NO DEMOTICS, NO DEMOCRACY?:

The talking cure: a review of Why Are the Arabs Not Free? by Moustapha Safouan (Samir El-Youssef, 18 October 2007, New Statesman)

The disparity between written and spoken Arabic is so great that talking to an audience is often a discouraging test for Arab writers. To use the vernacular, one would probably have to avoid sophisticated arguments and deep thoughts. But to talk in standard (written) language is to risk sounding pompous and rhetorical - and, worst of all, to fail to reach those who have had no school education. Given the high level of illiteracy in the Arab world, this means losing the attention of a great proportion of the public.

The dilemma is particularly daunting for those of us bilingual Arab writers who, through writing in English or French, have become used to the idea of written and spoken language being the same. The Franco-Egyptian writer Moustapha Safouan's solution to the problem is a call for writers to abandon standard Arabic and use the spoken dialects instead. Safouan claims that writing in rarefied standard Arabic is a major cause of the absence of freedom and democracy in the Arab world. He calls this the "politics of writing" - written language is the privilege of the elite, the educated few who are faithfully in the service of their paymasters: the despotic Arab rulers and their political regimes.

Where's King James when you need him?

MORE (via Mike Daley):
Mother Tongue: A review of Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, by Seth Lerer (Joseph Tartakovsky, Fall 2007, Claremont Review of Books)

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 18, 2007 11:48 AM