ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the emergence of the opposition between the “rural” and the “urban” identities in Arab societies. It shows that this opposition is lacking in most, if not all, Arabic dialects. But because of massive rural migration of modern times, together with the Western capitalist view which considers the urban life-style as the best form of social progress, some modern Arabs are developing equivalents of the “rural/urban” dichotomy. The native terms used as potential equivalents of “rural” differ from one country to another or even from one region to another within the same country. For example, while “fallaħin” (farmers) is used in Egypt to refer to rural folk and their life-style, the same term does not have similar connotations in the Gulf, North Africa or the Levant. In comparison, speakers in the major cities of Morocco express a similar concept by using “ʕroubi”, a word originally referring to the ethnolinguistic group of “Bedouin” Arabs, while in the far north of the country, the word “ʒəbli” is used, also an ethnolinguistic term referring to the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the Rif Mountains. On the basis of this remark, the chapter reviews critically some studies on sociolinguistic variation and argues for the inadequacy of the concept of “social class”, in comparison with local categories, in attempts to elucidate the social meaning of variation in Arabic varieties. The chapter ends with a discussion of the role of agency and language in the change of social categorization. It shows that sociolinguistic variants associated with traditional categories are assigned a new meaning through a novel assemblage to construct “urban” and “rural” identities. In this sense, sociolinguistic variation is argued not only to reflect social categorization, but also to change that categorization.
