyptian-level sugar contents at about 11.30pm;  The Egyptian government has cracked down on protestors following the storming of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, which you probably heard about (following the killing of at least 4 six Egyptian soldiers by an Israeli border raid that you probably didn't hear about... with others still in critical condition);  I went to an Egyptian wedding on Friday and danced on stage with the groom, whom I had met once before and assured me that it would have been a disgrace if I had not come to his wedding party -- unfortunately, amid the blasting Arabic techno beats blasting from every available speaker, the only word I heard was "disgrace," and was worried for at least 15 minutes that I had entered my worst nightmare and committed some unforgivable faux pas in front of a huge audience of Egyptians;  I learned that the business of being a simsaar -- something like an rentals agent who helps people find apartments to rent -- is akin to a mafia-cartel that would put the hurt on anyone trying to help foreigners get cheaper apartments by avoiding their crappy excuse for service.

And yet, here I am writing about something that has nothing to do with any of the above.  This is probably why the only people who read it are those like me who spend a bunch of time on facebook procrastinating and wishing they had something to read that wasn't the newsfeed.  Blockbuster days for readership on this blog run in the 20s or 30s.  I love each and every one of you for that little jump in the readership chart.

Point is, the Arabic language is wide and deep.  It has long been my position that, were it not for ideological considerations, the different "dialects" of Arabic would be taught as separate languages.  The old linguist's saying being "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

But even within Egypt, the dialect known as "Egyptian dialect" is... wide and deep.  Take, for example, Quranshu.

The town's accent is akin to the Yemeni and Upper Egypt dialect:
    -->  The deep guttural Qaf (a "k" pronounced as far back in the throat as you can manage) with a hard Geem sound (as in "gum").
    -->  The soft Jeem (as in "jam") remains as such in the Qaranshu accent.

Cairenes, by contrast, pronounce the Qaf as a glottal stop (the catch at the back of the throat at the beginning and middle of "Uh-Oh").  For Cairenes, the soft Jeem is pronounced as a hard Geem (as in "gum").

My friend's family will also mention words in conversation that are "peasant" words.  As it was described to me, these words were used "before we had education."  People tend to make sure I know that certain words are "not used" so that I don't make the mistake of going around Cairo using words that would give me away as a peasant-type.

The stereotype of the stupid Upper Egyptian peasant with the loud, non-Cairene accent, Qaf-as-Geem accent is so famous that it was made into a fish-out-of-water comedy: "The Upper Egyptian at the American University."  Something like: "The country bumpkin goes to Harvard." American University is proverbially upper-class, drawing its students from the aristocracy of Egyptian society.



The people who dubbed the disney movie "Bolt" had no problem playing off of the peasant stereotype when they cleverly had the pigeons in New York speak with unmistakeable Upper Egypt/Delta Peasant accents.

The pigeons in the English version have working-class New Yorker accents.


The Arabic version takes this and makes it totally Egyptian in ways that make jokes that were never there in the original (for instance, Bolt corrects the pigeons pronunciation of Cat from "Guṭṭah" to "ʾUṭṭa".

The accent (and thus stereotyped "stupid" behavior) become clear on the first line of dialogue (not in the video below).  It's totally classist, as was the original, but it's a brilliant example of what translation really is all about.


When I pronounced the word "who" in Arabic in a very Standard Arabic manner this past week, my teacher corrected my non-Cairene pronunciation and started doing her best Upper Egypt accent and performed a famous Egyptian television line that likewise mocks the Upper Egypt accent (which is, in many ways, closer to Classical/Standard Arabic pronunciation).

Of course, this kind of accent-based classism is not strange to Americans (though many would claim that it is).  It's certainly easier to see in England where students from Ireland, Scotland, and all sorts of Londoners came together in Oxbridge after losing their accents... this happens a lot less now, but you can still find people who lost their accents on purpose.

Copying Spenser's GSAM messages, I'll close with the following:

Send your favorite accent-based stories, tales of storming the Israeli embassy, and ways that you have violated cultural norms in front of huge groups of people to my inbox.  I'm waiting...

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