SummaryDay by day, Classical Arabic is distancing itself from university lecture halls—that is, from daily academic discourse—contenting itself with its official role in administration and writing, and relinquishing its authority as a cultural or social language.

When you hear students' conversations at the university as they speak Arabic, you feel as if you are in a market in Malta, where the national Maltese language is intersected by a memory of Arabic languages with its Tunisian and Egyptian dialects, as well as Italian, Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, French, and others. This is not to diminish the importance of Maltese, but rather to describe the state of a language historically and culturally shaped by a great Mediterranean hybrid. Consequently, contemporary daily academic discourse has become a linguistic hybrid, even transforming into a socio-linguistic phenomenon that indeed requires precise field study.

The student writes his research in standard Classical Arabic to some extent, but when commenting on it, he uses a parallel language whose resonance and lexical capital are found in the alleyway vernacular or in the language of social media, or in the late-night discussions of neighborhood youth after their heads have gotten heated.

This approach by no means implies passing value judgments on this new university linguistic phenomenon, but it alerts that a new academic discourse is beginning to take shape with this generation born in the era of the internet and advanced digital communication technologies, before which traditional geographical boundaries have vanished. Consequently, languages, concepts, modes of discourse, and their content have intersected, multiplied, and reproduced on a phone screen, and within a single paragraph.

Where, I wonder, did this Maltese linguistic blend come from in university language?

The student wants to speak Arabic with pride, from a position of national and especially religious belonging, but when he speaks it, you feel that his tongue, which he believes to be proper Arabic, is clearly crossed by the Syrian dialect coming from Turkish series dubbed in that dialect, which overwhelmingly invades the discourse.

A friend told me, astonished at his mother's condition, saying: 'My mother, who lives in an isolated Kabyle village at the far foot of the Djurdjura mountains, knows no language other than Amazigh, but when the Turkish series airs, she sits in front of the TV and intently follows the events narrated in a Syrian dialect.'

Although the Syrian dialect is the most prominent in university Arabic discourse, this does not negate the presence of the Egyptian dialect coming from films and music, even if it has begun to recede more and more among this generation compared with the 1960s and 1970s generation. We must also note the rise of the Gulf dialect in general within the Algerian family, and from there into university discourse—a dialect dictated by the strong presence of Gulf television media with its programs mainly related to art, music, and various entertainment contests.

At times, touches of the capital city dialect appear within university discourse—the dialect of 'Algiers' University—a dialect that is dying out day by day before this terrifying invasion of foreign dialects. Until recently, it was a gentle dialect with beautiful harmony, like the dialects of Tlemcen, Bejaia, Constantine, and others.

First Observation

Day by day, Classical Arabic is distancing itself from university lecture halls—that is, from daily academic discourse—contenting itself with its official role in administration and writing, and relinquishing its authority as a cultural or social language.

We have begun to feel that academic discussions and dialogues among students and professors concerning deep, philosophical, critical, and intellectual topics are getting closer day by day to the language of 'neighborhood youth' talks after midnight.

The student speaks French, which he picks up and learns from social media, audiovisual media, and commercial advertisements, without the slightest knowledge of the rules and origins of this language. He speaks it within another language—Classical Arabic or dialect—and because he does not master it, he colors it as he wishes until the word deviates from its meaning, even carrying a meaning opposite to the original intended meaning. The reason for this striking presence of a broken French in the new university discourse is due to the catastrophic results of teaching this language in the Algerian school, where it suffers fractures in everything: pronunciation, structure, grammar, morphology, spelling, and comprehension of meaning.

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Second Observation

The positioning of a broken French in university discourse—a French incapable of carrying philosophical and intellectual concepts, expressing them, or correctly translating them into Arabic—yet this penetration and positioning continue, with English on the way.

From University Language to 'Hadhra' (Chatter)

The language of social media has invaded university language with all its baggage, and day by day it defeats it, so the space of academic discourse with its concepts shrinks in favor of 'Hadhra' discourse. We have even come to observe university professors and doctoral and master's students in Arabic language and literature and in all other humanities specialties speaking, and even writing posts on social media, in the language of 'neighborhood youth' after midnight.

What we present in this article is not value judgments, but rather a pause before a new university discursive and stylistic phenomenon that requires bold and honest critical reflection.

The Return of 'Sharabia' to Academic Writing

The generation that graduated from the French school did not know how to write or read Arabic; they did not know the Arabic alphabet. When the Arabization phase came, some found themselves possibly forced to maintain an important position they held, to the point that they would give speeches in official meetings in Arabic, so they had to write their interventions in Arabic but with Latin French letters. The matter is not limited to political elites; it is also the case for many filmmakers and theater practitioners, who write their texts and scripts in 'Sharabia'—that is, using French Latin script to usually write a text in colloquial Arabic. Today, after this phenomenon had almost disappeared, here is 'Sharabia' returning in a strange way within the university, as we observe some writing French with Arabic letters, and others writing Arabic with French letters. But in both cases, the language being written is another language, not the dialect that used to refer to a city or region, but a 'Hadhra' that contains everything and nothing.

True, a living language, in the end, is the one that its user lives with in his social, emotional, political, and religious life, but what is happening personally baffles me, to the point that this 'Hadhra' seems to me to have become a rootless and lineage-lacking construct.

True, the Arabic language must lean on the dialect and take from it so as not to die and to free itself from deadly elitism, but today it seems to me that Arabic does not rely on dialect to free itself from its elitism, but rather mortgages its essence to a strange current driving it toward extinction, toward a new 'Maltese' state.