Qawfing fit
April 3rd, 2008Day four of my Economist language diary
Politics and glottal stops in Palestinian Arabic
ARIEL SHARON’S last act was to stop me learning Arabic. When the then Israeli prime minister suffered the massive brain haemorrhage that threw Israeli politics into disarray two years ago, I cancelled the next morning’s lesson and suspended the intensive course for which I had taken time off work. I never found time to restart it. Since then I’ve been taking lessons in dribs and drabs.
The nice thing is that Palestinians are so impressed with a foreigner who speaks any Arabic at all that I always get compliments. Unfortunately, I speak it better than I understand it, so most conversations start off in a blaze of glory and then sputter to a halt.
You can’t just “learn Arabic”, though, any more than you can “learn cookery”. First, you have to decide what kind.
Quranic or literary Arabic, known as fussha, is not much use unless you plan to become a scholar. The media uses what English-speakers call “Modern Standard Arabic” and Arabs call wussta, “halfway”, which as the name suggests is halfway between written and spoken Arabic. I tried learning it once. But since nobody talks like a TV announcer in real life, not only do you sound rather strange speaking it; you also don’t catch your own mistakes from how others speak, which is the only way to become fluent.
Spoken Arabic is almost a different language. For a journalist, it’s the most useful for talking to people in. But if you think British English varies a lot from place to place, it is absolutely uniform by comparison with spoken Arabic. Within Israel/Palestine alone there are several accents and dialects, sometimes literally a stone’s throw apart. People in the refugee camps often keep the accent of where their grandparents came from, even if their camp is within a city where people speak differently.
And your accent, like everything else, is highly political. Since I live in Jerusalem, it would make sense to study Jerusalem Arabic, which is considered high-class. My first teacher here was from Jerusalem. Jerusalemites, however, don’t pronounce the letter qawf, so they call their hometown al-Uds rather than al-Quds, and they say things like da’i'a instead of daqiqa (minute). I find this confusing; it’s like trying to learn English from a Cockney who says I wan’ a bo’le o’ wa’er.
I thought of a total immersion option. But in the Palestinian cities near Jerusalem too many people speak English. The more distant ones aren’t practical for my job. And in the countryside they pronounce the letter ka as cha, like in “cheese”. Since one of the commonest greetings is keef haalak? (How are you?) I feared that every time I met city types they’d laugh at me for being a bumpkin.
I could study with a Druze. They speak (or claim to speak) a “purer” form of Arabic, pronounced similarly to fussha. I even have a Druze friend to practice with. But Druze Arabic differs from Palestinian in certain words, including quite everyday ones, and even in shades of grammar. And Palestinians view the Druze with suspicion, since they serve in the Israeli army. So talking like a Druze, even if it’s clear you aren’t one, could make people jump to conclusions about your political sympathies.
In the end, I’ve found an excellent and highly experienced teacher in Jerusalem whose Arabic is that of the Palestinians from the north of Israel: a clear accent with a nice qawf, no class stigma, not too much political baggage, and I can visit her without crossing any checkpoints. Just one small detail: she’s not a Palestinian, but a Uruguayan-born Jew. Well, you can’t have everything.