Article published in:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 10:2 (2011) ► pp. 204–226

Bleaching a dialectal voice in political discourse

Sociolinguistic choices in re-writing political speeches

| University of Kansas
In 1973, former President of Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba delivered nine speeches in which he recounted episodes of the national movement. Even though delivered in an official setting and to a highly educated audience, the semi-planned speeches were delivered in the dialectal variety of Arabic, i.e. Tunisian Arabic. The speeches were brought together in a book form titled ḥayātī, ’ārā’ī, jihadi (My Life, My Opinions, My Jihād). Their publication in a book form meant that the original performed texts were modified from a spoken mode to a written mode and ‘translated’ from Tunisian Arabic, a dialectal form of Arabic, to fuṣḥā, the High variety of Arabic (Ferguson 1959). The rewriting of the speeches led to strategic sociolinguistic choices. In the translation process, the linguistic product was regulated by a web of competing institutions of power, sites of linguistic ideologies, and linguistic practices; each of which represents an institution of power whose interests shift strategically between moments of ideological convergence and/or divergence, if not rivalry and connivance, among and between them. The present essay is an attempt to explore those sociolinguistic choices translated into erasures, shifts, modifications, and polishing of the original text. The carefully orchestrated changes in the original text, I believe, aim at re-establishing the authoritative presidential voice, restoring the institutional linguistic status quo, and rendering Bourguiba’s personal ‘ḥkāyāt’, stories, to ‘tārīkh aš-šaʿb t-tūnsi’, ‘the history of the Tunisian people’.
Keywords: and language ideology, Arab political discourse, diglossia, bilingualism, linguistics practices, sociolinguistic choices
Published online: 19 July 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.10.2.04bou
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Boussofara, Naima
2017.  In Applied Linguistics in the Middle East and North Africa [AILA Applied Linguistics Series, 15], ► pp. 11 ff. Crossref logo
Dunmire, Patricia L.
2012. Political Discourse Analysis: Exploring the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language. Language and Linguistics Compass 6:11 ► pp. 735 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

References

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail
1986 Speech Genres and Other late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press Slavic Series 8. Austin:University of Texas Press.
Bauman, Richard
1975 Verbal art as performance. American Anthropologist 77, 290–311.
1977 Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Bell, Alan
1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society13, 145–204.
Bessis, Sophie and Belhassen, Souhayr
1989 Bourguiba: Un si Long Règne (1957–1989) Paris: Jeune Afrique Presse.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant Loïc J.
1992 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre
1998 [1977] Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1991 Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1990b Droit et passe-droit. Le champs des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en oeuvre des règlements. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 81/82, 86–96.
1989 La Noblesse d’Etat. Grands Corps et Grandes Ecoles. Paris: Editions de Minuit.Google Scholar
Bourguiba, Habib
1982 Ḥayāțī, ’ārā’ī, jihādī. Tunis: Ministry of Information Publications.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles. L. and Bauman, Richard
1992 Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2(2), 131–172. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Boussofara-Omar, Naïma
2005 Political transition, linguistic shift: How a political Communiqué (bayaan) has come to be what it is. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XVIII. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 195–224. Crossref
2006 Learning the ‘linguistic habitus’ of a politician: A presidential authoritative voice in the making. Journal of Language and Politics 5(3), 325–358. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Charles A.
1959 Diglossia. Word 15, 325–340.
El Guindi, Fadwa
1999 Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Oxford/New York: Berg.Google Scholar
Errington, Joseph J.
2000 Indonesian(’s) Authority. In: Bambi Shieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, & Paul Kroskrity (eds). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 271–284.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, and Irvine, Judith
2000 Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Regimes of language: Polities and Identities, Paul Kroskrity (ed). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 35–83.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan
1998 Multiplicity and contention among language ideologies. In: Bambi Shieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, & Paul Kroskrity (eds). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 317–331.Google Scholar
Haviland, John. B.
2005 “Whorish old man” and “One (animal) gentleman”: The intertextual construction of enemies and selves. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1), 81–94. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Jane, H.
2000 Read my article. In: Paul V. Kroskrity (ed). Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe Mexico: School of American Research Press, 259–291.Google Scholar
Haeri, Niloofar
2003 Sacred Language, Ordinary People. New York: Palgrave Macmillan CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2000 Form and ideology: Arabic Sociolinguistics and Beyond. Annual Reviews Anthropology 29, 61–87.
1997 The reproduction of symbolic capital: Language, state, and class in Egypt. Current Anthropology 38(5), 795–816. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hymes, Dell
1974 Ways of speaking. In: Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (eds). Exploration in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 433–51Google Scholar
Malinowski, B.
1948 Myth in primitive psychology. In: . Glenco, Ill: Free Press.Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth
1998 Linguistic Ideology and Praxis in U.S. Law School Classrooms. In: Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard and Paul V. Kroskrity (eds). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 149–162.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol
1993 Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Parkin, David
1984 Political language. Annual Review of Anthropology (13), 345–365
Philips, Susan
2000 Constructing a Tongon Nation-State through Language Ideology in the Courtroom. In: Kroskrity Paul (ed.). Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 229–257.Google Scholar
Said, Edward
2000 Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry 26(2), 175–192. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Spitulnik, Debra
1998 Mediating Unity and Diversity: The Production of Language Ideologies in Zambian Broadcasting. In: Schieffelin (eds.). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, 163–188.Google Scholar
1999 The language of the city: Town Bemba as urban hybridity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8(1), 30–59. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn
1998 Introduction: Language Ideology as a field of inquiry. In: Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard and Paul V. Kroskrity (eds). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3–47Google Scholar