Sarali Gintsburg

In this paper we explore the interaction between Maghrebi Darijas and Romance languages from the perspective of both historical and contemporary evidence. As Caubet 2002, following Lahlou 1991 argues, among contemporary educated populations in urban centres across the Maghreb, bilingual/multilingual interaction is the norm not the exception. Historical evidence tells us this was also the case in 11th century al-Andalus, though it is of course impossible down the centuries to reconstruct the actual interaction. We will however argue that certain surviving texts can provide an indication when analysed in terms of the constraints on conversational codeswitching such as is provided by Aabi. We start from the position that Maghrebi Darija is a special case of linguistic permeability due to its politico-geographic location on the frontier and given its thousand year history of close contact with Romance. To investigate this phenomenon in both its historical and contemporary manifestations we draw on the current construct of translanguaging, an alternative perspective on multilingual interaction to code switching as expounded in Baynham & Lee (2018) and the notion of convivencia as elaborated by Bossong in his study of linguistic conviviality and coexistence in mediaeval Andalusian poetry (Bossong 2010). We then go on to analyze this in two time slices: examining evidence of the productive convivencia/coexistence of romance and dialectal Arabic i) in the kharjas of 11th century al-Andalus as discussed by Bossong and others and ii) in the modern Maghreb music and performance scene (cf. Caubet 2002; Baynham & Gintsburg 2022). We do this here through analysis of a song by the Algerian singer Talyani and a performance of the Moroccan comedian Hanane el-Fadhili, using in both time slices translanguaging and Bossong’s notion of convivencia in our analysis. We then conclude by arguing as Heath (2020) does that for effective research into such varieties as Maghrebi Arabic, both currently and historically, it is necessary for cross disciplinary work between researchers in Arabic and its Romance contact languages, in order to fully address its sociolinguistics. We understand this as a form of disciplinary translanguaging to be undertaken in order to establish the dynamics of the convivencia/coexistence of Arabic and Romance elements in this type of data.

Spiritual, sometimes directly imbued and sometimes indirectly suggestive of religiosity, poetic genres are common in all corners of the Arab world. While authored religious poetry in Arabic is fairly well studied, oral, unauthored poetic traditions remain somewhat under-researched, although the latter represents an intriguingly complex microcosm infused with local systems of beliefs and traditions. In my study, I propose to examine one such tradition – from the region of the Jbala (northern Morocco). This tradition is generally regarded as consisting of three genres (ayta, ayyu, and ughniya). Textually, however, all three genres are very similar, and entire beyts freely migrate from one genre to another. Although Jebli poetry cannot be classified as religious, much of it is contextually linked to religious aspects of life of the Jbala people – most notably, pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints, as well as lifestyle shaped by Islamic faith. In addition, this tradition draws from the heritage of the famous sixteenth-century Moroccan Sufi Abderrahman el-Mejdoub. In this article, I will demonstrate how Jebli's poetic texts are built on Islamic cultural code and how the readability of this code depends on the religious identity of the audience. To do so, I suggest analyzing the available corpus of Jebli poetry.

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been examined by Soviet and Russian Arabists, their research remains largely unknown to Western comparativists. The mutual influence between these two literary traditions goes beyond mere literary translation while also transcending a straightforward bilateral relationship. Building on the ideas of David Damrosch, I summarize the impact of Maksim Gorky and his literary works on contemporary Arab literature. In the Arab world, Gorky remains one of the most popular and influential Soviet Russian writers, even legendary. There was a popular belief among Arabs that Gorky learned to read from the Russian translation of The Thousand and One Nights, even that the writer had Eastern origins. As one of the Russian writers most widely translated into Arabic, Gorky reappears in new translations even today. This chapter offers a brief critical review of his works translated into Arabic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, followed by an examination of his influence on the Egyptian writer Khairy Shalabi (1938- 2011), and the Franco-Egyptian writer Albert Cossery (1913-2008). By including Francophone Arabic writing, I show the complex trajectory of Gorky’s influence on Arab literature and beyond.

In this paper, I offer reading of the oral tradition of the Jbala (Northern Morocco) from the cognitive perspective. To get a better understanding of the process of spontaneous poetic creation I use the notions of frame and script and apply them to the genre of ayyu, a short improvised oral poetic genre from the Jbala region. In the introductory section, I briefly present the field of cognitive poetics and discuss last advances in it. Then I present the oral poetic tradition of the Jbala and demonstrate how frames and scripts operate when poetry is performed live by analyze in detail two frames, typical of Jebli poetry together with the scripts associated with them, and then summarize my findings in the concluding section of the paper.

This study aimed to describe the form of assertive, directive, expressive, commissive, and declarative illocutionary speech acts analysed based on the data collected. The method used was descriptive qualitative research. The data used were Arabic tweets contained in the twitter account @gbranit جبران خليل جبـران which totalled 30 tweets. Data collection used listening, note-taking, and documentation. The listening and note-taking techniques were carried out by collecting twitter tweets and selecting them for analysis. The analysis technique used Miles and Huberman’s interactive model comprising data collection, data reduction, data exposition, and conclusion drawing. This study revealed 30 data classified into 5 forms of illocutionary speech acts, namely 3 assertive speech acts, 6 directive speech acts, 13 expressive speech acts, 5 commissive speech acts, and 3 declarative speech acts. From all types of illocutionary speech acts, expressive speech acts were mostly used by speakers.

Mike Baynham is Emeritus Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). He was a Visiting Professor at York St John University (2020–2023) and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney (2019–2022). His recent publications include: Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach (with R. Breeze and S. Gintsburg, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Translation and Translanguaging (with T. K. Lee, Routledge, 2019). In retirement he has become engaged with writing and translating poetry and various types of performance. He translates from Spanish and Arabic mainly and has published translations of the poetry of the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika (Baynham 2020). He is currently translating the poetry of the Moroccan zajal poet Adil Latefi and the Kurdish Syrian poet Ceger Hillo. His translation of a poem by Adil was awarded second prize in the 2023 Stephen Spender Poetry Competition. He works as a poetry editor at The Other Side of Hope magazine, setting up a bilingual poetry section, working title Other Tongue/Mother Tongue. In this interview, Mike first elaborates on the reasons behind his involvement with narrative studies and how it became clear that the Labovian model of narrative is not always valid with all types of narrative data. He then reflects on the definition of narrative, the role space and time have in it and offers, as an example of non-linear narrative a “picaresque” story, in the Arab tradition of storytelling. In conclusion Mike offers his vision of the future of narrative studies.