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- Title
When Jews Speak Arabic: Dialectology and Difference in Colonial Morocco.
- Authors
Kosansky, Oren
- Abstract
This article explores how Judeo-Arabic and its speaking population were constituted as objects of research and reformation in colonial Morocco. I argue that the colonial project of dialectology, which emphasized the differentiated linguistic terrain of indigenous society, operated at two opposing levels. On one hand, the study of Judeo-Arabic contributed to the idea of homogeneous orality attributed to native languages, which despite their diverse relationships with literate textuality were made to appear divorced from locally established systems of writing. On the other, the historical and affective relationship between Jews and their Arabic dialect was figured in terms that stressed Jewish alienation from their mother tongue and thereby cast native Jews as differentiated objects of francophone linguistic reform. I pay particular attention to the material mechanics of ethnographic methodology, orthographic entextualization, and editorial arrangement through which colonial dialectologists rendered the Jewish dialect as an essentially oral and Arabic dialect, despite the countervailing circulation of Judeo-Arabic texts written in the Hebrew script. This investigation contributes to our understanding of how dialectology operated as a colonial science through which the hierarchical social categories of colonial rule were established, sustained, and manipulated against the backdrop of linguistic practices that never fully conformed to their colonial representation.
- Subjects
MOROCCAN Jews; JUDEO-Arabic language; DIALECTS; ARABIC language; HEBREW language; MOROCCAN history, 1912-1956; JEWISH languages
- Publication
Comparative Studies in Society & History, 2016, Vol 58, Issue 1, p5
- ISSN
0010-4175
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0010417515000559