Sunday, March 31, 2019

Final r-cluster metathesis in one child's French

My favourite 4-year-old is doing something very interesting these days with final consonant clusters in his French. Many word-final consonant clusters starting with R get metathesised: parle (speaks) becomes [palʀ] (yet parler "to speak" remains [paʀle]), tourne (turn) becomes [tunʀ], herbe (grass) becomes [ebʀ], ferme (close) becomes [femʀ]. On the other hand, "porte" (door) remains [pɔʀt]; regarde (look!) [ʀəgaʀd]; "force" (strength) [fɔʀs]; "mars" (March) [maʀs], "parc" (park) [paʀk]. Presumably the phenomenon is related to sonority: {l, n, m, b} metathesise, {t, d, s, k} do not. But French allows word-final consonant clusters with falling or rising sonority, and he has no trouble with words like "monstre" (monster) [mõstʀ]. Any idea if this is typical in French first language acquisition?

Nothing of the sort happens in his English or his Arabic. Then again, his English is non-rhotic anyway for some reason, and in Arabic he pronounces /r/ as [ʕ]; French is the only one of his languages where he's got the pronunciation of rhotics more or less sorted.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Ga3 c'est que ga3!

Among the many responses to recent events in Algeria circulating on Facebook, a particularly linguistically interesting one caught my eye:
His Excellency the People
orders:
"Throw 'em all out!"
That means all!
Million Man March of Friday 29 March
Peaceful, Popular, National, Civilised

The first two lines and the last two are in Fusha (Standard Arabic); the two middle lines are very much in Darja ("dialectal" Algerian Arabic). The clash of registers produces an amusing effect. But even more striking is the first word of the fourth line: سيك sik. You'll search for it in vain in Arabic dictionaries, or even in Algerian Arabic dictionaries (they do exist) printed before, oh, 2000 or so; it's a word from French - well, in French it's three words - c'est que, literally "it is that..." In French, this structure is used to mark sentence focus. You can find examples of it being used that way in Algerian Arabic too, eg in Lotfi DK's "Aar alikoum": "المشكلة فهذ البشر سيك في راسهم كاين لحجر" [The problem with these people is that there are rocks in their heads]. But that's obviously not quite what's going on here, though. I haven't come across this construction often enough to have a good sense of all its uses, but it seems to be gaining new functions as it becomes integrated into the wider system of information structure marking in Darja.

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Kabyle-Arabic code-switching

One of the great understudied subjects in North African linguistics is Berber-Arabic codeswitching (unlike French-Arabic and French-Berber codeswitching, which are massively overstudied); among the few references available are Kossmann 2014, for a central Moroccan community, and Hamza 2007, for Tunisia. A video from "Nass Bejaia" that's been circulating on social media might seem to provide a promising data source for this: in an eloquent plea against efforts to divide and conquer by setting ethnic groups against each other, the speaker alternates fluent Darja [Algerian Arabic] and Kabyle [Berber] to convey his message to both groups. What better context for code-switching? But, surprisingly enough, there is almost no insertional code-switching, almost no embedded language islands. About the only example is (Kabyle in bold, Arabic underlined):
makanš la d aqbayli, la d aɛeṛbi, la d amẓabi, la d annayli, la d attargi, ula ma... yji waħəd məlkamrun ysəggəm ldzayər nqululu mərħba bik.

There is no Kabyle, no Arab, no Mozabite, no Naili, no Tuareg, even if... there comes someone from Cameroon who would fix Algeria, we'll tell him welcome!

Even here, the second shift comes after an audible pause, and it's probably no coincidence that all the Kabyle elements of this sentence except ula ma are immediately comprehensible to Arabic speakers; even copular d is widely used in Jijel and Bejaia, though unfamiliar elsewhere (and la is ambiguous, used in both languages, which probably facilitates the first shift). Otherwise, the language shifts are rather consistently at phrase boundaries, as in the sentence that follows the previous:

yji waħəd mənnižir, waħəd məḷḷalmạn, lɛaslama

Someone comes from Niger, someone from Germany, welcome.

or as in this later sentence (French in red):

Anda ara aɣ terrem? Wac, ad ɛawdeɣ? Lukan par exemple - Ya xawti, ya xawti, had əlmisaž muhimm židdan məbjaya, makanš əljihawiyya.

Where are you taking us? What, should I say it again? If for example - Brothers, brothers, this message is extremely important from Bejaia: No regionalism!

Sometimes the same content is repeated in both languages successively, sometimes it's left in only one language, but in general, any one phrase should be perfectly comprehensible to a monolingual. It remains to be studied whether this is typical of Kabyle-Arabic code-switching, or just a fact about this short clip.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Protest songs 3: Frs Wld El3lmA

The most sociolinguistically interesting protest song that I've come across since the last post is also among the earliest (28 February): Frs Wld El3lmA's Az-Zawja Al-Khamisa (The Fifth Wife), a heavily underlined (and quite sexist) parable of Algerian history over the past 30 years introduced with وأي تشابه مع الواقع فهو مقصود بشكل متعمد... جدا "Any resemblance to reality is intended deliberately... very deliberately". He then launches into the lyrics - the Arabic is already given as subtitles in the video, so I'll just provide translations... (If you're more interested in the sociolinguistics than in the politics, just skim the lyrics and go to the paragraph that follows.)
In a rich town, whose fortune was plentiful,
There was a Bedouin girl, with an interesting body,
Honeyed eyes and silken hair,
Very romantic; many sought her hand.
Rich and poor competed for her,
Doctors and directors raced each other to visit her family.
They betrayed each other, hated each other, envied each other, conspired against each other,
They withdrew, came to blows, fought each other, made war on each other,
On the pure earth flowed conscience's blood
In total Ignorance (jahiliyya) died young children
Blood flowed and women were raped
The building was destroyed when the skies turned black
And blood flowed from those neglected quarries
With the eyes of the bereaved, the widows, the pregnant...
So that the town would not vanish in the process,
They offered up the beautiful one as a sacrifice to the prince.
Its prince was a migrant, returned from far away
With experience and wisdom and promises and threats.
He made a truce among the people of the great town
And said: "Marry me to the little princess,
So I can finish the trajectory and continue the process
So we can completely destroy this dangerous conflict (fitna)."
He married the second one according to the town's law
And changed its sacred book with fabrications
And spread around its money to keep everyone quiet
And shook up its situation so that the herd would bow down
And said: "Our religion, and it is obligatory to obey it,
Has always made licit a third and fourth wife."
He married the third one, his hair already turning grey,
And [???]
So he admitted that it was time for him to go away,
"So take up the torch, our dear youth -"
But suddenly, a deceptive blow!
The old man is capable of marrying a fourth wife.
A fourth wife? My God! How shall he enter unto her?
He is a decrepit old man, he shall not touch her hand!
A bride, fresh, soft, virginal, timid,
To be handed to an senile man with no manhood
While her family watch silently
And no groom arises among them to protect her;
As if the beloved town had become barren
Bringing forth only females or pseudo-males.
After the wedding, the old man slept a deep sleep
And the bride was lost in the continuation of life.
Who here would protect her, who defend her?
At night, in the bed, he would slink towards her...
The old man wasn't dead, no, the old man wasn't dead
And his gang were enslaving all those who stayed quiet.
Meanwhile, a beautiful new bride grew up,
And the time for her wedding drew near.
Where is her new groom? Come on, men,
Come on up, come on up, get ready for the tournament,
For the old man has become like a dry stalk
And everyone says the sacred law forbids a fifth wife.
But then they brought out to them a letter from the void,
In the handwriting of an old man, signed in ink and pen:
"The sacred law forbids a fourth wife who is a free woman,
But we are in a town, not in Algeria.
You have accepted to become like slaves around me;
Therefore, your daughter is - a slave-girl."
A slave-girl!
After this extended, elaborate, emo parable, he adds an afterword for anyone dense enough not to have gotten it yet:
روينا لكم القصة بالفصحى، لأن الفصحى لغة الأدب. لا تضطرونا باش نحكيوهالكم بالدارجة. في هاذاك الوقت، يا سعدو لي هرب.
"We have narrated to you this story in Fusha [Standard Arabic], because Fusha is the language of literature/politeness. Do not force us [shifts to Darja] to tell it to you in Darja [Algerian Arabic]. At that point, happy* the man that has fled!"

The chants of the demonstrators follow, shouting in chorus: ماكانش الخامسة يا بوتفليقة! "No fifth term, Bouteflika!"

While sociolinguistics is hardly the intended point, the sociolinguistic message comes across just as loud and clear as the political one. Fusha is the language of carefully planned literary compositions, where all the arts of parable and metaphor can be deployed to provide a figleaf of deniability when the censors come along; in Darja, you tell it like is, and it hits hard. As previously, this pair of stereotypes is not to be confused with a fact about the world: Darja even has a dedicated verb for speaking in pointed allusions, يمعني ymaʕni, and the practice of doing so is a core linguistic competence, especially essential for women but admired in men too, and seen as necessary in order to convey criticism without creating grudges and worsening conflicts. Then again, doing so relies extensively on proverbs which, if still Darja, are often far removed from the language of everyday speech; in a sense, resorting to Fusha is a natural extension of that approach. Be that as it may, the trope of Fusha as the language of circumlocution versus Darja as the language of straight talk is out there, familiar enough to every reader to make his invocation of it here rhetorically very effective.


* Is سعدو here a pun on Said [Bouteflika], the president's brother, widely thought to be pulling the strings? I suspect so...

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

"I don't speak Arabic, this is in our Darja"

This little clip, of sociolinguistic as well as non-linguistic interest, has gone viral in the Algerian online world (via Twitter):

The reporter, from Sky News Arabia*, is smoothly unrolling premature platitudes in Standard Arabic - الجزائريون يهنّئون بعضهم بما تحقّق إلى حدّ الآن يقولون "the Algerians are congratulating each other on what has been achieved up to now, saying..." when a somewhat inebriated-looking man pops into the frame (despite his companion's best efforts to stop him) and starts trying to address the camera. She very reasonably pushes him back off camera, then thinks better of it and decides to turn the intrusion into an impromptu vox pop. He says, making absolutely no effort at all to adjust his dialect towards any sort of externally imposed norm (the only word he takes from Standard Arabic is مُقتَنِعين "satisfied", presumably quoting the reporter):

ماكاش منها، ماناش مُقتَنِعين ڨاعيتيك باه تغيّر نحّاو پيو وعاودوا داروا پيو واحد أوخر، يتنحّاو ڨاع! That's baloney, we're not satisfied at all. To change, they took away a pawn and put on a different pawn again - they should all get taken away!

Knowing that her largely Middle Eastern target audience (not to mention her bosses) won't be able to understand this - especially not the French loanword pion, pawn - she tells him, in colloquial Algerian Arabic, to speak "عرْبيّة" (Arabic). He dismisses this with the classic line:

مانعرفش عربية، هاذي هي الدّارجة تاعنا I don't know Arabic, this is our Darja [colloquial].

The contrast being drawn there between "Arabic" and "Darja", striking as it is, should not be overstated. It was obvious from context that she was using "Arabic" to mean Standard Arabic or at least something a bit closer to it, and he ran with that; but in another context, he or any other speaker would use "عرْبيّة" (Arabic) to refer to Darja, as in the old joke about the Egyptian trying to buy stamps at an Algerian post office. (He asks for Standard Arabic "طابع بريدي" and gets nowhere; when the postmaster eventually figures out what he wants, he shouts "قول تامبر، ماتعرفش العربية؟" - "Say timbre - don't you even know Arabic?")

But it's still worth thinking about why this little video has struck such a chord. Part of the answer, I think, is that it resonates so perfectly with a whole set of stereotypes about Darja vs. Fusha [Standard Arabic]. Fusha is for parroting the official line; Darja is for telling it like it is. Fusha is for fluent, well-planned speech; Darja is off-the-cuff and from the heart. Fusha is for upwardly mobile women; Darja, for working-class men. None of these are truths about the world, obviously - you can be every bit as dishonest or premeditated in Darja as in Fusha (ask s'hab el kachir:), and fluent Fusha is no guarantee you won't find yourself hefting bricks for a living. But they are perceptions that emerge naturally from the regimented, restricted contexts in which Fusha is learned and required. If these stereotypes remind you of Glasgow or the East End, that's no coincidence; they emerge naturally in the context of urban diglossia.

Monday, March 11, 2019

More Algerian protest songs

A whole bunch more protest songs are emerging, as singers ride the wave. I don't think any of them have the kind of reach that La Casa d'El Mouradia does, but they should help counterbalance the Algiers-centrism of the previous post...

From the eastern plateau, in Chaoui (Berber), we have Sami Youress' "Ulac n cinquième" (No fifth term). Now I speak some Siwi, and a bit of Kabyle, but no Chaoui, so I wouldn't be able to translate this without the helpful subtitles, and my transcription is probably wrong in parts, but it starts:


Ulac ulac ulac, ulac n cinquième No no no, no fifth term,
Neṣbeṛ εecrin sna, temlim-aneɣ s imezgan We've waited twenty years, you've loaded us with problems.
Monsieur le Président ṛuḥ Ṛebbi ad yeεfu fell-ak Mr. President, go, God have mercy on you,
Ugir gg ubrid nnek, awid id-ek ayetma-k Go on your way, and take your brothers with you.
Agdud ad yeqqaṛ-ak εecrin sna bzayed fell-ak The people tell you twenty years is too much for you,
Ddzayer tamurt nneɣ ur teɣrid c sɣer baba-k / Algeria is our country, you didn't get it from your father.
Ddzayer tamurt nnek macci d elwert n baba-k. Algeria is your country, not your paternal inheritance.

Prominent opposition rapper Lotfi DK, from further east in Annaba, rose to the occasion as expected with Bandiyya (Bandits); there are whole theses on his oeuvre (well, at least one) so I won't devote too much effort to it here, but here's a short excerpt:


الشعب كرهكُم يا الكلاب The people are fed up with you, you dogs,
عشرين سنة بزّاف Twenty years is too much,
جمعنا أزمات البلاد باعوها في المزاد We've gathered crises, they've sold the country at auction,
البلاد رقّاسات ولبسات راهو زاد The country is dancers and costumes, it's gotten worse,
والرّئيس فلابوسات مانعرف مات ولاّ مازال And the President is in a stroller, don't know if he's dead or not yet...

Down in the Sahara in Adrar, a band calling themselves Gsariyine came up with their own take, with interestingly savvy lyrics as well as an unexplained goat:


واش بغيتوا فينا ضركا What do you want of us now?
البلاد راهي في غرقة The country is drowning;
انتُم عاطينها للسرقة You're handing it over to theft
والشعب خصروا النفقة And the people have lost the spending.
بغيتوا تزيدوا لينا عُهدة You want to impose on us another term
باش تديروا الزردة So you can have a party
تدخّلونا في هردة And get us in a mess
وتلعبوا فوقنا الروندة And play hopscotch all over us;
بلادي، c'est le moment - My country, it's the time
باش الشعب يتكلّموا For the people to speak up
ونكونوا يد واحدة And we'll be [as] one hand
ونبلّعوا للظالم فُمّهُ And close the wrongdoer's* mouth.
إيلا هوما ما حشموا If they have no shame,
حنايا نكونوا نفهموا We'll still understand
ونكونوا حضاريين And we'll be civilized
باش مبعد مانندموش So we don't regret it later.
في هاد اللخضة خصّنا نكونوا سلميين At this moment we must be nonviolent,
باش مايضحكوش علينا الُخرين So that "others" don't laugh at us.

And, moving back to the Algiers area for completeness, some sort of anonymous/Anonymous group came up with a catchy chaabi/country song. It ends:


إذا ادّاوا هاذ العُهدة If they get this term,
ما بقى في الدزاير قعدة No more staying in Algeria;
تتباع في سوق الخُردة It'll be up for sale in the flea market.
افّظنوا يا لا جوناس Wake up, youth,
ولّينا عرّة فالاجناس We've become the laughingstock[?] of peoples,
قولوا هاذ المرّة خلاص Say: This time it's enough.

I assume there are similar songs coming out in the west, and surely in Kabyle, but none of them have crossed my path; if you find any, let me know!


* Corrected following comment on Twitter.

Thursday, March 07, 2019

Some Algerian protest songs

What's going on right now in Algeria is fascinating - and difficult to get a full sense of from abroad even if you speak Arabic and French, let alone if you're relying on English-language media. The lyrics of the protest movements - whether composed for the occasion or just reused for it - may offer some interesting perspectives. Unfortunately this brief selection can't claim any particular representativity; these are just a couple of apparently popular ones that have crossed my path.

Starting with what a Marxist might call the urban proletariat of Algiers, we have a USMA football fans' song which outlines the basic issue:

ساعات للفجر وماجاني نوم Hours to dawn and I still haven't slept,
راني نكونصومي غير بالشوية I'm taking drugs, but only little by little;
اشكون السبة واشكون نلوم Who's the cause, who should I blame?
ملّينا المعيشة هاديّا We're fed up* with this life.

في الاّولى نقولوا جازت In the first [presidential term], we'd say it's fine;
حشاوهالنا بالعشرية They filled our heads with the decade [of civil war].
في التانية الحكاية بانت In the second, the story became clear -
لا كاسا دالمورادية La Casa d'El Mouradia [the Presidential residence].
في التالتة البلاد شيانت In the third, the country got thin
بالمصالح الشخصية thanks to private interests...
في الرابعة الپوپيّة ماتت In the fourth, the doll died [ie the president became too unwell to appear in public]
ومازالت القضيّة And the situation continued.

[chorus again]

والخامسة راهي تسويڥي And the fifth is following on,
بيناتهُم راي مبنية It's been set up between them;
والپاصي راو آرشيڥي And the past is archived,
لاڥوا تاع الحرُّيّة The voice of freedom.
ڥيراجنا الهدرة پريڥي Our corner** is [a place for] private talk,
يعرفوه كي يتقيّا They know it/him when he vomits;
مدرسة ولازم سيڥي A school where you need a CV,
بيرو محو الأمّيّة An anti-illiteracy office.
[x2]
[chorus]
Looking at this as a linguist, there's an interesting contrast between the first and second stanzas; the first is basically in normal Algerian Arabic, but the second uses some very striking French loanwords - some imposed by the rhyme in -ivi, several not. For discussion of similar stylistic devices in medieval Andalusi poetry and late 20th century Algerian rai, see Davies and Bentahila 2008.

Moving on towards the more rah-rah end of the scale, we have "Win Win Win", showing obvious Middle Eastern influence in its form and substantial Standard Arabic influence in its Algerian Arabic. It starts:


وين وين وين؟ وين بيها وين؟ Where where where? Where with it, where?
وين وين وين؟ وين رانا رايحين؟ Where where where? Where are we going?
عيبنا فاح وطننا راح ضاع بين الرجلين، Our shame has festered, our homeland is gone, lost between the legs;
دمنا ساح والمشعل طاح، ماصابش اليدّين، Our blood has flowed, the torch has fallen, it found no hands [to carry it];
ضحّكتو علينا الاجناس وراكو فرحانين You've made the peoples laugh at us, and you're happy about it.

جزاير أرض الحُرّيّة ماتوا عليها رجال Algeria is the land of freedom, for which men have died.
رجال ونسا حاربوا بالنية وجابوا الاستقلال Men and women fought with right intention and brought independence.
ادّيتو الحُكْم بالبُندُقية خُنتوهم يا انذال You people took power at gunpoint and betrayed them, you wretches;
باسم الشرعية الثورية خلفتوا الاحتلال In the name of revolutionary legitimacy you succeeded the occupation.
On the more hipster/"lachichi" end, Jidal showcases a group of artists from Algiers working together to make a worthy but rather forced protest song, guitars, dreadlocks, melodramatic handcuffs and all. The lyrics are mainly in Algerian Arabic, with a stanza or two in Berber, but the refrain is in French ("Libérez l'Algérie", Free Algeria).

يمّا كتّريلنا الدعاوي Mother, pray for us a lot,
ولادك راهُم خارجين Your sons are going out
يمشيوا على الحُرّيّة To walk for freedom***;
يمّا ولادك متحضّرين Mother, your sons are acting civilised,
طالبين ديمُقراطية Asking for democracy -
هاك الورْد زيد الياسمين Here are roses, throw in jasmine - [demonstrators have been giving roses to the police]
في مسيرة سلمية In a peaceful demonstration
عالتغيير معوّلين Bent on change.
الشعب est libéré - The people is free,
Libérez l'Algérie; - Free Algeria;
Libérez, libérez, - Free, free,
Libérez l'Algérie. - Free Algeria.

* Edited: was "tired".
** Edited, thanks to Imad's comment.
*** Fixed.