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Language Choice and Romanization Online by Lebanese Arabic Speakers

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Language Choice and Romanization Online by Lebanese Arabic Speakers Treball de fi de màster Màster: Edició: Directors: Any de defensa: Col⋅lecció: Treballs de fi de màster Programa oficial de postgrau "Comunicació lingüística i mediació multilingüe" Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………..…4 2. Theoretical background………………………………………………………....6 2.1.Languages in Lebanon…………………………………………………...….6 2.2.Language choice online………………………………………………..……8 2.2.1. English…………………………………………………………..…..8 2.2.2. MSA…………………………………………………………..…….9 2.3.Romanization……………..………………………………………………..10 2.3.1. Romanization as an orthography…………………………………..10 2.3.2. Reasons for Romanization…………………………………………11 3. Informants……………………………………………………...………………14 4. Method…………………………………………………………………...…….15 5. Limitations……………………………………………………..........................17 6. Findings…………………………………………………………………..…....18 6.1.Language choice……………………………………………………..…….18 6.1.1. Emails and formal inquiries……………………………………..….18 6.1.2. Initiating contributions…………………………………………..….18 6.1.3. Responding contributions……………………………………….….19 6.1.4. Whatsapp……………………………………………………….…...20 6.2.Reasons for Romanization…………………………………………….…..22 6.3.The practice of Romanization……………………………………………..22 6.3.1. Phonology 6.3.1.1.Consonants………………………………………………….,...22 6.3.1.2. Vowels…………………………………………………….….23 6.3.2. Morphophonology………………………………………………....24 2 6.3.3. Morphology……………………………………………………….25 7. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….26 8. References…………………………………………………………………….28 3 ABSTRACT This paper investigates language use online by speakers of Lebanese Arabic, focusing in particular on their language choice in online contexts, and the Romanization of this variety of Arabic. Three Lebanese Arabic speakers with different linguistic backgrounds were interviewed, and samples of their online activities were collected and analysed. The findings show that the language choice of Lebanese Arabic speakers online generally resembles their offline linguistic practices and preferences, with Lebanese Arabic maintaining its informal character online in contrast with English and Standard Arabic, and displaying code-mixing among youth. The results also show that Romanization is inconsistent among speakers, and that one possible factor causing this inconsistency is the speaker's L2. Keywords: Lebanese Arabic, Computer-mediated communication, Romanization, Language choice 4 1. INTRODUCTION Computer-mediated communication (CMC henceforth) has been defined as "any communicative transaction that takes place by way of a computer" (McQuails, 2010). A significant amount of the research carried out on CMC focused on language and language use. While the majority of such research revolves around the English language, several studies have also been carried out on the use of Arabic online (Warschauer et al., 2002; Palfreyman & Khalil, 2003; Al-Tamimi & Gorgis, 2007; Yaghan, 2008; Daoudi, 2011, Farrag, 2012). This paper aims at describing language use on CMC by a small sample of speakers of a specific variety of Arabic, Lebanese Arabic (LA henceforth). In particular, it discusses language choice on CMC by LA speakers in the context of the multilingual Lebanese society, and the practice of LA Romanization (transliteration into the Latin alphabet) as an ad-hoc writing system that was originally developed for lack of supporting software for the Arabic script, but still prevails although technological advances have now eliminated the technical constraints that prevented its use formerly. With focus on two forms of CMC (social media website Facebook and mobile messaging application Whatsapp), the paper attempts to examine the contexts of use of one language or another, the reasons for the emergence and persistence of Romanization, and the linguistic aspects of the Romanization practice. Following an ethnographic approach based on Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, defined as "the analysis of logs of verbal interaction" (Herring, 2004), this paper examines language use online by three LA speakers of different linguistic backgrounds, based on interviews and samples of online activities. 5 The paper is structured as follows: a theoretical background on language choice and Romanization in Lebanon and elsewhere will first be provided, followed by a description of the informants and methodology. The findings will then be presented and analysed. 6 2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 2.1.Languages in Lebanon Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Arabic that belongs to the Levantine dialect, which is one of the four main Arabic dialects.1 It is the first language of some 4.5 million speakers. As an Arab country, a former French colony, and home to academic institutions and multinational corporations having English as the primary means of communication, Lebanon’s language scene is distinctly multilingual. This linguistic diversity originated in the period of Ottoman rule (between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries) when European missionaries started establishing schools in the country, then grew bigger during the two decades of French mandate, and later with the global rise of English use as the international lingua franca.2 Moreover, the educational system in Lebanese schools has played a major role in favouring multilingualism. By virtue of educational reforms introduced in 1994, Lebanese schools became constitutionally required to adopt a multilingual approach to learning, with the teaching of the first foreign language (usually French or English) starting at the beginning of schooling, and that of the second starting in the seventh grade at the most, (StateUniversity.com) with many schools opting to include the teaching of the latter in the curriculum at an earlier level. This multilingualism is manifested in LA mostly through code-mixing and code-switching, especially popular amongst youth. Moreover, despite the positioning of French throughout the last century as the second language of the majority of LA speakers, English is believed to be on the way to becoming the more dominant foreign language in the country (Shaaban & Gaith, 1999, Esseili, 2011). 1 The other three are: Mesopotamian Arabic, Peninsular Arabic, and Maghrebi Arabic. 2 See Shaaban (1997) for a more detailed historical overview of languages in Lebanon. 7 In addition to having English and French as "culture languages," Lebanon displays a case of diglossia for Arabic, like its Arab neighbours (Warschauer et al., 2002; Ibrahim, Taha, Abu- Dabbous, & Khatib, 2013). A diglossic situation is one in which a "high variety" of a language coexists with a "low variety", the former usually being reserved to formal and written settings, while the latter is widely used in informal situations and speech (Ferguson 1959, 1972). Thus, the official language of Arab states is the formal, "high variety" of Arabic, i.e. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA henceforth), which is used in educational, media, religious, and formal contexts. However, daily communication is carried out almost always in local dialects, which display significant phonological, syntactic, and semantic differences from MSA. Therefore, not only is MSA not spoken as a first language by any Arab population, but it may also be considered a foreign language "to some extent" for speakers of vernacular Arabic varieties (Ibrahim et al., 2013). The status of MSA as a foreign language for LA speakers is therefore rather plausible, especially taking into account the broad presence of two other foreign languages in the country that are typically learnt in formal educational settings simultaneously with MSA, but with much more focus placed on the former rather than the latter. In fact, in Lebanese schools, the overwhelming majority (77.2%) of the teaching process is done in French or English, while the minor part (22.8%) is carried out in MSA (Tarazi-Sahab and Moro, 2013). Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that a large number of the LA speakers who received formal education master MSA fairly well, naturally due to its similarities with LA, but also possibly due to the large exposure they have to MSA in non-educational settings, which may compensate to some degree for its secondary position in education. However, this is obviously not the case for speakers who have not received or completed basic formal education, as their exposure to MSA only through non-educational contexts is not sufficient to establish their good knowledge of the language. 8 2.2.Language Choice Online Multilingualism provides speakers with several language choices to employ for their communicative purposes at any moment, and this multitude of options extends to online practices on various CMC forms. However, language choice online is not only limited to determining the language(s) internet users opt for among the options available to them according to their linguistic background, but also encompasses the way they "negotiate their choice" in their online exchanges and practices (Lee, 2015, p.120), as well as the technologies and applications available to them in any given context. 2.2.1. English Previous research on language practices by multilingual individuals online has shown that English is widely used as the lingua franca among internet users who do not share the same first language (Durham, 2003; Lee, 2015), which shows that language choice online is "a key resource by which to bring together or separate various parts of the networked audience" (Androutsopoulos, 2014, p.71). However, in many cases, communities that do share the first language have also been found to conduct their online
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