The Maghreb‐Mashreq language ideology and the politics of identity 
in a globalized Arab world¹

Abstract

To date, most scholarship on Arabic language ideologies has focused on the contentious relationship between Standard Arabic and the spoken vernaculars. This paper, in contrast, draws attention to the hierarchies among the regional varieties of vernacular Arabic. Specifically, it makes visible the workings of what it calls the ‘Maghreb‐Mashreq language ideology’: the hierarchical relationship between Mashreqi (Middle Eastern) and Maghrebi (North African) vernacular Arabic varieties. The paper explores, in particular, the de/authentication of linguistic Arabness through a detailed analysis of a transnational pan‐Arab reality/talent TV show. Drawing on clips of situated interactions from this series, which have been uploaded to YouTube and commented upon by viewers, the paper argues that the new media is a critical site for reworking longstanding language ideologies and the politics of identity in the Arabic‐speaking world.[Arabic]

Dialect and stance-taking by non-Egyptian celebrities in Egypt

“…It also concentrates on the struggle of access to linguistic resources as a reflection of a wider sense of national identity -that is, it correlates identity with access to linguistic and meta-linguistic resources by analysing novel sources of data. Indeed, the role of competing dialects across the Arab world remains underexplored (see Hachimi 2013).…”

Arabic interdialectal encounters: Investigating the influence of attitudes on language accommodation

“…The EA speaker's insistence in questioning the word ata:j (tea) (lines 12, 14, 16, 18) and its relationship to the SA word ʃa:j (tea) is a means of justifying his attitude that MA is incomprehensible. This is at the core of the contention between speakers of Mashreqi and Maghrebi dialects, as the relationship between the Maghrebi dialects and SA are questioned (Hachimi, 2013;S'hiri, 2002). The MA speaker's divergence in this extract is intended to rebalance the power asymmetry among the participants.…”

“…Another additional factor behind Mashreqis' expectation of accommodation could be attributed to the increasingly mediatized nature of the Arab world, where the role of the media reinforces these linguistic hierarchies by imbuing Mashreqi dialects with more status (S'hiri, 2002;Miller, 2005;Hachimi, 2013). In interdialectal encounters, be they in the diaspora or in the Arab world, Mashreqi speakers draw directly on the status of their varieties and are the recipients of accommodative practices.…”

Do you speak Arabic? Managing axes of adequation and difference in pan-Arab talent programs

“…At the same time, other forms of Arabic have persisted and derived their own forms of prestige (Haeri, 1997(Haeri, , 2003. Arabs have historically marked sociolinguistic distinctions through a variety of classification paradigms, or axes of differentiation that include nation, state, regional, and social registers: 1) Arab nation (al-ʕumma al-ʕarabiyya) versus some Other (Turks, Europeans, Berbers, Armenians, Persians), and which does not equate to the Muslim nation (al-ʕumma al-ʕisl amiyya) since it includes Christian, Jewish, and non-Sunni Muslim Arabic speakers as well (Suleiman, 2003:6-15); 2) supraregional forms: Maghreb as Arab West (primarily Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco), Mashreq as Arab East (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine) at times including or excluding Egypt, and Khalij as the Arab Gulf, which also either includes or distinguishes Iraq (Hachimi, 2013:270, Holes, 2004:47, Theodoropoulou and Tyler, 2014; 3) urban-rural divides: badaw ı Arabic glossed by some as rural or tribal and subdivided into nomadic vs. village agriculturalists, and urban had _ ar ı Arabic at times indexed as civilized, sedentary (Bassiouney, 2009:19); 4) postcolonial national varieties: Egyptian, Tunisian, Iraqi, Saudi (Bassiouney, 2010;Suleiman, 2011:51-52); 5) intra-national isoglosses within a state: Fessi (from Fez), Casawi (western Moroccan), Marrakeshi (from Marrakesh), and Shamali (northern) within Morocco (Hachimi, 2012, see Haeri, 1997 for the Egyptian context); 6) socioeconomic and educational registers such as ʕarab ız ı (mixed Arabic and English), ʕarnasiyya (mixed Arabic and French), fus _ h _ a (Modern Standard Arabic), street talk (alfahl aw ıya, shaʕb ıya, hadra dzanqa), and polite speech (Bassiouney, 2012:129, Miller, 2012:180-182, Suleiman, 2004.…”

“…Other scholars recognized the role of vernacular Arabics in news and entertainment programming (Al Batal, 2007;Holes, 2005). More recent analyses observed Maghrebi speakers adopting Eastern Arabics in asymmetrical convergence (Shiri, 2007;Hachimi, 2013). In each instance the focus was on accommodation along a single axis of differentiation: MSA vs. vernaculars, Maghrebi vs. Mashreqi, Bahraini Shi'a vs. Gulf Sunni.…”