La Langue Maternelle
Global Voices was kind enough to link to this blog, but the sub-heading made me pause - “They Blog In English.” For those familiar with American sci-fi, this brings to mind such classics as “They Came From Outer Space,” “They Live,” and the ever-popular “They.”
It also made me consider something - most of the Moroccan blogs are written in French or fus’ha, not darija. I know, I know, darija’s not a written language, stop ranting already. However, since I’m a blogger who writes in my native language, English, I wonder if I have a freedom of expression that Moroccan bloggers miss out on. Since they’re fluent in French and Arabic, it’s not my intent to accuse them of being less than eloquent - but how different would it be if someone blogged in Darija? Or Tamazight? Would the colloquial terms and slang make it more interesting? Would they feel more relaxed in their writing style? Just food for thought, I could be completely off-base - and if anyone knows of blogs written in darija, please let me know!
November 30th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
Write in Arabic with “heavy” use of slang words is fun, I think people don’t write in Darija or Tamazight because its not easy process, how much time it takes you to find Arabic letters on keyboard?
Mabrook new theme
November 30th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
It takes me a relatively long time to find Arabic letters on my keyboard, but I type pretty quickly in English…
Hm. I think I’ll attempt a post in Darija tomorrow.
November 30th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
I know at least one
http://www.rayhane.com/index.php
December 1st, 2006 at 2:44 am
Some Kuwaiti blogs do that, they write in Arabic letters but in the Kuwaiti dialect instead of fus’ha.
Sometimes you find arabic bloggers using numbers with letters to form words. These numbers represent arabic letters. For instance, 3yoon means ayoon (eye), 7ar means har (hot), 5aled means Khaled (the name Khaled), get it?
December 1st, 2006 at 9:00 am
Ahem, saw that global voices piece and was wondering if the Peace Corps was going to be asking you for a little meeting….You know that they strongly discourage PCVs from blogging, BTW (not that you are taking that path).
December 1st, 2006 at 11:12 am
Don - Yep, I have seen that, but since Arabic isn’t my native language, I think transliteration actually makes it harder for me. I didn’t make any meaningful progress in learning darija until I learned Arabic script. For example, say a Moroccan blogger wrote “Ayn.” I would probably know what they meant, but I’ve seen the same word written different ways - like “Habibi Ya Nour Al Ein,” for example.
If they wrote ???, I’d get it.
December 1st, 2006 at 1:18 pm
It is easy once you get the hang of it, Like Habibi ya nour Al Ein would be
7abibi ya nour al 3en, ya sakin 5yali
December 1st, 2006 at 2:36 pm
I guess I’ll have to practice that, too…sigh…because I’d write the next line as “Ahshek baqqali sneen, Walah ghayrak fee bali.” I’ll bet that’s not what Arabic bloggers would write.
December 1st, 2006 at 3:25 pm
“Askeek ba’ali sneen”, the first part is good, “walah ‘3erik fee bali” would change. Notice the apostrophe used as the dot over the 3en letter to make it ‘3en. (ghen). Anyway, there is no hard and fast rule on how to write in arabic using latin letters.
BTW, recently advertisers in the Arab world are starting to advertise their stuff using this new (to them) numbers and letters arabic/latin writing mix to make themselves sound cool, even though this way of writing was around for the last 15 years or more.