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Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6

Language Log 2024-05-12

This post grew out of a comment I was making yesterday to a previous post about a wall at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales [National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations]) (established 1669) in Paris that listed the many languages taught at that venerable institution.

As my eyes surveyed the mass of names on the wall, one thing struck me powerfully:  the large number of different Arabic languages.  This raised an interesting question:  common "wisdom" is that there is only one Arabic language, viz., Modern Standard Arabic [MSA], so how come there are so many different Arabic languages taught at INALCO?

Since the Arab vernaculars have been one of our favorite foci here at Language Log (see "Selected readings" below), I was interested to see how many different varieties of Arabic are represented on this wall:

Judéo-Arabe, Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Libyan Arabic (but that is MSA), Yemeni Arabic (also MSA, though it is generally considered to be a very conservative dialect cluster), Lebanese Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Arabe Littéral (which I take to signify written / literary MSA) in contrast to dialectal Arabic (though I'm not sure how it differs from regular MSA; perhaps it is hyper-conservative to a degree that it it not really "sayable", i.e., "writable but not sayable", cf. "Sayable but not writable" [9/12/13]; i.e., MWA [Modern Written Arabic]?).

I do not include Maltese because of the Romance superstrata, nor do I include Sorabe because that only refers to the script used to write the Austronesian language known as Malagasy, much as the Perso-Arabic script is used to write Sinitic Hui (Muslim) Mandarin.

It would appear that, to the teachers and administrators at INALCO, there must be sufficient differences among all these Arabic languages that they merit having separate offerings.

It seems that Arabic speaking countries possess a diglossia of MSA for formal, "proper" occasions and usage and a variety of vernaculars on a dialectal continuum for daily informal usage. SFAIK, only Egyptian vernacular has developed a widely used literary / written / cinematic form, even transcending its political borders to a certain degree. To what extent the other vernaculars are popular in music / song / TV, etc., in general, the situation must vary widely by country.

Worldwide, Arabic has about 372.7 million speakers (source), yet it has all of these different Arabic languages listed on the INALCO wall, despite the fact that theoretically and doctrinally there is only one (MSA).

Contrast that with India, which has a total population of 1.417 billion people, yet only has two or three languages represented on the INALCO wall, if you count Sanskrit, which is overwhelmingly a classical language.  Here at Penn, we teach virtually all of India's 22 official languages, at least 10 at any given time.

Urdu, which is mutually sayable with Hindi, but not mutually readable, is not taught at INALCO (source); with 230 million speakers, it is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world (source).

Hindi, which is taught at INALCO, has 615 million speakers and is the 3rd-most widely spoken language in the world (source).

Bengali is also taught at INALCO, probably because it is the official language of Bangladesh, has 272.7 million speakers and is the 7th-most widely spoken language in the world (source).

China has a total population of 1.412 billion people, of whom Ethnologue claims there are roughly 900 million speakers of Mandarin.  I don't believe it.  These are simply political propaganda figures put out by the CCP / PRC government.  At least half of those 900 million don't understand the other half.  It is telling that the wall refers to "Chinese" (Mandarin?) as Chinois in French and Zhōngwén 中文 (lit., "central script / writing") in Sinographs.  Even if they're referring to "Mandarin" writ exceptionally large, Pǔtōnghuà 普通話 ("Common Speech") or Guóyǔ 國語 ("National Spoken Language") would be a better designation.

The INALCO wall also lists Cantonese, which certainly is a separate language, worldwide has nearly 100 million speakers.  Taiwanese (Táiyǔ 臺語) is listed on the wall and has approximately 15 million speakers.  Added to their related confreres on the mainland they constitute a group of approximately 50 million Minnan ("Southern Min") speakers.  I am pleased to see that the INALCO wall includes Uyghur, Mongolian, and Tibetan, all three of which non-Sinitic languages the CCP/PRC is actively trying to eliminate.

On balance, the INALCO wall reveals a great deal about the geopolitics of French language policy in the world today.

 

Selected readings