The term “vernacular” is traditionally employed to refer to the development of particular linguistic traditions while underlining a polarity between native languages and the lingua franca. Arabic, however, is usually considered a continuous linguistic tradition entailing various registers. The question that I will address in my paper is how does the concept of the vernacular fit within the complex Arabic linguistic context? In my paper, I shall interrogate the adequacy of using the concept in the Arabic tradition by looking into texts from the period prior to the establishment of literary modernity. I will focus on writings that contain features which are usually distinguished as “Middle Arabic.” Specifically, I shall look into narrative texts composed in the Syrian lands which clearly oscillate between linguistic registers and reflect an attachment to oral storytelling practices. The texts I will explore are from the late 18th- to the early 19th-century and include Hanna Diyab‘s Book of Travels, a late reworked variant of Kalila wa-Dimna, and the first Robinson Crusoe in Arabic. By illustrating some of the linguistic variations within these texts, I will expound, how such features are not to be read as simply an impact of oral culture or the authors‘ colloquial language, but rather as part and parcel of the literary practices which disclose an awareness of a growing textual environment. Such illustrations can be indicative of different means of dealing with existing narrative material in a creative fashion and encompass practices of re-contextualizing, re-narrating, re-writing and translating. In my conclusion, I shall discuss the concept of Middle Arabic literature as a pre-print praxis of consciously combining linguistic registers and mediating between literary traditions in a globalized textual universe.

This paper explores the issue of vernacular Arabic through the particular lens of language learning books printed in Europe in the first half of the 19th century. Silvestre de Sacy’s instructional texts were widely-used in European academic circles to teach Arabic, but were of little use to students seeking to speak it. As the demand for scholars and diplomats who were proficient in vernacular Arabic surged in Europe, new tools and collaborations were undertaken to teach the spoken language. I draw in particular on three works: Claude-Étienne Savary’s Grammaire de la langue Arabe vulgaire et littérale (1813), Joseph Agoub’s Des règles de l'Arabe vulgaire (1823), and Muhammad ‘Ayyad al-Tantawi’s Traité de la langue Arabe vulgaire (1848). The textbooks were among the first to systematize the study of the vernacular, and offer insight into the policies and practices of language teaching on the one hand, and the language ideologies that underpin them on the other. More specifically, first, this paper identifies the language ideologies of these early ventures by examining their introductory and framing remarks about Arabic. How do the texts conceive of Arabic’s registers and configure them variously as spoken or written, and contemporary or ancient? How, at this early stage, do they classify and distinguish between the dialects, if at all? Second, I examine the selections from Arabic vernacular literary genres — including poetry, proverbs, riddles, letters, and folktales — that authors inserted and translated as examples bearing a purported didactic goal. The texts reveal the extent to which the meaning of vernacular Arabic was in flux at this point among European and Arab writers alike. It is precisely in this state of flux, or lack of standardization, that we can discern both the chaos and creativity with which authors endeavored to cull together their written archives’ of vernacular Arabic intended to aid the prospective student in its acquisition. Just as the success of these early textbooks in actually teaching the language is difficult to determine, the choice to teach vernacular Arabic alongside MSA and the methods used remains a matter of debate until today.

What role did 19th-century editors, proof-readers, and typesetters play in the establishment and policing of new linguistic registers and rhetorical styles during the Arabic literary renaissance (nahda)? Scholarship on this period describes the emergence of modern standard Arabic as a break with two corrosive and opposed legacies: (1) on the one hand, a tradition of flowery, ornate, convoluted post-classical prose; (2) on the other, a tradition of communicating in "sub-standard" forms of vernacular Arabic. The Arabic literary renaissance was made possible, so the traditional historiography goes, only by the elimination of post-classical frippery and uncouth solcecisms from the written language, paving the way for a modern literature. But how, precisely, did this process take place? Examining the role of “invisible technicians” like press correctors and editors at 19th-century periodicals and publishing enterprises, this paper explores the often-overlooked activity of bringing text into line with emerging journalistic and literary norms, a process inseparable from the establishment and policing of those norms. Drawing upon the work of scholars such as Hala Auji, Ami Ayalon, Marilyn Booth, Ahmed El Shamsy, and Ziad Fahmy, I consider the activity of figures such as Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Nasif and Ibrahim al-Yaziji, Eli Smith, Tannus Haddad, Antuniyyu al-Khayyat and Butrus al-Bustani in this domain, arguing against a teleological understanding of how 19th-century standard Arabic emerged from an inevitable process of correction rather than creation.

In my engagement and translation of contemporary Moroccan fiction, along with my ongoing interest in challenges to Standard Language ideologies and practices, I have found that Moroccan writers walk a fine line between using the vernacular while at the same time aiming their work toward broader audiences. This paper will offer a reading of Yassin Adnan’s novel Hot Maroc, which is essentially a tragi-comic homage to his home city of Marrakech. Displaying a dazzling knowledge of Moroccan literary and popular culture, the author deftly pivots between hyper-local events in Marrakech politics, Moroccan national scandals, high Arab literary culture, Muslim religious history, and the vulgar and adolescent rants of the novel’s young protagonists online and in person, all expressed in discourse-appropriate language registers. This novel grapples with the age-old tale of traditional culture and its valorization that is being forced to cede turf to a younger generation striving to find a fresh voice in protest and on the internet. Not only was the novel quite successful in terms of sales (in Morocco and abroad), but it was also long-listed for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This paper will examine this groundbreaking multi-glossic novel about the internet, focusing specifically on how Adnan utilizes Moroccan darija – in narrative, dialogue, and online interactions – taking into consideration the role of the internet in widening the appeal of a Moroccan novel that focuses on hyper-local events and that uses the local vernacular to a broad, Arab reading public. In other words, I aim to read this novel that can be considered one of Morocco’s first novels about the internet through the prism of the internet’s role in the increasing use of vernacular language and its acceptance in writing across the Arab world.