[BRIEF NOTE] Populism, or divide-and-conquer?

[rfmcdonald]

Over at The New Republic, Joseph Braude has an interesting article, "Language Barrier," examining what communications barriers between the United States and the Arab world.

Since September 11, the U.S. government's bid to promote democracy and improve America's image in the Arab world has consisted largely of countering anti-American pan-Arab media with pro-American pan-Arab media. In 2003, the State Department launched a glossy magazine called Hi, which it distributed in 13 Arab countries. The U.S.-backed Al Hurra television network--which recently celebrated its first anniversary--offers programs resembling those of Al Jazeera in nearly every local market reached by its rival. The former chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Harold Pachios, has written, "Now more than ever, the United States needs it own voice in the Arabic language." And these efforts go beyond government programs. Witness the Global Americana Institute, which seeks "to engage in translation, publication, and distribution of books on the United States in Arabic. The initial volume will be the key works of Thomas Jefferson."

[. . .]

The challenge of winning hearts and minds among populations with high illiteracy rates is doubly complex in the case of the Arab world. Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites.

Now, it's true that Cairene Arabic, propagated by Egypt's influential printed and electronic mass media, has gained currency across the Arab world. It's also true that the different Arabics spoken are mutually unintelligible, or at least as mutually unintelligible as the different standardized Romance languages. (EDIT: Or, perhaps, not; see the comments of optimussven.) This isn't surprising, considering that Arabic has been developing across a vast and territoprially fragmented space for more than fourteen centuries, or that it was superimposed over different languages (Berber dialects in the Maghreb, Coptic in Egypt, Aramaic languages in the Fertile Crescent).

Braude's solution to the fragmentation of the Arabophone language community? Encourage the fragmentation.

The Arab world today stands at a crossroads--between an old-fashioned allegiance to the contrived political agenda of a single Arab nation (or a single Islamic nation) and a new twenty-first-century emphasis on distinct, democratic national polities that focus on their own social and political challenges. But the latter will not be possible if a country's majority does not understand the language of government. Thus where countries have grassroots movements calling for mother-tongue media and education--the list includes Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco--the United States should support their efforts. The renowned Beirut linguist Sa'id A'il plans to publish the first ever "dictionary of Lebanese" this summer for a small group of scholars, but there is no program in place to develop his life's work into a curriculum. An independent newspaper began publishing in "Moroccan" in May 2003 and has won a large following among the working class but requires investment in order to expand.

Might the Middle East Partnership Initiative--founded with great fanfare by the Bush administration in January 2003 to promote discourse and civil society in the Arab world--consider supporting projects like these? One of the Initiative's existing projects, which subsidizes the translation and publication of children's books by Scholastic, predictably does so in Fus'ha--a one-size-fits-all approach for every Arab country. Not an encouraging sign. On the other hand, the U.S.-backed Radio Sawa, which broadcasts locally on FM dials across the region, has begun to include some local vernacular content in five separate Arab markets. More work along these lines is needed.

My reaction? I don't claim to be an Arabist, but I suspect that the sight of the United States encouraging the linguistic fragmentation of the Arab world would backfire rather spectacularly, not least because of the central role of the Arabic standard language in Islam. Compare, if you would, the role played by Mandarin Chinese in uniting the People's Republic of China, where perhaps one-third of the population speaks "dialects"--Cantonese, Shanghainese, and the like--which are actually spoken languages unintelligible to speakers of Mandarin Chinese. As Christopher Bodeen notes in the Malaysian Star, language is a major unspoken issue in modern China.

Promotion of Mandarin--known in Chinese as putonghua, or "common tongue"--began in the 1920s and became policy in 1955, six years after the communists seized power.

Its use has been encouraged through an unending series of social campaigns, including the current one featuring TV presenter Wang Xiaoya on billboards exhorting Shanghainese to "speak Mandarin ... be a modern person."

In the latest campaign, Shanghai city officials are being required to attend classes on perfecting their pronunciation, schools are nominating contestants in city-wide Mandarin speech contests and foreigners are being invited to Mandarin classes.

[. . .]

Despite support for dialects, Mandarin’s influence reaches deep. Speaking the language well is considered a sign of good breeding and education. And because China has bound the use of Mandarin so closely to the idea of national unity, promotion of other dialects can sometimes be seen as insulting if not traitorous.

Taiwan’s efforts to promote its local dialect have been angrily denounced in Beijing as "anti-Chinese". Even at an entertainment awards show in Shanghai, Chinese reporters drown out Hong Kong celebrities speaking in Cantonese with exasperated shouts of "speak Mandarin".

It's interesting to note that China is not heading towards a situation of Mandarin Chinese monolingualism across the country; China's regional languages are too strongly rooted.

"Many parts of China are heading for a situation of what linguists call diglossia, where there is one ‘high’ or public language ... and one ‘low’ or local language that is used among friends and family," says Stevan Harrell, an expert on Chinese languages at the University of Washington.

Use of dialects may even be strengthening in some areas with strong local identities, sometimes for economic reasons. In Guangzhou (that’s Mandarin for the great southern city of Canton), broad-casters are allowed to speak Cantonese to compete with the nearby Hong Kong stations.

Comparisons with the linguistic situation in the Arab world come readily to mind. Granted that the Arab world has never been politically unified in an Arab state and likely never will be, the sense of allegiance to a broader Arab world appears to be fairly potent even in Morocco, Lebanon, and Egypt, perhaps especially in these countries given their centrality (cultural, economic, political) to the Arab world.

Trying to encourage--or, perhaps, accelerate--the collapse of Arab cultural unity from the outside will be counterproductive. If the Arabic-derived vernaculars of Morocco, Lebanon, and Egypt ever attain the dignity of national languages, they'll have to do so on their own terms, within the contexts of the societies and polities which--Braude rightly notes--they would help define.

UPDATE (12:12 AM) : Matthew Yglesias reacts.

UPDATE (6:48 PM) : optimussven reacts.