[FORUM] How does your language vary from the standard?

[rfmcdonald]

One of the interesting things about the recent Tunisian revolution is the language that Ben Ali spoke in a televised address before his departure. Instead of speaking Standard Arabic, Ben Ali spoke Tunisian Arabic.

According to an email from Youssef Gaigi posted by Gillian York:

Today’s speech shows definitely a major shift in Tunisia’s history.
[Tunisian president Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali talked for the third time in the past month to the people. Something unprecedented, we barely knew this guy. Ben Ali talked in the Tunisian dialect instead of Arabic for the first time ever.

A story in today's New York Times will give you some background on the serious and astonishing situation in Tunisia: David Kirkpatrick and Alan Cowell, "Crisis Deepens in Tunisia as President’s Offer Falls Flat", 1/14/2011. [Update — Since I posted this, Ben Ali has resigned and fled the country, as the linked story indicates.]

By "Tunisian dialect" Youssef Gaigi means what the Ethnologue calls "Tunisian Spoken Arabic", and by "Arabic" he means what the Ethnologue calls "Standard Arabic", often referred to as "Modern Standard Arabic".

For those who aren't familiar with Arabic diglossia, a plausible analogy would be to equate "Classical Arabic" with Latin, to compare "Modern Standard Arabic" (MSA) to the variety of Latin used in the Vatican (with words and phrases added over the years to refer to more recent objects and concepts), and to link the various "spoken" Arabics (sometimes called "colloquials" or "dialects") with modern Latin-derived "Romance" languages like French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.

The analogy is incomplete, since MSA is taught everywhere in schools, used almost everywhere in the media, and is the only variety of Arabic with significant presence in a written form. The "spoken" or "colloquial" Arabics are used in everyday life, but generally don't have a standard written form and are rarely written. Still, the linguistic differences between MSA and Tunisian or Syrian are roughly as large as those between Latin and French or Spanish.

A story may illustrate some of the ideologies involved. A few decades ago, a Tunisian linguist who had studied in the U.S. returned to a university position in Tunisia. Because some of his published work dealt with the phonetics and phonology of Tunisian Spoken Arabic, one of his colleagues formally accused him in the faculty senate of bringing the Tunisian nation into disrepute, by suggesting in print that Tunisians spoke such a degenerate and incorrect variety of Arabic.

(This issue was followed up at Language Hat.)

I make active use of tags for "language conflict" and "language policy", but those tags refer to conflict between self-identified languages, Catalan and Spanish, say. They don't relate to conflicts between speakers of different forms of a language, whether one's talking about the sort of diglossia seen in Tunisia, or the more personally familiar variation in accent and vocabulary by region and by class that I hear around me even now. Atlantic Canadian dialects, for instance, are clearly non-standard and may have a stigmatizing effect even now. I don't speak Prince Edward Island English; instead, like many queer men and women, I've managed to adopt the standard form. I noticed in filming my "It Gets Better" video, though, that I have something of the stereotypical but actually existing gay accent.

So. That's me. And you? What variations from the norm do you evidence? What's your surrounding community (or communities!) like?

Discuss.