The Sociolinguistic Market in Cairo: Gender, Class and Education. - Review - book review

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2000 by Atiqa Hachimi

Niloofar Haeri. The Sociolinguistic Market in Cairo. Gender, Class and Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 273 pages. Hardcover $110.

Haeri offers an empirical sociolinguistic investigation of the roles of gender, social class, and education in the use of classical and non-classical Arabic in Cairo, Egypt. Her work brings together many important issues of Arabic sociolinguistics with the aim of understanding stylistic variation in Cairo.

The book consists of seven chapters. Chapter one briefly sketches the theoretical frameworks from which the book draws; namely Labov's variationist paradigm, Ferguson's diglossia, a model which stresses the functional differences of classical (high) and non-classical (low) varieties in Arabic speech communities, and Bourdieu's concept of linguistic market.

Haeri introduces the concept of the "standard variety", which is crucial in understanding the instantiation problem of language change in the variationist paradigm. Sociolinguistic theory has it that social groups who use non-standard or new variants are those who initiate and promote linguistic change, while those who resist it and persist in using "standard" or old variants are said to be conservative.

Interpreting the role of men and women in language change along these lines has revealed a paradox in the linguistic behavior of women: women are "innovative" and "conservative" at the same time. That is, women lead men in targeting and achieving the standard variant in situations of stable variation, i.e., when the variant is above the level of consciousness in the community; and they lead men in targeting and achieving an innovation when the variant is a change in progress, i.e., when the variant is below the level of social awareness. Haeri argues that" a 'paradox' can exist only if we assume that the social meanings of all variable forms are directly comparable to each other theoretically, and from the point of view of the speakers who use them" (p.4}

Surprisingly, Haeri does not entertain the idea that a paradox may not exist at all if women are not a priori taken to behave in a monolithic way. Treating women as a single group based exclusively on their shared biological traits is both an empirical and a theoretical oversimplification.

Haeri moves on to discuss the co-existence of Classical and Egyptian Arabic on stylistic variation: diglossia. She observes that variation in diglossic communities has been conceptualized as a competition between H and L levels. She strongly rejects the notion of the "intermediate" variety known as Educated Spoken Arabic, to which some scholars have resorted to account for the mixture between Classical and non-classical Arabic in the speech of educated speakers. She contends that the source of the problem lies in insisting on considering non-classical varieties as "colloquial" varieties instead of full-fledged languages. She disagrees with the idea that the intermediate variety is a separate entity and argues that intermediate varieties are stylistic resources that Egyptian speakers exploit along the Arabic stylistic continuum. It is not clear from Haeri's discussions, however, what counts as an entity and what does not. Furthermore, she states that the speech of educated Egyptians is "one of the styles in wh ich Egyptian Arabic under certain conditions is spoken"(p.14). Haeri does not elaborate on what these conditions are, or what the social meanings of this style shifting might be. I believe that whether intermediate varieties are separate entities in their own right, or mere stylistic resources is not nearly as important as what speakers accomplish by exploiting the stylistic continuum and the switching between varieties itself.

Chapter two gives a detailed description of the methodology used in sampling the Cairene speech community. Haeri relied on sociolinguistic interviews for data elicitation and adopted analytical techniques of the standard quantitative approach of urban sociolinguistics. In this approach, the linguistic behavior of a speech community is based on frequency-counts of standard and non-standard variables across stylistic and social stratification. The linguistic variants Haeri examined are phonological, namely palatalization and qaf. Linguistically, palatalization is a phonological process in which a sound takes on a palatal place of articulation usually in assimilation to a neighboring palatal sound such as /i/ and /y/. The social factors she considered evolve around age, gender, socio-economic class, and education of subjects. The stylistic types used also reflect the standard

Labovian division of styles into casual speech and careful speech, which consists of reading from a word list.

Haeri's reevaluation of the diglossic High and Low distinction requires her to assume that speaking and reading from a list constitute a stylistic continuum in diglossic setting, as might be the case in non-diglossic setting. However, there is a great distance between spoken and written Arabic. For example, Keith Walters has demonstrated that "speaking" and "reading aloud" in Arabic are two unrelated activities, both cognitively and socially. Thus, deciding a priori that the notion of style is homogeneous and directly comparable in Arabic-speaking speech communities and English-speaking speech communities is ignoring the different social meanings that seemingly similar stylistic activities encode in the two speech communities.