Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipédia new language : Algerian

[Stirling Newberry]

On Nov 27, 2004, at 2:16 PM, medifel at altern.org wrote:

> Algerian language, badly named "Arabic", Algerian Spoken, is the 
> language
> of more than 20 millions persons. It's a mix of lot of languages like
> arabic, turkish, french, spanish, berber etc.

Western Colloquial Arabic is also spoken in Tunisia and Libya, and is 
basically part of the Arabic family of languages in its root and 
pattern grammar. The situation there and in many other nations is of 
"diglossia", where there is an official standard version of a language, 
in this case "Modern Standard Arabic", with colloquial use of a related 
language or dialect. The Romans during the empire had a similar 
situation, the written Latin being different from the spoken language. 
West Colloquial Arabic, sometimes called "spoken Arabic" has almost 
30,000,000 speakers between all of its dialects.

That being said, the differences between the dialects - between 
countries and between rural and urban variations - are quite large. The 
Algerian varieties of the language show the beginnings of creolization 
with French, including imports of grammar, phrasing and words that are 
integrated at every level of the language. These include code switching 
- that is, whole words or phrases lifted from French - down to the use 
of words which have been made more arabic in sound and morphology, that 
is "loan words", though I've always disliked that term because they 
aren't given back.


> It's not exactly arabic, because gramatically it's totaly different.
> Speakers of Algerian who don't know what we call "classical" arabic, 
> don't
> understood arabic.

That's not entirely true. when written Western Colloquial Arabic is 
closer to written arabic than it is when spoken. As is the case in many 
societies where literacy rates are low, the spoken forms diverge a 
great deal more than the written forms do.


> Algerian language is the common language of every body in Algeria, but
> since independance (1962), the Pan-arabism vision denied totaly the
> existance of a specific algerian language, as it denied the existance
> berber languages.

Closer to 85%, with numerous smaller languages, including the Berber 
familiies, taking up the rest.

> Algerian language was almost not written at all (no newspaper, no book)
> but with the Internet we discovered that we coul wrote our own language
> (using latin alphabet with some specific caracters for special sounds).
> So we want to create an algerian Wikipedia to to persuade people that 
> we
> can use our language as a normal one.

There is writing in Western Colloquial Arabic using Arabic characters. 
There are also missionaries who use colloquial Arabic for their 
conversion work, and there is if I recall correctly, a translation of 
the Christian bible into the dialect. Most of the extent source 
material is in Arabic characters.

-

Here is where information starts to run out, and judgment enters in. 
While there is no standardized form of this language, there is a recent 
ethnological dictionary, and there are manuals for spoken courses. 
There is little to no publication in the language. The wikipedia would 
be, almost literally, the first standardized such project, and is, 
almost by definition, an attempt to construct a nationalistic language. 
We were talking about nynorsk and bokmal earlier, this would, in 
effect, be the same kind of project that created nynorsk as a stable 
linguistic set in the first place: taking a series of dialects which 
are separate from the "High" version of the language and giving them a 
standardize literature which acts as the synchronization point for the 
language. Western Colloquial Arabic is a "normal" language - it is 
based on dialects that have been spoken in North Africa for hundreds of 
years, and has millions of speakers that are majorities in three 
nations.

However, the polities of each of these three nations are committed to a 
policy of diglossia, that is having a standard Arabic to be connected 
with all of the other major Arabic states. The writer referes to the 
"pan-arabist" version, which would correspond to the mandating of 
Modern Standard Arabic - a modernized version of classical Arabic - as 
the official language of government. This isn't to say "no", just to 
put forward that there is no government support for creation of WCA as 
a literate language.

While people may know that I am an advocate of such projects - the 
creation or recreation of languages through the Romantic language 
process - I am not sure that wikimedia is in that line of work. The 
state of WCA is "normal" for a non-literate language group, that is an 
inter-related set of dialects which are mutually intelligible to 
various degrees with some written examples, but no communication zone 
which works within the language. An analogy would be Middle English 
around 1300: there are several dialects, no one of which is 
predominant, some literature, but little in the way of standardization. 
My instinct would be to ask for proof that the Language formation 
process has occured, or is occuring: that is that there is a community 
which is conscious of their dialect as an aspect of group identity and 
is willing to engage in the work to create a body of literature, 
scholarship and standardization that goes with having a literate 
language rather than a spoken dialect group. Examples of this would be 
a widely read author who uses the "vernacular", publication of 
newspapers or books in the language, the creation of associations for 
preservation and advancement of the language, broadcasting in the 
language by native speakers, web sites dedicated to content creation 
and so on. Basically, signs that people for reasons of their own, are 
using the spoken vernacular in a written form which is converging on a 
written dialect that is distinguishable from MSA.

I don't know if people are looking for advice but here is mine:

1. This sounds an awful lot like node, or someone similar. First rule 
out trollship. I'm suspicious because the key feature of Spoken 
Algerian Arabic isn't spanish, it is French. And any speaker of WCA 
sufficiently with it to write to us would be reasonably fluent in 
French, which is both part of WCA and a widely used language in 
Algeria.

2. There isn't, to my knowledge, a groundswell for creating WCA as a 
written language. The person asking couldn't even like to one website 
which is devoted to making WCA a written language and unifying the 
dialects. This is a minimum: until there is activity, there is no 
"language" in the literate sense, there are dialects with written 
examples. Have the person proposing show support from some of these 
groups. This both indicates community, and it indicates good faith in 
the proposal: after all, a person genuinely wanting to advance such a 
cause would be happy to bring in as many groups as possible, where as a 
troll looking for a free play space to vandalize would not want others 
looking over his/her shoulder.

3. If (2) can be documented, create a wiktionary for it. If the 
wiktionary takes off, then that is good evidence for a language 
community that wants to have a written version of their spoken 
language, and is committed to creating it. If it is just one person 
documenting the language, that can be tested against published sources. 
If it is trollery, that can be seen fairly quickly.

4. If the wiktionary works, create a wikipedia.

My two cents, YMMV.