Arabic in Algeria

When I went to Leeds University to do an MA in 1969 I spent much of my time dodging T.F. Mitchell, head of the Department of Linguistics.  This is because the good professor knew a great deal about the vernacular of eastern Libya (his best known publication being a paper on ‘The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica’), and was keen to find out how different it was from the Arabic of western Algeria.

The problem was that, despite four years in Algeria, I had made very little progress with the language.  In fact, although I have never spent more than 3 weeks in any year in Turkey, I now speak better Turkish than Arabic.  Why, then, did I do so badly in Arabic?

The first reason is that I went to Algeria in 1965, just three years after the French had left, and everyone with the slightest amount of education spoke excellent French.  The 11 year fight for independence had been bloody and vicious on both sides, yet it was still considered cool to speak the language of the former colonisers; you heard it being spoken in cafes by senior lycee pupils and university students. And when I needed to talk to my Arab neighbours in Tlemcen (see my earlier posting) it was too frustrating for all concerned if I struggled with my basic Arabic when everyone knew that we had fluent French in common.

(Celine, who was three when we went to Tlemcen, had no such trouble. As soon as we moved in she was adopted by all the local girls. And just a month after our arrival we were having drinks with some French friends when we heard the local woman who worked for them say something in Arabic to Celine, who promptly came into the living room, picked up the dirty cups and carried them back into the kitchen.)

The other reason has to do with the varied nature of the Arabic language.  Let me give you an example. On my first trip to Tunis, in 1971, I was walking in the medina with a friend, Eddie Eckert, when I stopped in front of a young man selling oranges and, in my best Arabic, said ‘zuj cheena’, expecting to be given two oranges.  The man looked at me in complete bewilderment, and I asked Eddie, Tunis-born and bred, if the accent here was so different from what I was used to.

‘No’, he replied. It had nothing to do with pronunciation, it appeared. The problem was lexical. The words for ‘two’ and ‘orange’ were entirely different in Tunis from what I had learned in Tlemcen and I should have asked for ‘ithnane burtukali’. (In fact, as I later learned, that is what you would need to say just about anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world apart from where I was living!)

Eddie (or El-Hedy) Eckert knew what he was talking about. The Eckerts had arrived in Tunis from Strasbourg, I believe, having fled Alsace around 1870 when the Prussians marched in.  The family had kept up their French, as well as their ancestral Alsatian dialect, acquiring the local version of Arabic along the way.  Eddie, in addition, had studied Arabic at university and had a very good knowledge of the different versions of the spoken language from Morocco to Tunisia.

The problem with Arabic, as Eddie explained, is that there are really three different levels. At the top you find the unifying language of the holy Qur’an, sometimes called Classical Arabic, which is unchangeable and unchanging, rather like the Latin of the Roman Catholic Church. 

Below that, and derived from it, is Modern Standard Arabic, which is used on radio and television, in schools and universities and, as its name implies, is standardised throughout the Arabic-speaking world.  Compared with the language of the Qur’an it is flexible and can change to keep pace with changes in the modern world.

Then there is dialectal Arabic, the language spoken at home and in the street, what a child learns from his or her mother,.  And it is hardly surprising that it varies considerably from its home in the Middle East as you head westwards towards Morocco, following the route the Arabs took as they brought their language and religion with them over the centuries.

All languages change over space and time.  And when you think that Latin gradually changed into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian and hundreds of less prestigious dialects, then you can hardly expect Arabic to have remained static. The version spoken in Algeria bears traces of the Berber languages it had displaced (still spoken in mountain and desert areas, rather like the Celtic languages surviving in various parts of the British Isles).  And the language of the settlers - French and, to a lesser extent, Spanish - has also left its mark.

So the bit of dialectal Arabic I’d learned in Tlemcen wasn’t going to help me much elsewhere. And when I moved to Algiers, after two years in Tlemcen, there were noticeable differences in dialect.

That’s when I decided it would make sense to study Standard Arabic, so I joined  a small group for a dozen or so lessons with a teacher from Syria. It seemed to be going well until I tried a passage out on Zohra, the woman who worked for us, looking after the children. ‘Beautiful!’, she said, when I read aloud a passage I’d studied. ‘It’s beautiful!’. ‘Yes’, but do you understand me?’ I asked. ‘No, but it’s so beautiful. You sound like the imam!’

So my choice was: either study the standard version, and risk not being understood in Algeria, or get to grips with the language of the street, which would mean not being understood if the street happened to be in Damascus, Rhiyad or Baghdad.

Make that Damascus, Rhiyad, Baghdad or London.  A few years back I was in a rather swish men’s wear shop in the West End when I heard two women, from Saudi Arabia I’d guess, discussing which of two sweaters they were going to buy for one of their menfolk.  ‘Excuse me’, I said in my best Arabic, ‘I think this one is really nice’.  They immediately burst into quickly stifled laughter.  I fear that what they had heard was more along the lines of ‘Ey oop lass, it’s right nice is this one’.

Arabic in London

Four years ago I plucked up courage and signed up for a beginner’s course in Standard Arabic at Morley College, near where we used to live in Waterloo.

The teacher was Dr Imran Hamza Alawiye, an excellent, enthusiastic teacher who used ‘Gateway to Arabic’, a well-illustrated, extremely useful course in several parts which he had written himself.

I missed the first two lessons, as we were on holiday in Turkey, but had bought the beginner’s book and CD. The latter I put on my I-Pod, and I spent an hour or so a day listening to the recordings and learning the script with the help of Dr Alawiye’s set of flashcards.  Even so I had to work fast to catch and keep up.

I told Dr Alawiye about my previous encounters with spoken Arabic and he was very tolerant of my attempts to guess if words I’d met in Algeria were acceptable in the version he was teaching. He also allowed me, when working on a short piece about my family, to use the form of transcription that Eddie Eckert had introduced me to back in Tlemcen, which meant that I could write much more quickly.

The problem was that I had too much on my plate. I was taking the train from Buckinghamshire to Marylebone twice a week, heading to Hackney on a Wednesday for my Turkish lesson, and to Waterloo on a Thursday for Arabic. And both nights I was rarely home before 10.30.

It helped that Turkish, despite the best modernising efforts of the Turkish state early in the 20th century, is still full of loan words from Arabic. (I you remember Aslan, from ‘The lion, the witch and the wardrobe’, then you know how to say ‘lion’ in Arabic and Turkish).  But the effort of coping with two very different languages and two lots of homework, while desperately trying to keep up with my classmates, most of whom were much younger than myself, proved too much. And, at the end of the first year, I decided not to carry on with Arabic straight away, as I was down to do GCSE Turkish the following year. And Dr Alawiye would be leaving Morley College anyway (to concentrate on writing for a while) which would have meant adjusting to a different teacher.

So Arabic is on the back burner for a while. Occasionally I listen to one of the three Arabic courses I’ve added to my I-Pod, and I intend to take Jane to Tunisia or Libya some time in the next year or so.  Before setting off I’ll work really hard at standard Arabic and see how that works out.

Postscript

The really intriguing aspect of ‘Gateway to Arabic’, Book 1, comes near the end of the book. Up to then we had been learning very ordinary vocabulary but, four pages from the end, Dr Alawiye introduces the learner to a series of ‘familiar Islamic phrases’ starting with ‘bismillah al-rahman al-rahim’ (in the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful’,  the phrase which begins all but one of the different parts of the Qur’an).

Following this, two pages cover the ‘Ninety-nine perfect names of Allah’, and the book ends with a series of sentences either addressing Allah directly (‘You alone do we worship, and to You alone do we turn for help’) or referring to him (‘His throne extends over the heavens and the earth, and he never wearies of guarding and preserving them, for He is the most high, the Supreme in glory’.)

I would like to say immediately that I have no problem with this.  I was already aware that the good Doctor prefaced each of his recordings with ‘bismillah al-rahman al-rahim’ and it makes sense, I believe, to discover more about Islam while learning the language with which that important religion is associated.

Before reading aloud to the class the text I’d written in Arabic about my family, I even prefaced it myself with ‘bismillah al-rahman al-rahim’ (having checked with a muslim friend that it would not be discourteous for a non-muslim to do so), and I was pleased to see that my teacher, though slightly surprised, was not upset.

What did strike me, however, was this: imagine if I wrote an English Language book intended for sale in Arab countries. Imagine if I decided to include, say, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, or a list of some of the names that pious Roman Catholics have attributed to the Virgin:

Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother inviolate, Mother undefiled, Mirror of Justice, Seat of Wisdom, Cause of our joy, Spiritual vessel, Mystical rose, Tower of David, Tower of Ivory, Star of the Sea, Gate of Heaven, Health of the sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the afflicted, Mirror of Justice ........

Imagine how many copies of the book I could sell.