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7 Being “modern”: From Shakespeare to chat room literacy (7) Hi girl, how r u? Its better 4 u to start studing coze time is over. Goodluck! (happy dreams & good night;-) where r u now? Sinnar or… ‘Hi girl, how are you? It’s better for you to start studying because time is over. Goodluck! (happy dreams & good night ;-) where are you now? Sennar or…’ Fellah’s story This text message was sent from Fellah El Sharif, an 18 year-old student of English and linguistics at the University of Khartoum to Hana, a classmate of hers. If I didn’t know its origin, however, I would have guessed its author to be a teenager from Southern California rather than Sudan. Fellah’s mastery of American youth slang with the phrase, ‘hi girl’ and the letter and number homonyms r ‘are’, u ‘you’ and 4 ‘for’, is remarkable. That she not only writes in almost fluent English but adopts a specific type of youth dialect begs the questions, where did she learn it, and why is she talking like that? Fellah is half Egyptian and half Sudanese, but was born in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) because her father, a technician in a dental technology lab, had moved the family there for work. She lived there until the age of twelve, after which she moved to Sudan. She now lives in Omdurman with her family. Her English is good, she says, because she studied for three years in the British system in the UAE. She also speaks French, and has plans of going to France after graduation, even though she feels most comfortable with English. Fellah has had a phone for three years, but in her opinion phone communication is not as good as face-to-face interaction. She feels that it’s easier for people to lie; they can pretend to be somewhere they are not. She says this is a big problem in Sudan. It also creates the occasion for people to discuss immoral topics, “such as bikinis”. Even the phone companies are promoting this as Areeba (MTN) lets you talk for free at night. She also thinks the internet is creating opportunities for Being modern 137 immoral behaviour, where “girls can act as boys, or boys can act as girls”. Nonetheless , she uses the internet and her phone to communicate with her friends, but in conscientious ways. On two occasions, she remembers giving her number to boys she doesn’t know first. As for boys in general, she doesn’t think about them. She prefers to follow custom by doing as her parents would expect. If a boy is interested in talking to her, he will approach her parents first, and if they agree, then she and the boy can sit in the living room and talk. Only then can he ask for her phone number if she so decides. In the future, she might consider marrying a non-Sudanese, if he were a Muslim. She distrusts Sudanese men, and fears for lying, turning off the phone, or coming home late. She also said that Sudanese men treat women poorly, as they would “an animal or an insect”. Fellah was one of the best students in the second-year linguistics course I taught. She made herself known to me early on because of her ability to speak English in contrast to the majority of the students in the class who struggled with the material due to poor English skills. In fact, as is normal in a large lecture course, the instructor gets to know only the most assertive students, and in this case, it was those who had better English who came forward. Naturally it was also this same handful of students who were willing to come for interviews about their text messages as they were less shy. During the interviews, however, I discovered that most of these more confident students had lived abroad, in one of the Gulf countries, for much or most of their lives. It was their early experience with English education in the Gulf that later enabled them to perform better at the University. It also enabled their interest and access to the internet, and to be able to interact with me. Most people who have lived in the Gulf, Fellah says, have better English skills, because much of the education is in English. People also have access to the internet more easily, and start using logha chat ‘Chat language ’. She says that Chat language...

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