Resisting the Standard: Rethinking Tunisia’s Arab Identity within a Multilingual Context 

Lilia Ben Mansour

Department of English, Higher Institute of Languages of Tunis, University of Carthage, Tunisia

Abstract

The present-day linguistic situation in the Arab world is marked by spatial diversity, evident in diglossia in each member-state. Diglossia, per Charles Ferguson (1959), is the coexistence of two linguistic varieties – belonging to the same language – within the same speech community. These varieties are hierarchically aligned, with the standard being the high variety (H) and the dialect being the low variety (L). Historically, Tunisia has always been multilingual; Berber, Punic, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish and French have all gained a foothold in the area (Lawson and Sachdev, 2000). Steadfastly since the Arab conquest of North Africa, Modern Standard Arabic has been the H variety used in formal writing. Tunisian Arabic (TA) is the quotidian L variety, used alongside French and English. The linguistic scene is far from stagnant and has, since Ferguson, witnessed the encroachment of TA on Standard domains; a phenomenon described as leaky diglossia (Fasold, 1984). This paper argues that multilingual education in Tunisia has further relegated MSA to a quasi-exclusively liturgical domain moving counter to the official discourse of uniformity that champions standardization, manifest particularly in the post-independence drive towards Arab(ic)ization. The empirical data provided by 65 respondents to a questionnaire shows the substitution of MSA by French (L2) and English (L3) in traditionally MSA domains. More significantly, over 40% of respondents strongly believe MSA to be a different language, rather than a standard form of their “dialect”. These findings correlate with a stronger sense of a Tunisian, or a Tunisian first, identity where Arabic and Arabness come after. The post-Arab(ic) Tunisian reality, while breaking from a language ideology grounded in a uniform Arab identity, itself centered around the Arabic language, harkens back to a Tunisian identity that is rooted in multiplicity and multilingualism.

Keywords: Diglossia, Standardisation, Modern Standard Arabic, Tunisian Arabic, Identity