The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World

Abstract

This volume comes out of a four year research project (The sociology and ideology of language change in the Arab world) based in Oslo, but involving scholars from -besides Norway -Egypt and Morocco, France and Britain, the us and Canada.Thanks to a generous research grant from the Research Council of Norway, we have been able to meet in three workshops -in Cairo, Oslo and Rabat -in order to arrive at a conceptual and empirical framework for the project and to discuss preliminary versions of the contributions to this volume.We also designed the issues and questions for two large-scale surveys on attitudes and practices concerning written Arabic, carried out in Cairo and Rabat.The results of these surveys have already been made publicly available in two tabulation reports published by the Norwegian research institute Fafo: Language and Change in Egypt: Social and Cultural Indicators Survey and Language and Social Survey in Morocco.The editors, dr.Jacob Høigilt (senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo) and professor Gunvor Mejdell (University of Oslo), have thoroughly enjoyed the company of and scholarly discussions with our colleagues.We believe our cooperative efforts have resulted in an interesting, highly relevant and valuable volume on writing Arabic, its politics and practices.Several institutions deserve thanks for their support and facilitation throughout the project.First, we would like to thank the Research Council of Norway for a grant that has financed this four-year, international research project on Arabic sociolinguistics (rcn project no.213473).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 84 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.