Lebanese language
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The Lebanese Language is a proposed appellation for the spoken language of the people of Lebanon. The term has political connotations and is meant to distance the spoken language of Lebanon from the Arabic language. In linguistic and other academic circles, among most Arabic speakers, and among most Lebanese, the spoken language of Lebanon is called Lebanese Arabic and is considered an Arabic dialect belonging to the Levantine Arabic family of dialects. Attempts to dissociate the language from Arabic are generally associated with movements attesting a Lebanese identity apart from an Arab identity.
In addition to daily conversations, Lebanese is used in an extensive body of popular poetry, play production, popular music, television shows, and much more. Due to the huge media production in Lebanese, the language became instrumental in understanding the rest of the languages and dialects spoken in Palestine, Syria and Jordan.
The Lebanese language belongs to the Semitic family of languages that includes Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Related forms of this spoken language include the Palestinian Arabic dialects, the Coastal and Central Syrian Arabic dialects and some dialects of Jordanian Arabic to a lesser extent. The Lebanese language is an amalgamation of various languages that passed over Lebanon. It is a result of centuries of cumulative linguistic assimilations, thus is the state of every living language today.
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[edit] The First Pioneers
Saiid Akl was one of the first pioneers of the Lebanese Language. In one of his interviews, he claimed that the Arabic language is a dead language and that the natural linguistic development will eventually lead to the institutionalization of the Lebanese language. His views were based in a nationalistic ideological approach towards language. Even though his theory carries allot of weight, it was part of a larger political agenda for various groups, mainly Christian, who were seeking to distance themselves from the larger part of the Arab world. This association proved to be a drawback to the development of the Lebanese language for decades, since a sense of resentment was boiling between opposing political and militant groups in Lebanon during the period of the civil war. The subject became highly sensitive, and was attacked at every occasion as being a "christian phalangist" agenda directed towards the Lebanese Muslim communities that view themselves as part of the larger Arab world. The fact that two early pioneers of the Lebanese language were Muslims, Kamal Charabi and Nagib Jamalleddine. Yet this fact was not sufficient enough to overcome political rivalry between the Christian and the Muslim militiants.
[edit] The Dialects versus the MSA (Modern Standard Arabic)
The claim that the Arabic language is the mother tongue of all the Arab countries is highly debated, and highly disagreed upon subject. The formal classification of MSA in the Ethnologue is as follows:
[among Arabs] Modern Standard Arabic has 246,000,000 second language speakers. [It is] not a first language. [MSA is] used for education, official purposes, written materials, and formal speeches. [...MSA] is used for religion and ceremonial purposes, having archaic vocabulary. MSA is a modernized variety of Classical Arabic. In most Arab countries only the well educated have adequate proficiency in Standard Arabic, while over 100,500,000 do not.
Furthermore, in the January 17th, 2002 edition of The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard linguist Wheeler Thackston maintained that MSA remains the domain of newspapers not conversations:
"Arabs themselves speak a multiplicity of languages "which are downgraded to dialects, [but which] resemble [MSA] as much as Latin resembles English."[1]
The variety of the so called "Arabic dialects" that span from the Middle East to the North African shores do not satisfy the pre-requisite definition of dialects of the same tongue in that they are not mutually intelligible. Edward Said gives an example in one of his articles "THE LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE OR OF THE SCHOLARS?":
"As I grew up in a family whose spoken language was an amalgam of what was common in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria."
Said continues that:
"if I were to try to understand an Algerian I would get nowhere, so different and varied are the colloquials once one gets away form the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. The same would be true with an Iraqi, Moroccan or deep Gulf Dialect."[2]
Clearly demonstrating the unintelligibility of the so called various dialects of "Arabic".
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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