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3. Discourse and identity: Texting in the Sudanese communicative ecology
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3 Discourse and identity: Texting in the Sudanese communicative ecology (3) ϴϴϴϴϴϗΎΘθϣ Ϧ mushtaagiiiin ‘I miiiiiiss you’ This piece of SMS data represents one of the most common expressions not only in text messages, but in spoken communication, and is said and heard multiple times daily by most all Sudanese people. Unlike its English translation, its use is not limited to intimate utterances between close friends or lovers, but is quite appropriate between acquaintances, or even colleagues. It’s been said to me even after having met someone once. It commonly works its way into most greeting sequences, the appropriate response being bil-aktar ‘even more so’. It is especially said by young women and is usually spoken enthusiastically, with a higher pitch and more loudly than normal speech. In the text above, we can see the emotional affect marked with a repeated long vowel yaa (iiii). This chapter shows how the textual interaction relates to broader communication patterns and oral conversational style in the Sudanese context, how it adheres to or diverges from other means of interaction, and how cooperation is achieved is this medium. It is understood as one context for the expression of an urban Northern Sudanese identity and culture. In text-messaging, we see features of Sudanese Colloquial Arabic1 which normally dominates oral domains, as well as a modern form of Classical Arabic, fuSHa2, which dominates written domains, 1 Sudanese Colloquial Arabic (SCA), the main dialect of Arabic spoken in Greater Khartoum, is also referred to as Khartoum Arabic (Miller & Abu-Manga 1992) but I will use the former term or its acronym (SCA) in this thesis. 2 fuSHa (pronounced fuus-Ha) is the Arabic term for Classical Arabic (CA), called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the American academic community. I use both fuSHa and CA interchangeably. Discourse and identity 37 showing how the text message is a hybrid medium which reflects Arab cultural ideologies associated with literacy as well as a medium which contests those norms, through an expression of Sudanese-ness in the writing of SCA. Thus, a Sudanese communicative setting is in part defined by its relations with the larger Arab-Islamic world, and by the indigenous Northern Sudanese culture that developed in Khartoum. Furthermore, as I will elaborate on in later chapters, the flexible informal context of the mobile phone, allows for the emergence of subnational identities or even alternative trans-national identities to the broadly sketched Arab-Islamic one described in Chapter 2. First, I give a broad description of the communicative culture in Greater Khartoum, situating the mobile phone within the cultural pattern of ‘keeping in touch’, then I discuss how texting practices exhibit language patterns that reflect discursive norms outside the context of the phone, how the phone is a semi-oral medium that builds on and extends pre-existing patterns and works within mainstream urban Sudanese culture. In the third section, I suggest that the SMS is not only used for perpetuating social norms, but is also a tool for the expression of discursive identities, acts of alignment which identify people with a “community of practice” by way of individual linguistic behaviours. I analyze features of SMS discourse drawing mostly from the methodological tools developed by interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. I first discuss the way I use the concept of identity narrowly, reviewing the relevant literature as it pertains to the sociolinguistic approach. Then I present data which exemplifies several ways that identity work is accomplished in text-messaging through discursive3 interaction, the issues of code-switching, footing and positioning as they relate to the diglossic4 (Classical and Sudanese Colloquial Arabic) language situation, the use of multiple scripts and other languages. I mostly limit my analysis to the identities of Sudanese communicative style, situated in discursive interaction, while, in the later chapters (4–7), using these techniques combined with ethnographic data, I broaden my analysis to larger social issues, Discourses in the broader sense and macrosocial identities such as those explored in Chapter 2. 3 Interactive discourse, as it is used here, is distinguished from discourse. While much has been said about discourse and language in the media as a process of social organization and community formation , few look at “naturally occurring language in use” (Spitulnik 2002a) as the concrete events and instances of language that make up the larger Discourses. Paying attention to the way they are contextually employed enlightens us as to how social structures influence language choice. 4 Diglossia is situation where two registers of language are...