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August 03, 2007

Gulfies and Berberism versus Salafism (a trivial and somewhat boring story from the 10e)

An amusing, for me at least, conversation witnessed in the 10e arrondissement yesterday at a bodega / dukkan / epicerie shop run by a Chleuh. Myself, waiting to buy my mineral water and afternoon yoghurt snacks.

A unkept beardy type salafi sort from (by accent I am guessing the origins) some aroubi backwoods place such as KSA or Yemen buying groceries from your typical round-headed dorky looking Chleuh shopkeeper. As it is clear the aroubi fellow speaks piss-poor French, and the shopkeeper no English, they use Arabic. Of course the shopkeeper uses derridja, and our aroubi fellow rather more formal Arabic.

For reasons that entirely escaped me the buying of a certain article (some leben nastiness) involved a really stupid exchange about quantity, price, blah blah. I confess I hardly paid attention as I was merely annoyed at being held up. But he is my favourite shopkeeper, and it's not his fault the googly eyed unkept bearded aroubi fellow is tedious.

All this is quite boring until the linguistic dispute.

At some point the aroubi fellow gets annoyed at not quite following what our Chleuh is saying, and makes a snide comment about our Chleuh speaking more French than Arabic.

To which the Chleuh replies, "Arabic is your language, not mine. You start speaking Chleuh, and I will start speaking your language - or you can learn French."

Not particularly funny I suppose in the abstract, but it cause me to break out laughing - I think much to the embarrassment of the aroubi fellow who thought the conversation was 'private.'

It was also an amusing highlight of a certain almost... American attitude a certain kind of Arabic speaker has to their Ikhouan who aren't Arab.

Posted by The Lounsbury at August 3, 2007 09:21 AM
Filed Under: MENA Region General

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Comments

I love/hate having to look 5 different words up on wikipedia (fr/en), google, etc when reading your cultural/social entries. I like the expansion of my vocabulary but the usual search sources are rather unhelpful. Surprisingly, Chleuh was on en.wikipedia... We (and by we, I mean I) need a menapedia!

Posted by: Frandroid Atreides at August 4, 2007 06:43 AM

Menapedia. An excellent idea.

Posted by: Ali K at August 4, 2007 08:12 AM

Terrible idea, too much work, and if open wiki merely doomed to attract the lunatices.

As to the vocab, sorry mate, part of my indifference to readership.

But Chleuh are berbers, south of Morocco, and the "new Jews" as it were (to take an expression used among some Maghrebines) being reputed to be grasping shopkeepers wherever they turn up.

aroubi is a fine usage meaning effectively hick, uncultured cretin...

Posted by: The Lounsbury at August 4, 2007 12:37 PM

That kind of comment coming from Eastern Arabs is actually not common only for Chleuh, it is for Maghrebi Arabs as well. For some reason, they believe we all speak French. Or Berber. They're also a bit suprised when they realize that Tunisian/Libyan dialects are quite intelligible to them.

Posted by: Shaheen [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 5, 2007 07:27 PM

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