Songhay words in El Jadida, Morocco

Bulbul sent me a link I just had to post about: the article describes, among other things, a secret language used by the Gnaoua, descendants of West Africans brought to Morocco as slaves in precolonial times, in El Jadida, Morocco (on the Atlantic coast.) The author makes no attempt to seek an etymology for the words recorded, but a lot of them are immediately obvious to me - as Songhay. Thus:

* sindi "sommeil": Songhay cindi "rest"
* kuy barkuy "on s'en va": Songhay koy "person", koy "go"
* katihari "...apporter de l'eau": Songhay kati hari "bring water!"
* noro "money": Songhay nooru
* dangi bamatcin "tais-toi": Songhay dangey "be silent", ciine "speak"

Significantly, these words do not display any characteristics that would link them with Kwarandzie. To the contrary - noro and hari are unambiguously Southern, not Northern, Songhay in form, and most of the other words haven't survived in Kwarandzie.

A few words are clearly non-Songhay, and as such harder for me to identify, but these include some Bambara words:
* sgho "viande" - Bambara sogo
* dominika "nourriture" - Bambara dumuni ke

Elsewhere, I've read of Hausa words showing up in Moroccan Gnaoua music (I don't have the reference handy here in Tabelbala). The various sources of the vocabulary attest to the wide geographical range from which slaves were brought, and it's interesting that the words were preserved at all. I look forward to finding out where the other words come from... any ideas?

Baccouche on Darja

Just found an interview with Taieb Baccouche, preparing a Linguistic Atlas of Tunisia - the interview isn't actually that interesting, but I definitely want to see that atlas.

Berberised Afro-Latin speakers in Gafsa

One reader of my last post asked how late Latin (or some descendant thereof) continued to be spoken in North Africa. The answer is, pretty late: the latest attestation I came across on short notice seems to be in the major medieval geographer Al-Idrisi (12th century) who, describing Gafsa in southern Tunisia, notes that:

وأهلها متبربرون وأكثرهم يتكلّم باللسان اللطيني الإفريقي.
Its inhabitants are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin tongue.

He even gives one word of their dialect:

ولها في وسطها العين المسماة بالطرميد.
In the middle of the town is a spring called the ṭarmīd (perhaps to be related to Latin thermae).

One interesting thing to note about this statement is that he said that the town was Berberised - in other words, that, in the very century when the Banū Hilāl were rapidly spreading through Tunisia and Libya (a subject he has fairly harsh things to say about), Berber culture was prestigious enough to be adopted by members of other cultures, in particular the remaining Roman or Romanised towns, in the area. Gafsa, of course, speaks Arabic now, but several nearby villages still spoke Berber in the 1800s, and two, Sened and Majoura, well into the 1900s.

Chenanith b'Libya - in the 11th century AD?

Anyone interested in North African languages who doesn't speak Dutch should immediately check out Bulbul's posting on Latino-Punic. The Phoenicians brought their language with them to North Africa when they founded Carthage and other cities. Carthage was destroyed, of course, but many other cities continued to speak Phoenician for longer; however, like Arabic in more recent times, it changed a lot under Berber influence, and this later dialect is usually called Punic. This language was spoken by St. Augustine, who quotes a number of Phoenician words, such as salus (< shalu:sh < shalo:sh < shala:sh < thala:th) "three", in his works. In eastern Libya, as it happens, Punic continued to be written even after the Phoenician alphabet was forgotten; this body of inscriptions, using the Latin alphabet to write Punic, is called (logically enough) Latino-Punic, and a comprehensive database of such inscriptions is available from Leiden. Recently, as Bulbul points out, a thesis was submitted at Leiden on Latino-Punic and its Linguistic Environment; I would love to read it.

The twist in this tale is that Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD! Al-Bakri (whom I've mentioned before) enigmatically says of the inhabitants of Sirt in Libya that:

لهم كلام يراطنون به ليس بعربي ولا عجمي ولا بربري ولا قبطي ولا يعرفه غيرهم
‍They have a speech in which they jabber which is neither Arabic nor Ajami (by which he probably means Latin but might mean Persian) nor Berber nor Coptic, which no one but them knows.

The location (in eastern Tripolitania) is about right for it to be Punic, and if it were Greek you would expect him to know, considering he cites (more or less correctly) the Greek etymology of طرابلس (Tripoli) in the next page. So was Punic still spoken in the 11th century? Your guess is as good as mine, but it looks plausible.

Zenaga and Mauritania

Mauritania deserves some attention this week. On the rare occasions when it makes Western headlines, it's generally for slavery or famine, but this week it's distinguishing itself in a rather nobler fashion: holding its first free presidential elections. This is all the more remarkable because it comes some months after a military coup deposing the dictator who ruled Mauritania for 21 years, Maaouya Ould Taya; is it possible that a coup leader actually wants to step down in favour of an elected government? One can but hope that the appearance corresponds to the reality...

Anyway, in commemmoration of this event, I will talk a little about Zenaga this week. Zenaga is the nearly-extinct Berber language of Mauritania. Until about five hundred years ago it was spoken throughout most of the country; its ancestor would have been the language of the Almoravids. However, after the main Berber tribe, the Lamtuna, was defeated by the Arab Beni Ma`qil, most tribes gradually shifted to Hassaniya Arabic, which itself came to contain numerous Zenaga loanwords. The "marabout" tribes, those specialising in Islamic religious learning, retained Zenaga longest, and to this day it continues to be used, at least by the elderly, in a few areas near the southern Atlantic coast. It is remarkably divergent from other Berber varieties, due partly to a number of sound shifts (x > k, l > dj) and partly to a rather different vocabulary, incorporating words rare elsewhere in Berber along with Wolof and Pulaar loanwords. In addition to influencing Hassaniya Arabic, it has also contributed a number of loanwords to the Azer dialect of Soninke, and several words - notably the words for three of the five prayer times, and some religious holidays - to Wolof. Catherine Taine-Cheikh has been doing some documentation of it.

At least one of the few books on this language is available online: Le Zénaga des tribus sénégalaises, by General Faidherbe - although, chillingly, the author dedicates it to the genocidal mass murderer King Leopold II.

Maghreb sociolinguistics

I've just come across a couple of interesting posts on the North African sociolinguistic situation. On Aqoul, Shaheen discusses a topic close to my heart - how the dominance of French hurts the Maghreb's economy and makes new ideas take longer to reach it:

The ubiquity of French not only aggravates the dependence of the Maghreb to France, it impedes the region's ability to develop beyond its traditional (colonial) ties. Worse, it not only serves as an economic chain, it culturally acts like an albatross around their necks: everything, from law to social models is borrowed from France. Considering how inefficient and sterile French models and intellectual production can be today in most fields when compared to their anglo-saxon counterparts, the Maghreb is riding a losing horse. It isolates individual Maghrebis from most scientific and economic literature...

Some of the comments are worth reading as well, and the author links to published online papers (bibliography in a blog post - always a trend worth promoting!)

In a more personal post, "Filjazair" describes Algeria's linguistic "schizophrenia", as it appears to a heritage learner:

I hear, a lot, things like: "Don't bother learning darija, it's not worth it"; "You don't need to learn fusha [formal Arabic], nobody speaks it"; "Our language [Arabic, formal Arabic] is being corrupted - we're still in the age of colonisation!" (this from one student who'd heard that another student had to write her university thesis in French); "Everybody speaks French, that's all you need"; "Everybody speaks darija, that's all you need."

Chaos.

So I'm in a French class with Algerians who already know a lot of French but speak it sloppily, and who feel a need - because of work, because of school, because of future prospects - to get better. This week I start formal Arabic lessons with a tutor downtown. And along the way I'm trying to pick up snippets of darija to use in the street, so as not to have to use too much of the French or Arabic I'm learning, because French marks you as a foreigner (or worse, a snob - an Algerian in contempt of her Algerianness) and because nobody actually speaks the formal Arabic.

North African language policy

MoorishGirl has an interesting post on an article on a round-table debate on Moroccan Arabic, or Darija, as "a medium of cultural expression". She comments:

I'm fully in favor of using Darija, because of the huge impact it would have on the creation of a reading culture. Imagine: All children's books right now are in Modern Standard Arabic, which is a language no one learns until first grade (i.e. age 6 or 7), by which time reading habits are already in place for many kids.

I think this is a crucial point. Developing a literature of sorts in Darja would allow kids to get into the habit of reading way earlier. A fair number of kids in the West are reading by the age of three; for an Algerian or Moroccan kid to even understand much of the language his/her books are written in at that age would be unheard of. With Darja literature for them to use, they could start reading before they ever started school; it might even lead to them acquiring literary Arabic faster. Moreover, an oral literary tradition already exists, best exemplified by the traditions of melhoun poetry and chaabi lyrics; the language used in these is recognizably a literary register, and all that would be needed would be to write it. My puristic instincts would also rejoice in a move with the potential to stem the tragic loss of inherited vocabulary, and overuse of French, now afflicting Darja. And after all, why should Arabic-speaking kids continue to be deprived of the chance to read in their native language now that Tamazight-speaking ones are finally getting that chance?

However, I would envision Darja as a supplement to literary Arabic, not a replacement. Arabic connects Algeria (and no doubt Morocco), not only to the Arab world but to its own past, not to mention allowing it to engage more fully with its religion. The language in which Amir Abdelkader and Ibn Khaldun wrote - and of which generations were deprived by French rule - should always be a crucial part of an Algerian education. Also - as the ongoing struggle to get adequate higher educational textbooks published even in literary Arabic reminds us - a written Darja would take centuries at least to build up a literature comparable to major languages.

As long as I'm pondering educational policy, what should be done with foreign languages is obvious: end the domination of French. Nothing wrong with French per se, but an all-French policy is a handicap in a global context, isolating Algeria in the ghetto of Francophony at a time when English is a prerequisite to serious scientific work even in Paris, and an embarrassment at home, where it remains a scandal in conservative eyes. From 3rd grade on, have a choice between French and English (and maybe even Spanish) as the second language, and raise a generation of educated North Africans that do not all share a single foreign language; only thus can the domination of French in North Africa, with all its attendant sociological divisions and economic problems, be ended. Of course, in an educational system that has a serious shortage of good teachers as it is, this is a distant dream... but dreaming can be useful.