The Choice of Linguistic Register in Contemporary Egyptian Prose Fiction
The main objective of the project is to analyse the use of varieties of Arabic in recently
published Egyptian prose fiction written by young authors, and to investigate the sociological
and ideological ideas behind the choices of linguistic register after the political and social
events in the country since January 2011.
There have been made numerous studies on spoken Arabic dialects. However, written dialect
use has not been studied to such a wide extent. Implementation of dialect or dialectal features
in literature is not a recent phenomenon, and several studies of Modern Arabic Literature have
focused on the usage of dialect in written dialogue. The authors’ initial objective when writing
dialogues in dialect was to make the story more realistic, and later also for humorous purposes.
There has been an increase in use of written dialect in several literary fields due to factors
such as change in attitude and diversification of means of printing. The project studies both
these factors, with an emphasis on attitudinal change, especially the attitudes among young
and debuting authors of prose fiction.
When studying the linguistic registers of Egyptian prose fiction, it is important not to centre
the attention to a cut between Standard Arabic and the dialect, but also pay attention to
variations authors may choose by sticking not only to one variety or the other, but mixing
them or switching between them. The study draws on Bourdieu’s theory about language and
power as well as the field of Literacy Studies and the study of writing systems and
orthography.
The PhD project is part of a joint research project between Fafo, the University of Oslo, the
University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University, City University New York and Cairo
University called “The ideology and sociology of language change in the Arab world”.