New Realism, Language Variation, and Egyptian Society

In modern Egyptian literature realist narrators have often considered language variation as an instrument to represent social classes, religious affiliation, education levels, geographic and gender identities. The adoption of standard Arabic or Egyptian vernacular in dialogues, with code switching and mixing phenomena, sometimes has even transcended language reality having rather the aim of defining groups with their roles, social positions and specific cultural traits. Among the realist texts written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some show a dominant search for verisimilitude while others indicate a symbolic or ideological value of the authors’ choices. My contribution presents some findings of a study I am carrying out on literary works displaying one or the other stance, al-Arḍ (1953), by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Šarqāwī, and al-Ǧabal (1959), by Fatḥī Ġānim, whose authors’ main purpose is to represent the harsh reality of rural communities opposed to the governmental unfair policies in the 1930s and 1940s, before the Revolution of July 1952.