Globalization in the Periphery: Arabization and the Changing Status of Siwi Berber in the Oasis of Siwa

Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Article

Globalization in the periphery: Arabization and the changing status of Siwi Berber in the oasis of Siwa

Valentina Serreli

Abstract New media and communication technologies, heritage tourism and new reproductions of local identity are forms of globalization characteristic of the peripheries (Wang, Spotti, Juffermans, Kroon, Cornips and Blommaert, 2014:30). This article discusses some effects of globalization in a peripheral area of Egypt, where relative isolation delayed Arabization and favoured the maintenance of the indigenous Berber language, called Siwi. Globali- zation materialized in important socioeconomic changes that affected the linguistic attitudes and practices of the oasis dwellers. Following Milroy’s (1980) social network approach and Gumperz’ (1982) further elaboration, it is argued that such variation is not related to socioeconomic changes directly but connected to the structural variation of the community’s social network they provoked. Based on qualitative attitudinal data collected through interviews and participant observation, the study shows that although Egyptian Arabic is widespread and acquires prestige, Siwi not only remains a strong marker of group solidarity but is also becoming a symbol of the Siwan identity.

KEYWORDS: SIWI BERBER, EGYPTIAN ARABIC, MINORITY LANGUAGE, GLOBALIZATION, MULTILINGUALISM, SIWA OASIS (EGYPT)

Afﬁliation

University of Bayreuth, Germany email: [email protected]

1 Introduction

This article discusses the changing sociolinguistic status of Siwi and Arabic in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, arguing that such variation follows the change in the structure of the community’s social network provoked by the advent of globalization. Globalization is characterized by processes through which ‘people in their everyday socio-cultural and socio-linguistic practices form relations across multiple networks […] that while locally situated involve connections with phenomena occurring at higher, translocal scale-levels, and have effects at all scale-levels involved’ (Wang, Spotti, Juffermans, Kroon, Cornips and Blommaert, 2014:25). These processes concern the entire world, but their distribution depends on the degree of availability and accessibility of ‘infrastructures of globalization’, that is, ‘instruments enabling connections between purely local events and translocal processes, patterns and developments’ (Wang, Spotti, Juffermans, Kroon, Cornips and Blommaert, 2014:29). Therefore, as central and peripheral areas are characterized by unequal access to infrastructures of globalization, peripheral areas might have only partial access to specific ones. Wang, Spotti, Juffermans, Kroon, Cornips and Blommaert (2014:30) argue that new media and communication technologies, the emergence of new forms of economic activity, and new (re)pro- ductions of local identity formations are infrastructures favouring globalization in peripheral areas. This paradigm is useful to describe the present case study, because these three processes correspond to the transformation of the society that represented the advent of globalization in the oasis of Siwa, namely: a major circulation of knowledge due to the massive presence of televisions and access to the Internet; the diversification of the economy; and a new awareness and understanding of group identity. Milroy (1980) pointed out the key role of social networks in processes of language variation and change. She defined social networks as ‘the informal social relationships contracted by an individual’ (1980:174), and argued that social networks characterized by density and multiplexity ‒ that is, where a great number of individuals are linked to each other and are linked in several ways ‒ favour the maintenance of vernacular norms; in contrast, the weakening of these ties can create the possibility of language change. In multilingual contexts, a dense and multiplex network supports low-status languages and, on the contrary, in a weaker network the group’s sense of distinctiveness diminishes and the dominant variety is perceived as more advantageous (Milroy, 2002). In other words, as argued by Gumperz (1982), the continuation or variation of linguistic practices depends on the preservation or variation of the density and multiplexity of interpersonal networks, even when the dynamics of social change are affecting the community.

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After presenting very succinctly the sociolinguistics of the Arabic-speaking world, and of Egypt more specifically, the article presents the current sociolinguistic situation of Siwa Oasis, pointing out the emergence, among specific brackets of the population, of new attitudes and practices that are connected to the new values and meanings acquired by the Siwi and the Arabic varieties. Based on qualitative data collected through interviews and participant observation (see section 3.1), the article accounts for the socioeconomic changes produced by globalization and the transformation they have induced in the community’s social network, and it argues that the modification of the quantity and quality of members’ interaction, that is, their interpersonal networks, significantly affects the oasis dwellers’ attitudes towards and use of Siwi and Arabic. The study shows that within the space of the oasis, although Egyptian Arabic is widespread and acquires prestige, Siwi not only remains a strong marker of group solidarity but is becoming more than ever a symbol of Siwan identity.

2 Arabic and non-Arabic languages in the Arab world

2.1 Non Arabic languages in the Arab world A number of non-Arabic languages are spoken by indigenous groups within the Arab world. Among the biggest and most transnational ethnolinguistic groups are Berbers in North Africa; Kurdish, Armenian and Aramaic speakers in the Middle East; and the speakers of the Modern South Arabian languages in the Arabian Peninsula. Regardless of their demographic weight, these languages have the status of minority languages, because Modern Standard Arabic enjoys greater prestige and has official status. This follows the policies of Arabization1 pursued by Arab countries after independence, to the detriment of the non-Arabic languages spoken within the borders, because the presence of other languages besides Arabic was considered a threat to national and pan-Arab unity (Miller, 2003). So far, only Berber in Morocco and Algeria, and Kurdish in Iraq, have become official languages alongside Arabic. Let us focus on the case of Berber. Berber belongs to the Afroasiatic language family. This is a close-knit language family, whose sub-classification is debated. Kossmann (2013:19) distinguishes ten major blocks of Berber varieties, with internal divisions. Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa. They are found in the countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria, with high percentages in Morocco, Algeria, Niger and Mali (Chaker, 2008:2). The political treatment of the Berber language has varied from one country to another. The multilingual Saharan states of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso officially treat it as a national language (Kossmann, 2013:29). In the Arab

234 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES countries, while it has not been an issue for countries where Berbers represent a small minority of the population, such as Mauritania, Tunisia and Egypt (Koss- mann, 2013:29), in Ghaddafi’s Libya the Berber language was banned from public life altogether (Kohl, 2014). In Morocco and Algeria, Berbers suffered denial and neglect for a long time; it was only after decades of popular struggles that the language achieved legal recognition. In Morocco, Berber has been an official language alongside Arabic since the 2011 Constitution, while in Algeria the status of national and official language is claimed for Berber in the draft constitution of January 2016. Within the climate of claiming linguistic rights and identity awareness-raising, Berbers have chosen to call themselves ‘Imazighen’ and their language ‘Tamazight’ (although the term ‘Amazigh’ is often used inter- changeably). In 1995 the Amazigh associations and the Amazighs of the diaspora founded the Amazigh World Congress, an international organization whose purpose is to uphold the rights of the Amazigh people. Arabic/Berber bilingualism is widespread in the Maghreb, but it is generally asymmetrical, as most Berbers usually speak Arabic besides their mother tongue, while Arabs do not usually learn Berber, except in specific areas where Berber is the language of the local daily routine (El-Kirat, 2006; Kossmann, 2013; Sayahi, 2014). According to Kossmann (2013), the asymmetry is ascribed to Berber’s failure to expand in new domains, that is, to become suitable for the new contexts of use created by urbanization and mass education.

2.2 The sociolinguistic situation of Egypt Egypt is an almost homogeneous Arabic-speaking country. Egyptians conceptualize the sociolinguistic situation of their country in terms of the opposition between al-luġa al-ʿarabīyya al-fuṣḥā and al-ʿāmmiyya (Kebede, Kindt and Høigilt, 2013:67–69; Suleiman, 2013), the latter being a cover term indicating non-standard Arabic varieties in general. However, dialect diversification and hierarchies are very significant, especially the distinction between the urban Lower Egyptian dialects (especially Cairene) and the Upper Egyptian dialects (ṣaʿīdi), which form the basis for widespread stereotypes. Cairene has a status of ‘non- standard standard’; it enjoys the greatest prestige and is considered soft, elegant, modern and more beautiful than other dialects spoken in the country, while ṣaʿīdi is often associated with rurality and therefore stigmatized (Haeri, 1996; Miller, 2005). Bedouin dialects, on the other hand, enjoy prestige, according to a long- standing pan-Arab ideology that considers them the purest among dialects and the closest to Classical Arabic, and for representing tribal affiliation and the survival of traditional social structures despite urbanization (Miller, 2007:6).

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Some non-Arabic minority languages are spoken in Egypt, among which are Siwi, Beja, and Nubi. Siwi is spoken by the Berbers of the oasis of Siwa in the Western Desert; Beja is spoken by the Bishariyin in the Eastern Desert south of Aswan; and Nubian is spoken in the southernmost part of Egypt, close to the Sudanese border (Miller, 1996; Wilmsen and Woidich, 2007). At present, these communities are almost completely bilingual: Arabic is widespread and dominant in written and formal domains, and it shares the spoken and informal domains with the local languages. The sole ofﬁcial language of the state is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), as ratiﬁed in Article 2 of the most recent Egyptian Constitution (2014),2 which echoes the previous ones issued in 2012 and in 1971. Neither non-standard Arabic nor non-Arabic languages are recognized by the Egyptian Constitution. After the neglect that characterized the Mubarak era, and despite the fact that the Constitution of 2014 promises the protection of cultural pluralism (Article 50) and condemns linguistic discrimination (Article 53), Egypt still lacks an adequate system for protecting minority rights (Zuhur, 2014). Several foreign languages are spoken in Egypt, and English has a special place. Brought by the British colonizer, who promoted it alongside French in the educational system (Shraybom Shivtiel, 1999), the English language has almost displaced French and has become the most important foreign language in Egypt (Wilmsen and Woidich, 2007). Upper-class Egyptians prefer to send their children to foreign-language schools, mostly English (Haeri, 1996), but English is spread across all brackets of the population, together with other imported goods and practices (ranging from fast foods to clothes and music), because it is ‘the primary vehicle of the world’s commerce, science, technology, computer activity, electronics, media, popular culture and entertainment’ (McArthur, 2002:450; cited in Albirini, 2016:41). In other words, Egyptians value English for its association with the globalized economy and culture of which they seek to be a part, and for its instrumentality. It has more or less become a requirement in the private job market and, according to a recent attitudinal study, Egyptians consider it the most important language their children must learn in order to secure a better future (Kebede, Kindt and Høigilt, 2013:127–128).

3 Case study: Siwi Berber

3.1 Methodological considerations This study is part of doctoral research conducted in Siwa Oasis (Serreli, 2016). Falling into the ﬁeld of folk linguistics (Niedzielsky and Preston, 2000), it sought to portray the sociolinguistics of the oasis, based on the study of speakers’ language attitudes and ideologies.

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A qualitative approach was chosen, and data was gathered between 2013 and 2015 through a combined method that included both interviews (direct approach) and participant observation (‘anthropological-cultural approach’; Preston, 2011:18). Participant observation proved very fruitful, because building a rapport of trust with the informants and participating in the community’s daily life provided a key for understanding the local contextualizations and the opportunity to observe the informants’ linguistic behaviour in context. The ethnographic data provided background knowledge of paramount importance for both the conduct of the interviews and the analysis of the data; furthermore, it is significant for providing a complete account of Siwan life, made possible because, as a female researcher, I could have access to both the women’s and men’s contexts of a community characterized by strict gender separation. Interviews were informal and formal. Informal interviews are unrecorded conversations that were not planned but whose subject is consistent with the formal interviews. Formal interviews are recorded and imply the participants’ awareness of the subject being discussed and the purpose of the interview. Sixty- one interviews were recorded; being adapted to each interviewee, they are semi- structured or unstructured, depending on the degree of the interviewer’s control, and their length varies between five minutes and two hours. Interviews gathered the interviewee’s overt comments about languages, about his and others’ behaviour, his awareness of and positioning towards extra-linguistic phenomena (e.g. the social change undergone by the oasis) and feelings of local, national or ethnic belonging. The interviewees are both people with whom I established a rapport before the interview and people who were first met for that purpose. They are male (3/4) and female (1/4), aged between 9 and 70 years, and their educational background varies from uneducated to PhDs. Three-quarters of the interviewees are native Siwi speakers; the remaining are native speakers of Bedouin or Egyptian Arabic. The interviews were mostly conducted in Egyptian Arabic; three interviews were conducted in English. All the interviews were transcribed in Word without the help of assistants. One reason is that female interviewees allowed me to record their voices and use the content of the interviews, provided the audio file was not to be published or shared with anybody else. However, due to the presence of personal anecdotes in some of them, I decided to transcribe by myself all the interviews for privacy reasons, considering that in a small community like Siwa the people I was familiar with were mostly known and their voices and stories could hardly stay anonymous. The interviews’ data was analysed following the grounded theory approach (Bernard, 2006:492). Developed in sociology by Glaser and Strauss (1967) and widely used in the analysis of ethnographic interview data, this approach is based

ARABIZATION AND THE CHANGING STATUS OF SIWI BERBER 237 on the assumption that theory is grounded on data rather than imposed on them, therefore the researcher seeks a theory that explains the data (s)he has gathered. Speciﬁcally, while transcribing the interviews I identiﬁed most relevant themes and categories and I assigned to them a code to sort the data. Coding was both deductive and inductive, because some codes were decided based on literature and prior knowledge and others arose from the data itself (Bernard, 2006:494). Finally, I developed a conceptual analysis of the material by connecting the themes and categories previously coded to one another, in order to build a theore- tical model. The diverse quotes of the interviews below are presented in English; the original quotes are available in Serreli (2016).

3.2 The research field Siwa is one of the five biggest oases of the Egyptian Western desert, situated 300 km south of the coastal city of Marsa Matruh and 600 km west of the Nile valley, about 50 km inside the Libyan border. The smaller oasis of El-Gara, which lies about 100 km northeast, belongs administratively to Siwa. The population of the oases exceeds 28,000 inhabitants (2015, Governorate of Marsa Matruh, personal communication). El-Gara’s inhabitants are all Berbers. In Siwa, the inhabitants acknowledge the existence of the three groups, characterized by the language and a body of specific ʿādāt w taqālīd ‘customs and traditions’, and claim to belong to one of them. These groups are the Berbers (henceforth ‘Siwans’); a minority of Arab Bedouins, a branch of the Awlad ʿAli tribe that settled in Siwa’s peripheral villages in the early 20th century (Bliss, 1984:57); and a growing number of nonlocal Egyptians coming from different parts of the country, who outnumber the Bedouins. Siwans define their group on the basis of their distinctive ʿādāt w taqālīd, which encompass both tangible elements, such as clothing and food, and intangible ones, including language. Bedouins base their group identity on kinship ties much more than the others, and they are the most closed group in this respect. ‘Egyptians’ (miṣriyyīn) are grouped together as outsiders. Siwans and Bedouins disparage Egyptians for lacking morals, while on the other hand, Egyptians criticize Siwans’ backwardness and obsessive ties with tradition. Siwans present themselves (and are presented by others) as the true locals, because they were the only inhabitants of the oasis for centuries. The isolation experienced by Siwa, due to its position in the midst of the desert and the lack of adequate roads until the 1980s (Fakhry, 1973), has resulted in the maintenance of traditional customs and the local language and the growth of a well-established feeling of distinctiveness and uniqueness among Siwans. The incorporation of Siwa into the Egyptian political and administrative system was achieved after a

238 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES long negotiation between the state and local actors during the 19th century (Ellis, 2012), but it was the second half of the 20th century that represented a true turning point in the Siwans’ life, because of a number of factors which brought them into greater contact with Egyptian institutions, Egyptian and foreign people and their languages. This contact triggered changes in all aspects of the oasis’ dwellers lives, which directly and indirectly promoted Arabic in their daily life. In fact, until the first half of the 20th century, most Siwans were monolingual speakers of the local Berber variety, Siwi, and proficiency in another language was neither required nor accessible to a large portion of the population (Fakhry, 1973). Mass Arabization started in the second half of the 20th century. Today almost all the population understands and speaks Arabic, although with varying fluency and with the exception of some elders and pre-school-aged children (Souag, 2013; Serreli, 2016).

3.3 Globalization in Siwa Oasis Globalization entered Siwa Oasis in the form of a transition from a context of isolation, localism and traditionalism to one of contact and innovation. This section paragraph will outline the major socioeconomic transformations of the oasis and the change they induced in the community’s social network. Globalization consisted in an incoming flow of goods, people and knowledge to the oasis that triggered a modification in the occupational patterns of the oasis dwellers and in their educational background, and launched the transition towards a more heterogeneous demographic fabric. With regard to occupational patterns, while traditionally occupied in agriculture, within the last few decades a growing number of Siwans have begun to work in other sectors, for example as public employees, as workmen in factories and as tourism professionals. Tourism has become a very important resource in the oasis economy: beginning in the 1990s, large projects of sustainable tourism have been run in Siwa by nonlocal and local associations with the declared aim of preserving the intangible and material heritage of the oasis (Battesti, 2009). This sector employs Siwan and non-Siwan men and also Siwan women, who produce handicrafts to be sold to tourists. Education has been significantly improved, both in terms of percentages of the population, as almost all boys and girls attend at least the primary school, and in terms of degree, as four secondary schools opened in Siwa between 1986 and 2008,3 and many Siwan men complete university studies outside of the oasis (Malim, 2007). Unlike in the last century, numerous nonlocals now live scattered in the city and the villages of the oasis; therefore, Siwan men have contact with non-Siwans in their workplaces and among their acquaintances and their neigh- bours, Siwan women have similar contacts in their neighbourhood and Siwan

ARABIZATION AND THE CHANGING STATUS OF SIWI BERBER 239 children play and attend school with non-Siwan children. Moreover, the rate of intermarriages has grown considerably, mostly between Siwans and Egyptians, since Bedouins are keen to preserve traditional endogamy (Malim, 2001; Serreli, 2016:222). The increased mobility both from and towards Siwa that followed the opening of the asphalt road between Siwa and Marsa Matruh favored the arrival of exogenous practices and trends. The landscape of the oasis changed with its demography: a range of shops opened, providing services unavailable to the previous generations, such as laundries, bakeries, Egyptian cafés and ṭaʿmiyya4 takeaways. Although these are often run by Egyptians and serve an Egyptian clientele, along with tourists and the Siwan men working with them, the new generations of Siwans are also becoming acquainted with these kinds of services. A number of commercial products and practices (e.g. the bridal dress, golden jewellery, the bride’s hairstyle by a professional) have replaced traditional Siwan handcrafts (e.g. respectively, the embroidered dress and shawl, silver ornaments) and are now common among Siwans (Vale, 2014). Furthermore, the knowledge and circulation of new ideas and Siwa’s connection with the outside is assured by the mass media. The widespread presence of televisions in Siwans’ houses and, more recently, the diffusion of smartphones with Internet access, have allowed Siwans to know and to communicate with the outside. This knowledge of the outside has strengthened Siwans’ awareness of their uniqueness and speciﬁcity; it has also triggered contrasting ambitions for both change and preservation. The socioeconomic transformations listed above implied a transition from remoteness to accessibility, from isolation to contact with the outside, and from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous population. They affected the structure of the community’s social network, which became less dense and less multiplex as interpersonal ties became looser. The Siwans attribute the ongoing socioeconomic change to contact with outsiders, and they conceptualize the qualitative change in the community’s social network as a transition from communitarianism towards individualism and from uniformity towards distinction, following patterns that have been observed among other rural Egyptian populations (e.g. Asdar Ali, 1998; Bach, 1998). Furthermore, they conceive it in terms of an Egyptianization of customs, as exempliﬁed in the interview extract (1) below, because innovation is perceived as coming from the Egyptian cities that embody a modern lifestyle with its positive and negative aspects.

(1) A.: Now they’ve developed […] Now it’s over, they’ve become Egyptians! […] They’ve forgotten everything […] they’ve forgotten customs and traditions now! (Woman, 40s)

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The oasis dwellers also see a direct relationship between socioeconomic change and the ongoing process of Arabization and transition to bilingualism, as shown in (2) and (3).

(2) M.: A long time ago there wasn’t television. Television entered and […] the radio arrived […] and people learnt Arabic. A long time ago no stranger’s foot entered Siwa because of the difﬁculty of traveling, but when the asphalt road was built and tourism started to spread in Siwa people automatically started to open. […] Now [people know Arabic even before entering school] because of television, satellite, and the contact with the people who come from outside. (Man, 40s)

(3) A.: Nowadays, I mean, the whole oasis is developed! Before it was a place separated from the rest of the world, we never saw anyone and no stranger came to us, but now children […] you ﬁnd six- or seven-year-old children who know a foreign language because of the extent of their interplay […] Everybody speaks Arabic, everybody knows Arabic […] Except if they are aged, if they reached the age of seventy or eighty or ninety years! They are the only ones who cannot speak Arabic, but everybody [else] can, they speak Egyptian […] before, I mean, with whom would they speak? There was nobody! Like my mother, for example, she never saw any Egyptian or foreigner: she was born Siwan, she lived with the Siwans, so how would she speak [Arabic]!? But what made us speak Egyptian, as I told you, there is television and the oasis developed. (Woman, 40s)

Indeed, socioeconomic change favoured Arabization because the new situations with which people are confronted in daily life ‒ attending school, dealing with non-Siwi speakers in the workplace or the neighbourhood ‒ require and encourage the use of Arabic. In other words, the variation of the social network structure affected speakers’ behaviour, attitudes and ideologies. A weaker network offers a weaker incentive to use the local language, due to the emergence of competing positive associations that may prescribe the use of other languages as advantageous. The next section discusses some attitudinal and behavioural patterns in the new multilingual context of the oasis, accounting for the way they are inﬂuenced by ongoing socioeconomic changes, both directly and through the effect that such changes have produced on the quality of the community’s social network.

3.4 Siwi and Arabic in globalizing Siwa

3.4.1 Siwi, Arabic and the dimensions of power and solidarity The ﬁeld research has shown that Siwi, on the one hand, and Bedouin and Egyptian Arabic, on the other, are generally maintained as mother tongues in their native groups ‒ that is, they are spoken in in-group interactions and transmitted to

ARABIZATION AND THE CHANGING STATUS OF SIWI BERBER 241 newborns, despite the massive spread of Egyptian Arabic. Moreover, Siwans, Bedouins, and, to a different extent, Egyptians, lay claim to their own native language by stressing the unlikelihood that outsiders can reach a native-like proﬁciency; some of them also consider proﬁciency in and use of the language a criterion of group membership. Siwans present Siwi as the language used by all Siwans with the family and within the group.

(4) A.: At home and in the society and everywhere here you speak this language. […] You live all your life here with the Siwi language ‒ except if you meet, for example, an Arab and speak with him ‒ that’s the only case. (Man, late 20s)

(5) V.: Do people in the houses always speak Siwi? S.: Yes everybody [speaks] Siwi. Speaking any language which is not Siwi is not an option; one can’t, basically. One can only speak the Siwi language, it is difﬁcult to change one’s language! (Man, mid-40s)

However, these contexts are no longer exclusively reserved to Siwi. In fact, although the majority of Siwans absolutely forbid the use of Egyptian Arabic at home, among children or by any Siwi-speaking interlocutor, some have started to allow it. Excerpts (6), (7) and (8) below, for instance, report the interviewees’ accounts of a change in attitudes and behaviour among the youngest Siwans and the criticism of the elderly.

(6) M.: [My parents] didn’t accept! […] especially my father. I speak to her [my daughter] in Arabic and he speaks to her in Siwi […] my mother basically doesn’t speak Arabic… she doesn’t speak at all because she doesn’t know Arabic! […] She has no choice, but my father does, he is obstinate: he, my father, knows Bedouin Arabic and also Egyptian, but still they refuse absolutely! (Man, early 30s)

(7) H.: If mothers saw you teaching the child Egyptian they’d tell you, ‘You’ll overwhelm the child if you do this, let him learn Siwi’. There is the problem that the child that is in this environment […] for example, the one who lives in the family house ‒ you know, the family house, it means you live with your mother- in-law, your husband’s mother ‒ you speak to him in Egyptian, they speak to him in Siwi. (Woman, mid-20s)

(8) M.: It started to change a lot and the problem is that there is something, there is the idea, especially among children who are still young […], aged ten or twelve years, they talk to each other ‒ the two are Siwans but they talk to each other in Arabic. […] They would do it if there is nobody else, this is the problem! If they are with other people we’d say okay, also because of the people who are there, but they are together by themselves and what do they speak? They speak Arabic. […] Young boys from ten to twelve and downward, not older. (Man, 40s)

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In agreement with the interviewees’ accounts, the field research revealed that these practices are new and that the speaker’s age seems the most significant variable affecting their distribution. Every time they were asked about it, young parents justified their positive attitude towards the use of Arabic in childrearing by saying that this would secure a better education and a better future for their children, but their opponents attribute it to a mistaken association of Arabic with the ideas of civilization (taḥaḍḍur), urbanness (tamaddun), progress (taṭawwur), and open-mindedness (mutafattiḥ).

(9) M.: Our goal is just that it helps in education. (Man, early 30s)

(10) M.: They look at it in the perspective of progress: […] when one speaks Arabic he is open-minded, advanced, better. […] Perhaps they consider this to be civilization and progress and speaking Siwi backwardness, for example. (Man, mid-30s)

(11) M.: Some families imagine […] that civilization and urbanness are represented by the shift from the Siwi language […] especially now some families teach their children to speak Arabic […] It is a kind of civilization, urbanness and this is wrong, of course, in my opinion, because it is as if I am selling my identity. (Man, mid-30s)

Based on these associations, the interviewees point out that speaking Arabic can be perceived as a way to praise oneself, underline one’s higher proﬁciency with respect to one’s interlocutors and thus distinguish oneself among the group members. Conversely, speaking Siwi would express solidarity and put interlocutors at the same level.

(12) H.: I can’t leave Siwi, I can’t speak Arabic! It doesn’t come! When I enter my house I speak to my children, I speak with this and this one, we can’t speak Arabic! One would say ‘What is this? Why is he speaking Arabic? Are we Egyptians or what?’ (Man, mid-40s)

(13) M.: Thank God I speak foreign languages but, still, I don’t like to speak a language in front of somebody, to avoid people saying, ‘Ah, he wants to be […] he praises himself’ and like this. […] Everybody can speak Arabic, but still the majority of the people don’t like to speak Arabic to each other, everybody likes to speak Siwi. (Man, mid-30s)

(14) A.: Sometimes you even stop yourself from speaking Arabic with the Siwans so no one would feel excluded from the conversation. However, basically, I spontaneously feel at ease while speaking Siwi. (Man, late 20s)

Since speaking Siwi is perceived as expressing a positive stance towards being one of the group, it becomes an instrument for those who are neither full members nor full outsiders (as non-natives born or residing in Siwa and the offspring of mixed marriages) to signal their desire to be accepted within the group. For these

ARABIZATION AND THE CHANGING STATUS OF SIWI BERBER 243 people Arabic is an unmarked choice, because it is both their mother tongue and the major language of inter-group communication in Siwa, while Siwi is a marked choice; however, Arabic can also become an instrument used to signal distancing from Siwans if spoken by bilingual speakers in specific contexts. For instance, I met a group of teenage female cousins who were raised in Siwa in a Siwan/ Egyptian family, whose native language is Egyptian Arabic, who dislike the idea of ‘being Siwan’ because they stereotypically associate it with having a sort of obsession with tradition and ‘everything that is Siwan’, including the language. Therefore, as a way to distance themselves from it, these girls stress their appreciation for ‘everything that is Egyptian’ and underline their pride in speaking Egyptian Arabic without deploring their lack of proficiency in Siwi. Other teenage informants belonging to Siwi-speaking families (and even some Bedouin girls), during interviews or during informal meetings, could express appreciation or fascination for speaking Egyptian Arabic, and present code-switching and borrowing from Arabic as something neutral and as a direct consequence of their continuous exposure to Arabic and their bilingualism. The fact that many teenagers with whom I spoke and whose behaviour I observed, regardless of the family’s dominant language and attitudes, express fascination with Egyptian Arabic is noteworthy in a context in which Siwi is strongly spoken by native speakers and acquired by resident non-native children. Communication strategies such as code-switching and borrowing from Arabic are becoming a way for young people to express generational identity through language: they originate from the association of Egyptian Arabic with modernness, urbanness and educatedness. Besides age, the gender of the speaker also seems to be a significant variable affecting language attitudes and use. I made the most of the opportunity I had, as a female researcher, to participate in domestic life. During fieldwork, I spent most of my time with women and with families, and was thus able to meet males and females ranging from children to the elderly and to observe their relationships and behaviour. Regularly visiting a good number of families meant being almost adopted by some and establishing a close friendship with Siwan, Bedouin, Egyptian and mixed families. On the basis of the significant sample I observed, I argue that in certain situations women gain benefits or rewards from speaking Siwi, while men gain benefits or rewards from speaking Egyptian Arabic. I observed that non-native and bilingual women speakers of Siwi seemed more likely to adopt Siwi and more willing to assimilate to Siwans than their male peers, who seemed more willing to emphasize their distinction from Siwan men. The case of two siblings is a good example. Born into an Egyptian/Siwan family,

244 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES they have always lived in Siwa among their Siwan relatives and they are both bilingual, but during the interview they described very differently their own identity and their relationship with Siwi and Arabic. While the man (24 years old) stressed his Egyptian identity and identiﬁed Egyptian Arabic as his mother tongue, his sister (29 years old) underlined her love for the Siwan customs and traditions, showing pride in her Siwan identity and reproaching herself for speaking an imperfect Siwi. According to her, she feels she is Siwan and she does not want her use of Egyptian Arabic to make her appear as if she is showing off the Egyptian part of her origins.

(15) M.: I love Siwi! […] To anyone who asks me, ‘What are you?’ I say, ‘Siwan’. I don’t say ‘Egyptian’ […] because I like all Siwa’s customs and traditions […] I love it truly! (Woman, late 20s)

I argue that the gender difference is attributable to the different values associated with manhood and womanhood, on the one hand, and the meanings indexed by Siwi and Egyptian Arabic, on the other. First of all, womanhood is positively related with the values of modesty and piety, which are also associated with Siwanness, and manhood is positively related with indicators of status and power, such as level of education and a good job, which are associated with Egyptian- ness. Moreover, women’s predominant connection to domains of solidarity ‒ family, friends and neighborhood ‒ emphasizes the importance and usefulness of the language of solidarity, that is, Siwi. Conversely, men’s stronger connection to domains of power ‒ occasional acquaintances, travel and the job market ‒ is associated with the language of power, that is, Egyptian Arabic. Although they cannot be generalized, the trends exist, and the chains of associations described do affect the attitudes and behaviour of the oasis dwellers. This is important because, together with other factors such as the acquisition of Siwi by non-native children, they conﬁrm that Siwi retains a strong value as the language of in-group communication and of solidarity, and it continues to enjoy prestige in this realm despite Arabization. In the current context, it is multilingualism, rather than Egyptian Arabic itself, that is positively evaluated, and the norms of the oasis community encourage a differentiation of function between the two languages. The variations in attitude and behaviour described above are meaningful in the context created by the recent social changes in Siwa, taking place in a community less dense and homogeneous than before. More speciﬁcally, this is a context where men’s and women’s networks have become more mixed and heterogeneous, and where an increased knowledge of the ‘other’ gives the oasis dwellers options in terms of the social and linguistic identity they wish to adopt.

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3.4.2 Siwi and identity Heritage tourism and new reproductions of local identity are forms of globalization that characterize peripheries (Wang, Spotti, Juffermans, Kroon, Cornips and Blommaert, 2014:30). In other words, globalization in the peripheries is characterized by forms of economic development and political mobilization that capitalize on the concepts of peripherality and authenticity (Pietikäinen, 2013; Pujolar, 2013; Wang, Spotti, Juffermans, Kroon, Cornips and Blommaert, 2014). The new possibilities of interconnectedness, and the fact that tourism capitalizes on the ‘speciﬁcity’ of Siwa within the Arab and Arabic-speaking Egypt, led Siwans to (re)discover their Amazighness. In my view, all outsiders’ attempts to connect Siwa to the Amazigh movement do not seem to be politically convincing for the Siwans, who overtly emphasize their belonging to the Egyptian state, as in excerpts (16) and (17) and in informal conversations.

(16) M: The Siwi are one part of the Amazigh. […] We feel we are Egyptians, because we are born in Egypt, our fathers and grandfathers were all born in Egypt, and Siwa is one part of Egypt. (Man, mid-30s)

(17) M: Siwans, in this regard ‒ I told you, I know them [Siwans] ‒ I am sure they refuse Amazighs politics […], but they don’t refuse the fact that their roots are Amazigh, because this is their origin. (Man, mid-30s)

However, some Siwans are well aware that the speciﬁcity of Siwa, which derives from its being ‘Amazigh’, can be a commodity that can satisfy the demands for authenticity and exoticism made by cultural tourism. In the words of a highly educated interviewee:

(18) S: The language gives us distinctiveness, it gives us speciﬁcity, it also characterizes us a little bit. […] Anyone who comes to Siwa also hears this language, even from Egypt. A tourist who comes from Egypt, from Cairo […] he feels he is in a place different from Cairo; he hears a different language and sees different customs and traditions, lifestyle and life standards, food and drinks and cooking different from theirs […] and this characterizes us, it is something good! (Man, mid-40s)

The term ‘Amazigh’ itself is new in Siwa: it has only recently begun to reach people who are not directly involved with the tourism sector, but it already circulates among tourism professionals and among a young educated elite. These latter groups have started to emphasize the cultural connection of Siwans to the Amazigh people, and to concretely claim the preservation of the language and other cultural elements as a way to state and assess the Siwan identity. The accounts of young, highly educated interviewees, such as those reported in (19)

246 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES and (20), reveal the emergence of these ideas, and the correspondence that young people have established between the preservation of language and traditions and the assertion of the Siwan identity.

(19) M.: Young people started going back to the past, they started to talk about how they could work together to see what is in their hands to bring it back and […] there began to be associations with the purpose of bringing Siwa back. (Woman, late 20s)

(20) I.: For me, Siwa is not just desert, land, and my family. Siwa is customs and traditions, language! V.: Do you mean that the language […] is part of the customs and traditions? I.: The most important part of customs and traditions! It is very important, because if the language disappeared, got lost, you would ﬁnd that all the customs disappeared with it! (Man, mid-20s)

Statements such as these are typical of people who are mostly highly educated, and involved in tourism activities or cultural associations, but they are not shared by all segments of the oasis’ population. These other groups would not express this concern simply because, for them, language preservation and the assessment of identity are not issues at all. In fact, as argued in Serreli (2018), this ideological construct is the result of the attribution of new meanings to languages, which is deliberate and subject to metapragmatic discussion; therefore, it is only available to the portion of the population that participates more fully in the processes of globalization.

4 Conclusions

This article has described the form of globalization that has reached the Egyptian oasis of Siwa and discussed the main effects of globalization on the internal sociolinguistic situation. It argued that globalization affected the status of both the Siwi and the Arabic languages in Siwa, not directly, but by causing a qualitative change in the community’s social network. Speciﬁcally, it caused the weakening of interpersonal networks, which became less dense and less multiplex and, in turn, exerted a weaker pressure towards the use of the native language. As a result, multilingualism has spread and is in fact welcomed by the local population, who endorse a system of separation of functions between Siwi and Egyptian Arabic. The globalization process triggered the emergence of new attitudinal trends and practices among a minority of speakers, especially younger ones, who are willing to bring Arabic into Siwi-dominant domains. However, at present, the

ARABIZATION AND THE CHANGING STATUS OF SIWI BERBER 247 power-related prestige of Egyptian Arabic seems to be well counterbalanced by the solidarity-related prestige firmly enjoyed by Siwi. Although it is true that Egyptian Arabic is prestigious among youth, which may signal a further attitudinal and possibly also linguistic shift to Arabic, the strength of the link between Siwi and the Siwan identity must not be undervalued. The conscious use of Siwi expresses a feeling of group identity in the face of the global concern with minorities’ rights and languages. Globalization in Siwa Oasis has thus produced a diversification of language attitudes and behaviours that mirrors the different degrees of access to resources among different segments of the population. It has also triggered processes of commodification of the local language and culture that are typical of peripheries.

Notes

1. Both terms Arabization and Arabicization (in Arabic: taʿrīb) are used in the literature on language planning in the Arab World (Shaaban, 2006:696). In this article, I use the term Arabization, to refer both to the taʿrīb policy of Arabic- speaking countries and to Arabic language acquisition by Siwa’s Berber- speaking population. 2. Dustūr ǧumhūriyya miṣr al-ʿarabiyya [Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt]. Retrieved on 29 June 2015 from: http://www.egypt.gov.eg/ arabic/laws/download/Constitution_2014.pdf. 3. District of Siwa-Governorate of Marsa Matruh. Retrieved on 24 November 2014 (Serreli, 2016:338–362): http://www.matrouh.gov.eg/siwamagles.aspx. 4. A common Egyptian dish ‘consisting of dried broad beans soaked and pounded together with herbs and spices, shaped into balls and deep fried in oil’ (Hinds and Badawi, 1986:540). While it is very common elsewhere in Egypt, it is not a common dish for Siwans.

About the author

Valentina Serreli received a Joint PhD from Sassari University (Italy) and Aix/Marseille University, IREMAM (France) in 2016. At present, she is Junior Professor of Arabic Studies at Bayreuth University, Germany. Her domains of research include Arabic sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and language contact in the oasis of Siwa.

248 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES

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(Received April 2016; revision received 5th May 2017; accepted June 2017; ﬁnal revision received 10th January 2018)