LINGUIST List 26.67
Tue Jan 06 2015
Review: Historical Ling; Socioling; Writing Systems: Mumin, Versteegh (2014)
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 04-Jun-2014
From: Kariema El Touny <k.eltouny
gmail.com>
Subject: The Arabic Script in Africa
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EDITOR: Meikal Mumin
EDITOR: Kees Versteegh
TITLE: The Arabic Script in Africa
SUBTITLE: Studies in the Use of a Writing System
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Kariema El Touny, Women's College for Arts, Science, and Education, Ain Shams University
Review's Editor: Anthony Aristar
SUMMARY
The book consists of sixteen papers that deal with the use of Arabic script to write African languages other than Arabic. It is divided geographically into four sections, North, West, East, and South Africa respectively, in addition to a preliminary section for general papers.
Section I General Problems of Arabic-Script Based Traditions
The Type and Spread of Arabic Script
Peter T. Daniels
Daniels gives a brief history of the origins of the Arabic script. Arabic writing has its roots in Nabataean, which is a branch of the Middle Aramaic scripts during the Common Era (Klugkist 1982). When Arabic took over the Nabataean script, several difficulties occurred. For example, the similar letter sets, which was solved by introducing the consonant dots towards the end of the second Islamic century.
The author moves to the use of the Arabic ‘abjad’, the notations used only for consonants. He gives examples of several languages that use it. These are Persian, Uyghur (a Turkic language), Pashto (the Iranian spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan), Urdu of Pakistan, and Ottoman Turkish.
The Arabic Script in Africa: Understudied Literacy
Meikel Mumin
Mumin provides a summary of the status of Arabic script within academic research. With the advent of Islam in Africa, Arabic became the lingua franca not only for religious studies but also for politics, business, and science. Many newly-converted scholars preserved their own indigenous languages by writing them using Arabic script, modifying it to adapt to the linguistic features of the different languages. It is now documented that 80 to 95 languages in Africa use Arabic script.
The author speculates that the scarcity of research on the subject is due to Western academes’ bias. They treated Arabic as a language of religion. Hence, most texts written using Arabic-based script and/or orthography were dismissed as Islamic literature, Islamic writings, or Arabic literature.
Moreover, literacy surveys and statistics in Africa have double standards when it involves languages other than what the colonialists provided. The author advocates for the integration of the Islamic institutions into the mainstream educational systems to elevate the literacy rates.
Section II North Africa
Preliminary Notes on Tuareg in Arabic Script from Niger
Maarten Kossmann and Ramada Elghamis
The authors use selected texts from collected field work by Elghamis (2011) to present the main characteristics of Tuareg Ajami (Arabic script) orthography. First, they give an introduction on Tuareg, a language spoken in the central and southern Sahara and the Sahel, in Niger, Mali, Algeria, and Burkina Faso. Then, they examine whether Tuareg writings are an indication of inherited tradition or personal inventiveness by the writers of the texts through graphemic choices, for example: the writing of /g/.
Finally, they try to put Tuareg Ajami in its regional context. On the one hand, it has a phonemic system similar to that of Classical Arabic, which is evident in some writers’ logical choice of Arabic script. On the other hand, other writers opt for the graphemic choices of other Sahelian languages, such as Fulfulde and Hausa, and West-African traditions of Arabic writing. The authors do not draw conclusions to prompt further research.
Writing ‘Shelha’ in New Media: Emergent non-Arabic Literacy in Southwestern Algeria
Lameen Souag
Souag takes the area of Southwestern Algeria as the focal point of his article. It is the Saharan ‘wilayas’ (states) of Tindouf, Becher, En Naama, El Bayadh, and Adrar. Literacy in this region is acknowledged by competency in Standard Arabic. However, many non Arabic languages are spoken and written there that are collectively called ‘Shelha’, examples of which are Taznatit, Zenati, Tamasheq, and Kwarandzyey. Comparing the use of these languages suggests a difference in their status. While Arabic is institutionalized and used formally through government communications, the educational system, and as a sign of urbanity; Shelha is minimally taught and typically used by individuals from the same community mainly as a sign of solidarity.
The author uses online correspondences to examine writing Shelha by users of internet forums and social websites. He discovers some difficulties for users to properly write Shelha, attributing them to the inability of devices to handle the necessary orthography. This does not hinder its use neither publicly, such as place names or recording old proverbs, nor privately, such as phatic communications: greetings and family inquiries.
Section III West Africa
Old Kanembu and Kanuri in Arabic Script: Phonology through the Graphic System
Dmitry Bondarev
The main purpose of this article is the study of old Kanembu present in the Qur’an manuscripts, MS 3ImI, MS 1YM, and MS 2ShK, as glosses and commentaries next to the original text in Arabic. Kanembu and Kanuri belong to the Saharan family of the macro Nilo-Saharan language phylum and are spoken by four million people around Lake Chad.
The author gives a brief account of the graphic system used in these texts. He describes Old Kanembu spelling conventions, followed by vowel and consonant graphemes. Finally, he provides two comprehensive tables dedicated to the language of (Qur’an) glosses LG: one for LG grapheme/phoneme correspondences for consonants and the other for an inventory of its consonants.
Bondarev notes that writers of Old Kanembu adhered to the graphic system of Arabic by adapting it to their native sounds rather than creating a new Arabic-based script due to the reverence they held for the text.
Influence of Arabic Poetry on the Composition and Dating of Fulfulde Jihad Poetry in Yola (Nigeria)
Anneke Breedveld
In her analysis, the author uses a collection of jihad poems, the Yola collection, by the famous Fulbe poet and warrior Sheehu Usman dan Fodio (1754-1817) and his contemporaries. They used Arabic-based script and adapted it for the characteristics of their non-Arabic languages. The purpose of these poems was not just for recitation on special occasions, but also for educating people about Islam and as mnemonics for scholars.
Breedveld states three reasons for the difficulties in translating and transliterating the Yola collection. One is the nature of poetry itself as subjective material full of imageries and feelings. Two is the lack of an authoritative, standardized Fulfulde Ajami orthography. Three is the 200 year old text, full of archaic terms and formulations.
She chose two salient features in Arabic poetry and traced them in the collection. First, the hammisaande, derived from Arabic “hamsa” (meaning five). In it, a poet takes an existing poem, and as an homage to the original poet, chooses two hemistiches (stanzas) and adds three more making those five. Second, the chronogram, which is an expression meant for a numerical interpretation. Usually, the consonants of last stanza are added to signify an important date in the Islamic calendar. Each letter is assigned a numeric value, for example: ا = 1, ب = 2, etc.
West African Ajami in the New World (Hausa, Fulfulde, Mande Languages)
Nikolay Dobronravin
The author briefly discusses how African Muslims maintained their knowledge of Arabic script after they moved to the New World. He studies the few surviving manuscripts that were discovered in the Caribbean and Brazil, for example, the Dublin manuscript written by a soldier based in the Caribbean in 1817 to a surgeon in Trinidad. It is in Arabic script and mainly uses Hausa, but includes Arabic, Eastern Fula, Mandinka, and English or material from English-based Caribbean Creole languages. He provides an account of three prayer books found in Brazil, which are written in Arabic script.
Fula and the Ajami Writing System in the Haalpulaar Society of Fuuta Tooro (Senegal and Mauritania): A Specific ‘Restricted Literacy’
Marie-Éve Humery
The author takes Fuuta Tooro, located in the middle valley of the Senegal River that runs between Senegal and Mauritania, to trace the socio-political effects on the use of Arabic script in writing Fula within the Haalpulaar society. She compares Ajami, Arabic script, and Abajada, Roman script.
She utilizes two previous surveys to present her findings. The first, in 1996, was conducted in Nabadji Civol and Galoya, two villages of the Senegal River Valley, plus the Guédiawaye suburb in Dakar. The second, between 1999 and 2001, was in Juude and Dungel, two Fuutanke villages. Her interviewees preferred Roman script in writing Pulaar because of its accessibility. Contrarily, Pulaar Ajami had limited use.
In the 18th century, Arabic and Ajami witnessed a rise in their status. With the spread of Islam, many Arabic religious texts were translated into Fula using Arabic script, in addition to original work written directly in Fula using Ajami. However, by 1950-60s, this practice gradually declined to be replaced by Roman script. In Senegal, this was a result of weak attempts of the Haalpulaar’en Arabists to make Ajami a symbol of their clerical and scholarly class. In Mauritania, even with Arabization at full force, several movements, such as the Pulaar Movement, propagated the use of the Roman script. This was validated at the Bamako Conference in 1966.
Ajami Scripts for Mande Languages
Valintin Vydrin
The author observes the scarcity of research on Arabic script texts for the Mande languages even though the Mande people were among the first in West Africa to be contacted by Islamic culture and Arabic. He provides a brief history of this, beginning with French colonial times, where Delafosse (1904) is the only scholarly record available of Manding Ajami. Unfortunately, the scholar was contemptuous of the writing system, which led to subsequent lack of interest in the topic. Nowadays, of the three available writing systems, Roman, N’ko, and Ajami, the latter holds the weakest spot due to its being the least standardized and adapted, and its rare use in publications.
Vydrin briefly presents the current status of Manding Ajami in various areas where the Manding languages are spoken. In the Southern Senegambia region, Manding Ajami is still used today. In Guinea, it held a high place during pre-colonial times, but witnessed a decline by the middle and late 20th century. Similarly, Côte d’Ivoire, Bamana, Mogofin (Mikhifore), and Susu (Soso) used Manding Ajami around the beginning of the 20th century (18th century for Suso), but its current use is mainly for personal notes and correspondences. He compares the grammatological properties of each variety of Mande Ajami through texts, such as the Bijini Chronicle, Parts II and III, and the Keba Singateh’s Texts.
Manding Ajami Samples: Mandinka and Bamana
Valintin Vydrin and Gérard Dumestre
The authors describe the limitedness of Manding Ajami texts and the difficulty of their acquisition, analysis, and publication. They extensively analyze two sets of documents and provide some grammatological remarks and discuss the use of diacritics, the orthographic segmentation of words, and the dialectal characteristics of the texts. The first set consists of three texts that are a hunter’s incantations in Mandinka. The second is in Bamana, originally from San (an old southwestern area in Mali), and is comprised of five texts.
West African Scripts and Arabic-Script Orthographies in Socio-Political Context
Andy Warren-Rothlin
The author examines the consequences of socio-political factors on three languages: Hausa, Fulfulde, and Chadian Arabic, spoken in the Sahel region between the Mossi and Jula in the west and the Sango and Maba in the east. He focuses on the current practical use of Arabic script, its development, and the effects of publishing in these languages, by government and non-government organizations, on its standardization.
In the 19th century, Arabic script was used, along with Arabic, even by pre-colonial Christian missionaries. However, by the 20th century, and the French and British colonization, Roman script came into conflict with Arabic script. This led to digraphia, the existence of two scripts for the same language, exhibited on billboards, for example.
He presents and discusses the modern orthography of the three languages, followed by some general problems that face Arabic script in the region, such as the difficulty in representing of nasalization and tone. Arabic loan words present a problem to writers in choosing either the phonetic or etymological form of the same word.
Section IV East Africa
Chimi:ni in Arabic Script: Examples from Brava Poetry
Bana Banafunzi and Alessandra Vianello
Chimi:ni, a Bantu language spoken in Brava which borrowed heavily from Arabic, is considered an endangered language due to war and consequent migration. There are few studies of its grammar and syntax,
In the early 20th century, Sufi scholars used to write their religious poems, ste:nzi, in Chimi:ni using Arabic script as a sign of solidarity against European colonization,fundamentalist Wahhābis as well as modernist movements. They resorted to poetry because it is more popular and easier to memorize. The themes were strictly religious and the poems were delivered orally, hence written examples are scarce. The authors describe Chimi:ni in Ajami by providing two versions of a poem by Sheikh Qasim al-Barawi (1878-1922) and comparing them.
Swahili Documents from Congo (19th Century): Variation in Orthography
Xavier Luffin
Luffin describes the Arabic script used in Swahili documents, which come from Stanley Falls, Marungu, and Uele in the now Democratic Republic of Congo, and gives a brief history of them and their structure. They consist of official and personal archives and other papers that were found, or intercepted during the battles of the “Arab campaign 1892-1894”, in Swahili settlements, and date back to a period from 1884 to 1899. Arabic script use started with Omani and Swahili traders in the 1860s, then it was adopted by the local chiefs, then it spread to the Islamic schools, and was used with the European explorers through translators and interpreters.
Akhi Patia Kalamu: Writing Swahili Poetry in Arabic Script
Clarissa Vierke
The author provides a short history of Swahili in Arabic script and examines the interaction between poetic language and its representation in script. Swahili in Arabic script is found in letters as early as the 7th century and on coins around the 13th. Its use peaked in the 17th and by the 18th, the oldest written Swahili document discovered in Goa dates back to 1724. The oldest Swahili poem in Arabic script, Utendi wa Tambuka, dates back to 1728.
Starting from 1840, colonization and Christian missionaries introduced Roman script. By 1899, Arabic script was excluded officially, and was only used in personal letters and contracts. However, it was still used by some missionaries to reach a wider range of people. Between the 1920s and 1930s, Swahili was standardized in Roman script while Arabic script was linked more to folklore and local dialects.
Vierke examines the written poems in Swahili Arabic script to discuss the conventions used by the poets regarding the visual representation of sounds in Arabic script.
Section V South Africa
Revisiting Al-Qawl Al-Matīn: A Sociolinguistically Engineered Arabic-Afrikaans Text
Muhammed Haron
In his article, the author summarizes the salient features of Al-Qawl Al-Matīn as an example of the linguistic contributions of the Cape Muslim community, without delving into the controversy surrounding it in academia. He gives a brief history of the formation of Afrikaans as a common language in the region, recognized in 1925, and how it was influenced socially, politically, and linguistically by the languages of colonists, Dutch and British, and other settlers, slaves from South and Southeast Asia and East and west Africa.
The Cape Muslims’ ancestry has three roots: Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East and West Africa. The use of Arabic script (Jawi script) was maintained by religious leaders as a gesture against colonial rule and to keep their ethno-religious identity. Haron gives a few excerpts from the manuscript to show several features of the Arabic script used. These are orthographical options, the transcriptions/translation challenges, word construction, and combination of graphemes.
A Remarkable Document in Arabic-Afrikaans: The Election Pamphlet of 1884
Kees Versteegh
The author uses an election pamphlet for Anders Ohlsson (1841-1912), in his 1884 campaign for parliament, as an example of a written document in Arabic-Afrikaans (Afrikaans in Arabic script). He gives a brief history of the development of Arabic Afrikaans, followed by a comprehensive examination of the document itself: a description of its content, the script used, its social context, and the candidate’s biography. From it, he deduces the Dutch linguistic influence on Afrikaans and the political weight given to Muslim voters in the Cape.
EVALUATION
The book serves as a guide to a relatively under-studied topic, the Arabic script as it is used to write various languages in Africa. The collection is a study of its origins, development, orthographical features, and linguistic, social, and political influences. Hence, it could be used as a valued reference for researchers of Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics, Orthography, and Historical Linguistics.
The authors managed to present their ideas despite the scarcity of references and source material, in the articles. Almost all contributing authors complain of how documents were either lost or destroyed, and encourage the preservation of existing ones. In addition, calls for further research and/or a re-examination of current theories are found in abundance throughout the book.
The editors divided the continent into manageable parts and assigned to each its relative articles. This enables the reader to choose according to their interest. One of the visually appealing features is the use of digital images of the original documents along with the appropriate transliterations and translations either in paragraphs or tables. Another feature related to the content of the articles is their brevity even though the authors provide historical backgrounds along with the linguistic topics. Concise terms are used with no redundant or superfluous information.
REFERENCES
Delafosse, Maurice. 1904. Vocabulaires comparatifs de plus de 60 langues ou dialectes parlés à la Côte d’Ivoire et dans les regions limitrophes, avec des notes linguistiques et ethnologiques, une bibliographie et use carte. Paris: Ernest Lerux
Elghamis, Ramada. 2011. Le tifinagh au Niger contemporian: Etude sur l’écriture indigene des Touargs. PhD Thesis, Leiden University
Klugkist, Alexander C. 1982. Midden-Aramese schriften in Syrië, Mesopotomië, Perzië en aangerenzende gebieden. PhD Thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Kariema El Touny has an MA from Women’s College, Ain Shams University. Her interests include (but are not limited to) Syntax, Arabic Dialectology, Typology, and Theory Construction. She presented and published her research on Cairene Arabic syntax within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory.
Page Updated: 06-Jan-2015