Language, Identity, and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media 2019025034, 2019025035, 9781138335813, 9780429443527, 9780429812347, 9780429812323, 9780429812330

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Language, Identity, and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media

Language, Identity and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media is an empirical contemporary Arabic sociolinguistic investigation informed by theories and notions developed in the fields of Arabic linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Building on the Bakhtinian concept of linguistic hybridity, this book conducts a longitudinal analysis of Syrian dissidents’ social media practices between 2009 and 2017. It shows how dissidents have used social media to emerge in the discourse about the Syrian conflict and how language has been used symbolically as a tool of social and political engagement in an increasingly complex sociopolitical context. This monograph is ideal for students, sociolinguists and researchers interested in Arabic language and identity. Francesco L. Sinatora is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. His academic research in Arabic sociolinguistics and discourse analysis focuses on political discourse and identity on Syrian social media, integrating the tools of language ethnography and multimodality. Additionally, he has developed a research interest in Arabic pedagogy.

Routledge Studies in Language and Identity Series Editor: Reem Bassiouney

The Routledge Studies in Language and Identity (RSLI) series aims to examine the intricate relation between language and identity from different perspectives. The series straddles fields such as sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, historical linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It aims to study identity and language by utilizing novel methods of analysis as well as ground breaking theoretical approaches.

Titles in Series: Arabic in Israel Language, Identity and Conflict Muhammad Amara Identity and Dialect Performance A Study of Communities and Dialects Edited by Reem Bassiouney Arabic Translation Across Discourses Edited by Said Faiq Language, Identity, and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media Francesco L. Sinatora For more titles, please visit www.routledge.com/languages/series/RSLI

Language, Identity, and Syrian Political Activism on Social Media Francesco L. Sinatora

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Francesco L. Sinatora The right of Francesco L. Sinatora to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sinatora, Francesco L., author. Title: Language, identity, and Syrian political activism on social media / Francesco L. Sinatora. Other titles: Routledge studies in language and identity. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in language and identity | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025034 (print) | LCCN 2019025035 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138335813 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429443527 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429812347 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780429812323 (mobi) | ISBN 9780429812330 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social media—Political aspects—Syria. | Arabic language—Political aspects—Syria. | Sociolinguistics—Syria. | Arabic language—Discourse analysis. | Discourse analysis—Political aspects—Syria. | Language and culture—Syria. | Dissenters—Syria—Language. | Syria—History—Civil War, 2011—Mass media and the war. Classification: LCC P95.82.S95 S56 2019 (print) | LCC P95.82.S95 (ebook) | DDC 306.442/92705691—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025034 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025035 ISBN: 978-1-138-33581-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44352-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To all my Syrian friends and their struggle to live in dignity and freedom

Contents

List of figuresviii Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxi Transcription, glosses and transliterationxiii 1 Introduction

1

2 Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media

29

3 Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities

56

4 Hybridity and dissident identities

65

5 Hybridity and participation

87

6 Hybridity, secular identities and radical Islamic discourse

102

7 Hybridity and erasure

120

8 Conclusions

136

Appendix References Index

145 169 183

Figures

1.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

Map of Syria Maher’s September 29, 2010 post Nawar’s May 26, 2010 post Maher’s March 19, 2011 post Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s Facebook page timeline Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s Facebook page wall picture Ad-dōmari’s profile picture Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s short description section Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s long description section Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s October 7, 2011 post Screenshot of Nawar’s November 21, 2012 post Interactional dynamics. Source: De Fina (2016): 482 Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s July 25, 2012 post Frame foci. Source: De Fina (2016: 482), Table 1 Screenshot of Layla’s May 28, 2015 post Comment 1 to Layla’s May 25, 2015 post Layla’s reply to comment 1 Comment 2 to Layla’s May 25, 2015 post Layla’s reply to comment 2 Layla’s May 28, 2015 post Zain’s YouTube channel caption Commenter’s reaction to Zain’s use of instrumental music Commenter’s reaction to Zain’s image of Malala Yousafzai Omran Daqneesh impersonated in the Zain commercial Reaction to Zain’s image of Omran Daqneesh Screenshot of the Avaaz petition Avaaz petition text with declension underlined

18 59 61 68 73 74 75 76 77 79 83 89 92 95 111 113 114 114 115 116 123 126 127 128 128 129 131

Preface

Scholarship on language and identity has emphasized the impact of language on social interaction. In particular, it showed how language is used symbolically as a means of inclusion and exclusion, to foreground some identities and to erase others (Al Zidjaly 2012, 2015; Bassiouney 2014; Blommaert 2005). Arabic is an excellent case for the study of language and identity, due to the symbolical meanings of fuṣḥā, the Arabic term for all written and formal varieties, and the vernaculars. Symbolic meanings, which are the product of repeated practices, attitudes and ideologies (Bassiouney 2014), are particularly relevant in a situation of conflict (Suleiman 2013a). In this book, I show how these meanings underlying the construction of identities are a relentless process accelerated by the use of social media. I describe this process through the term hybridity, a notion that postcolonial cultural and anthropological studies appropriated and subverted from biology in order to affirm the power of subaltern over hegemonic colonialist discourses (Bakhtin 1981; Eid 2002, 2007; Kraidy 2002; Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014). In order to illustrate my argument, I take up the case study of language on Syrian dissidents’ social media. When the Syrian uprising sparked in the spring of 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad not only cracked down on protests through coercive methods, but he also othered protestors as mundassūn (“foreign infiltrators”) and ğarāṯīm (“germs”) first and as radical Islamic terrorists later. Delegitimizing protestors is at the core of a well-established narrative, through which former Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad and his son and current President Bashar al-Asad portrayed themselves as the only viable alternative to sectarian strife. This narrative, which implied that only Bashar al-Asad’s supporters are ‘real’ Syrians who want the good for their country, has recently conflated into an international official narrative, according to which Islamic terrorists are the main reason for the destruction and instability in the Arab world. I start my case study by showing how a group of Syrian dissidents radically changed their hybrid linguistic practices on social media at the onset of the Syrian uprising. I demonstrate how, between 2011 and 2017, they used established and new symbolic meanings attributed to language forms and varieties to reject the president’s and the official international narrative and to affirm their identity of dissidents as ‘real’ Syrians. Through hybridity on social media, I will argue, Syrian dissidents attempted to claim voice and visibility in political discourse.

x  Preface Throughout my work, I use the term “Syrian dissidents” to refer to a group of Syrians who identified themselves with the young, unarmed peaceful protestors who took to the streets in 2011 on the wave of the sociopolitical upheaval known as the Arab Springs. I use the word “dissidents” as a translation for suwwār (“revolutionaries”), used by this group to distance themselves from the government and to avoid identifying themselves automatically with any forms of official political mu‘āraḍa (“opposition”). I had the privilege to meet these Syrian dissidents through friends of friends during my fieldwork in Jordan and in Austria between 2014 and 2015, to observe their social media practices in the context of their everyday personal and professional lives and to discuss these during interviews and informal conversations. I began this research as a doctoral student specializing in Arabic language and society. My interest in language as a tool to analyze how identities emerge in discourse on social media is what motivates the current study. This work also bears historical witness to texts that are more and more subject to erasure due to the volatile and the increasingly common dynamics of exclusion on social media, governed by algorithms and peer-to-peer policing (Tufekci 2017). Although I do not share all the views and the positions expressed by my case study participants, through my work I intend to give visibility to their voices by translating them, providing my own interpretation and making their practices relevant for specialists of language and society.

Acknowledgments

This work represents a milestone of a long journey, which started with my first experience as a student of Arabic in Syria in 2004. Like all long journeys, it would have not been possible without the assistance of several beacons and travel companions. I would like to thank Manuela E.B. Giolfo and Elie Kallas for their encouragement to study language in Syria. I am grateful to Karin C. Ryding, Anna De Fina and Yasir Suleiman for their precious advice and guidance toward the completion of my PhD dissertation, on which this book is based, and to Reem Bassiouney for stimulating me through her work to study sociolinguistics and for her extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. I am thankful to the Routledge staff, particularly Andrea Hartill and Claire Margerison, for their assistance and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I am indebted to the exceptional scholars who have helped me grow through their inspiring work and invaluable feedback, such as Najma Al Zidjaly, Jan Blommaert, Majid KhosraviNik, Eleonora Esposito, Wesam Amer and Ruth Wodak; to the scholars who have had a great impact on my learning experience at Georgetown University, including Felicitas Opwis, Deborah Tannen, Jennifer Sclafani, Elliott Colla, Emma Gannage and Suzanne Stetkevych; to the Arabic scholars Barbara Airò, Jonathan Featherstone, Leslie McLoughlin, Benny Hary, Hanaa Kilany, Sahar Mohamed Ali, Kassem Wahba and Zeinab Taha, whom I had the privilege to meet and learn from along the way; and to my former Georgetown fellow graduate students and friends Abdallah Soufan, Pamela Klasova, Nazir Harb, Enass Khansa, Marya Hannun, Mike Raish, Katrien Vanpee, Zeina Azzam, and Robert Ricks. I am thankful to Mohssen Esseesy, who has tirelessly encouraged me to pursue this book project; to my supportive colleagues, including Amin Bonna, Cory Jorgensen, Ebtissam Oraby, Nazih Daher, Nashwa Taher, Amaya Martin, Mitch Ford, Jennifer Tobkin, Mohammad Kassab, Elizabeth Fisher and Chris Rollston; and to the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Middle East Studies, and the Office of the Vice President for Research at The George Washington University for their financial support. A special thanks goes to all my students at The George Washington University, whose questions and enthusiasm made me a better scholar and educator. I would like to express my gratitude to Reem Abulohoom for her help with the editing of the reference section and to Manuela E. B. Giolfo and Nazir Harb for

xii  Acknowledgments their assistance in the proofreading of the Syrian Arabic data and the English translation, particularly in the appendix section. I thank Anna De Fina, Amelia Tseng and Luis Cerezo very much for reading and giving me feedback on some sections of the manuscript. A previous version of the material presented in chapters 3 and 4 was published in the article “Chronotopes, entextualization and Syrian political activism on Facebook”, which appeared in the 2019 special issue of Multilingua “Society in digital contexts: New modes of identity and community construction”, edited by Najma Al Zidjaly. The ideas developed in chapters 6 and 7 are based on three papers presented at different conferences, namely GURT 2018, CADAAD 2018, and IPrA 2019. I thank the organizers of the panels in which I presented, Najma Al Zidjaly, Sage Graham, and Majid KhosraviNik, for helping me develop these ideas and anchor them to current sociolinguistic approaches and themes. Writing a book is a rewarding but also a demanding and an isolating process. This work would have not been possible without the support of amazing people, who throughout the years have worn the hats of friends, family, and counselors. I am grateful to my parents, Agazio Sinatora and Vittoriana Cardinale; to my sister Rosamaria Sinatora; my brother-in-law Michael Bock; to my niece and nephews Irene, Alessio and Mathias; my special cousins Maria Grenci, Fabio Fiore, Angela De Lorenzo, Irene Masiero and Graziella Ferrarelli; and my dear friends Amelia Tseng, Luis Cerezo, Paola Piscionieri, Pierina Bianchini, Douglas Lingenfelter, Ali Arastu, Sean Bland, Andrew Kadi, Eloisa Manera, Monica Mazzoleni, Mimosa Moroni, Roberta Frameglia, Fiorella D’Ambrosio, Serena Lari, Eleonora Crippa, Nader Uthman, Francys Subiaul, Ashley Smith, Andrea Ajello, Theo Christov, Christine Bonnefil, Gonzalo Cabral, Marcus Mirra, Hassan Altawil, Fadi Achkar, Roula Haddad, Ali Younis, Coilin Parsons, Taraf Rima Jamal, Rima Sliat, Torsten Menge, Gail Cleere, Natalia Dolgova, and Fadi Amireh. Last but not least, I am forever indebted to Maher, Nawar and Layla for welcoming me into their lives and allowing me to study language and identity through their social media practices.

Transcription, glosses and transliteration

For the representation of the linguistic data in this book, I adopted the DIN 31635 system characters: ‫أ‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ج‬ ‫ح‬ ‫خ‬ ‫د‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ز‬ ‫س‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ص‬ ‫ض‬ ‫ط‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫ع‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ك‬ ‫ل‬ ‫م‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ه‬ ‫و‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ى‬

’ / ā b t ṯ ǧ ḥ ḫ d ḏ r z s š ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ1 ‘ ġ f q k l m n h w/ū y/ī ā

When I transliterate or transcribe Modern Standard Arabic, the feminine ending is – a in pause and – at in construct forms. The vowels in Modern Standard Arabic are represented as a, i, u, ā, ī and ū. In addition, the letters e, o, ē, ō and ә are used to represent vernacular realizations. For proper names, known Western representations are used, in order to facilitate their recognition. A predominant

xiv  Transcription, glosses and transliteration part of my data consists of uncodified mixed and vernacular forms. I will discuss my choices to represent these forms further in chapter 1. Throughout the book, I use the abbreviation MSA for Modern Standard Arabic.

Note 1 This letter is also used to represent the emphatic vernacular ‫ظ‬.

1 Introduction

The aim of this work is to investigate the relationship between language, discourse and identity through the linguistic practices of a group of Syrian dissidents in digital environments, including Facebook, YouTube and radio shows. Drawing from an online ethnography between 2009 and 2017, it shows how the dissidents’ discursive strategies changed in relation with the sociopolitical context and with public discourse and how the notion of hybridity can help make sense of their discursive practices with relation to identity.1 Specifically it shows how dissidents recurred to hybrid linguistic strategies to rebut the identities of ‘infiltrators’ and ‘terrorists’ assigned to them in dominant public discourses. Following the success of the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions, many Syrians took to the streets in spring 2011 to demand more freedom and dignity. The peaceful demonstrations were encountered by a violent repression and by President Bashar al-Asad’s labelling of the protestors as mundassūn – a word related to the verb indassa (“to infiltrate”) and the noun dasīsa (“plot, conspiracy”) – acting as pawns of a ‘universal conspiracy’ against Syria. Through the term mundassūn, which can be roughly translated as ‘conspirators’ or ‘infiltrators’, Bashar al-Asad delegitimized protestors, implying that they were not ‘real’ Syrians but rather traitors playing the game of foreign powers. Delegitimizing dissidents is a common tactic among rulers in times of crisis. Bassiouney (2014) explained how protestors who gathered in Tahrir square against Mubarak’s regime were labelled as ‘nonreal’ Egyptians, with the pretext that they were speaking English, the language of the former colonial power. Interestingly, the word mundassūn went viral across social media platforms. Dissidents appropriated it to mock and reverse the regime rhetoric, triggering a metalinguistic discussion on language and identity. In an entry of the blog satirically named al-mundassa as-sūriyya (“The Syrian Infiltrator”), published in April 2011, the authors, who described themselves as “a group of Syrians inside and outside of Syria, united by their love for their homeland”, engaged in a metalinguistic discussion of the word mundass, arguing that [this word] was attributed tyrannically and untruthfully to foreign hands who want to destroy the country. In so doing, they [those who used this word] nullified the power of the “infiltrated” Syrian citizens delegitimizing their

2  Introduction demands for freedom and dignity. They made them believe that citizens are just naggers and that everything is already available to them. [. . .] So who’s the real infiltrator? Those who call for freedom and for a piece of bread? Or those who delude the people telling them that freedom and dignity are already available to them [. . .]?2 A few months later, a series of satirical videos on YouTube, entitled after the popular protestors’ slogan ḥurriye u-bass (“freedom, that’s all”), featured a sketch in which two simple young Syrian men ponder the meaning of the word mundass.3 One of them explains ironically that mundass is someone who walks with his head held high with legitimate demands. As he explains the meaning, he uses a conceited tone, as if to voice and ridicule the regime rhetoric. Throughout the sketch, the actors use the Syrian vernacular to enhance the humorous tone and to evoke an idea of simplicity and authenticity, as to suggest that those who demanded dignity and freedom are simple Syrian citizens, not traitors or infiltrators.4 Similar linguistic choices were adopted in the satirical puppet YouTube series Top Goon: Diaries of a Dictator (cf. Kraidy 2016), in which the word ğarāṯīm (“germs”) used by Bashar al-Asad in one of his first speeches after the uprising to denigrate protestors, was appropriated humorously. Over the course of the past seven years, the exacerbation of the conflict and the onset of other regional and international actors, including radical Islamic groups, ISIS, Turkey, Russia and the United States, has resulted in an erasure of Syrian dissidents’ identities in mass media discourse and led to a focus on Islamic terrorism. In May 2017, during the month of Ramadan, the Kuwaiti telecommunications company Zain, famous for its progressive and politically engaged advertising campaigns, released a commercial on its YouTube channel that caused social media backlash. The commercial uses a plethora of linguistic and multimodal resources, such as Quranic Arabic, pop music and images, to exhort Muslims to reject terrorism and embrace a modern version of Islam.5 This call echoes a Western dominant discourse, according to which Muslims around the world have not yet done enough to distance themselves from terrorism, as well as the Syrian government’s long-held narrative that equates dissidents with radical Islamic extremists and has portrayed former Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad and his son and current president Bashar al-Asad as the only viable alternative to sectarian strife. Moreover, the ad’s message reinforces a stance that has gained international currency and sees the Syrian government’s threat subordinate to that of radical Islamic terrorism. Social media backlash revolved around the use in the commercial of the image of Omran, the young boy from Aleppo whose photo of him sitting in an ambulance covered in dust and blood went viral immediately after an alleged airstrike conducted by the Syrian regime. The hashtag zain tušawwih al-ḥaqīqa (“Zain distorts the truth”) was created on Twitter, and a campaign was launched through the global activist networked Avaaz to raise awareness about an alleged collaboration between the Syrian government and Zain, accused of neglecting the government’s involvement in the war and corroborating the regime’s equation of political dissent with terrorism.

Introduction  3 Bashar al-Asad’s delegitimization of protestors as ‘non-real’ Syrians and as terrorists through the use of the word mundass, the Syrian dissidents’ appropriation of this word on social media, the Zain commercial and the backlash it triggered on social media constitute examples of how linguistic and multimodal resources are used to discuss matters that pertain to group identity and society. The relation between language and group identity has interested sociolinguists for a long time. In this book, I subscribe to an understanding of identity as an intrinsically dialogic and collective process. As noted by Blommaert (2005: 205), “in order for an identity to be established, it has to be recognised by others. That means that a lot of what happens in the field of identity is done by others, not by oneself [. . .] regardless of whether one wants to belong to particular groups or not, one is often grouped by others in processes of – often institutionalised – social categorisation called othering”. In his seminal study on the Arabic language and national identity, Suleiman (2003) investigated the role of standard Arabic in the construction of national identity in the Arabic-speaking world. Additionally, he made the case for a focus on the symbolic use of language, marking a distinction with previous Arabic sociolinguistic studies, which, he posited, had hitherto approached the link between language and identity from a predominantly functional and quantitative perspective. According to Suleiman (2011, 2013a), the “symbolic function of language” is particularly evident in situations of conflict and social unrest, as, he contends, it is in such situations that particular language forms, which up to that point had been perceived as neutral means of communication, acquire a special status in society and are consciously deployed and contested to promote radical and irreversible social change.6 The relevance of focusing on the symbolic use of language was reiterated by Edwards (2009), who also claimed that collective and individual identities intersect, inasmuch as “the elements of individual identity are not unique, but rather, are drawn from some common social pool” (2). Building on this insight, in her study of language and identity in modern Egypt, Bassiouney (2014) argued that, even though stereotypical, the analysis of collective identities in public discourse is an essential endeavor to understand individual identities, as the collective identity emerging from public discourse serves as a frame of reference toward which individual identities orient. In addition, Bassiouney (2010, 2012, 2014, 2017) explained the link between language and identity through the sociolinguistic theories of code choice, stance and indexicality, showing how linguistic codes are associated with different symbolic or metaphorical meanings. Analyzing linguistic codes as resources, she showed how the access to these resources and their symbolic function is a fundamental ingredient in the formation of public identities. So far, much of what we have learned about language and identity in the Arab world derives from an analysis of identities as imagined through state-controlled mass media, including the printed press, television, political speeches and literature. A very recent strand of studies has addressed the link between language, identity and social change in digital environments in the Arab world (Al Zidjaly 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017; 2019b; Brustad 2017; Hachimi 2017; Johnson 2015; Mejdell and Høigilt 2017; Nordenson 2017; Sinatora 2019).

4  Introduction Building on this strand, in this book I adopt a bottom-up perspective, investigating the link between language and identity as it emerged from the discursive practices of Syrian dissidents on social media within the context of the 2011 Syrian uprising. The examples of the term mundass and the backlash generated by the Zain commercial show that the shaping of language, discourses and identities is no longer an exclusive prerogative of mass media. Social media are known to have played a significant role in the Arab uprisings, providing new “affordances” – a term coined by Gibson (1979) and defined by Hutchby (2001) as “the possibilities for action” chartered by technologies (449) – for civic engagement and a new dimension for the Habermasian public sphere (KhosraviNik 2018) – explained by Hauser (1998: 86) as “a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment”. Through their discursive practices, dissidents capitalized on social media affordances to reimagine their collective identity as Syrians differently from the homogenizing Syrian and Arab national identity propagated by the Ba‘ath Party, which has ruled Syria since 1963, as well as to reject other identities assigned to them after the uprising, such as those of infiltrators and terrorists. Dissidence in Syria is not a new phenomenon. Wedeen (1999) and Cooke (2007) showed how public discourse also served as an instrument to co-opt and control dissent. Through the notion of tanfīs (lit. “letting breathe”), Wedeen explained that co-opted dissident work, or “commissioned criticism” (Cooke 2007), functioned as a form of safety valve under Hafiz al-Asad’s rule and had the purpose of quelling dissent. In her extensive research on Syrian television drama production, Della Ratta (2015) showed how this type of publicly displayed social criticism has changed guise under Bashar al-Asad. Instead of being “commissioned criticism” (Cooke 2007), Della Ratta argued that the social message of Syrian television dramas is the result of shared intents between a president who portrays himself as a reformist and an elite of television drama producers, who adhered to the “enlightenment project” of a society they perceive as backwards (Della Ratta 2015). An intense dissident activity was present in Syria between 2000 and 2011 during Bashar al-Asad’s presidency (Ghadbian 2015). In this book, I focus on the grassroots spinoff of this activity, which was particularly intense and visible on Facebook. The overarching question is: How is language used to articulate political identities on social media? Whereas, as I will show, much work in Arabic linguistics has analyzed fuṣḥā and vernaculars as separate varieties, I propose an approach that looks at language and identity on social media through the lens of hybridity (Eid 2002, 2007; Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014).

1 Identity and hybridity In my analysis, I subscribe to an understanding of identity as emergent, dialogic and performative (Blommaert 2005; Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Davies and Harré 1990; De Fina et al. 2006). Rather than being an abstract, essential trait of human beings, socioconstructionist approaches (De Fina et al. 2006) see identity as a process that involves visibility. Identity is emergent in the sense that we are

Introduction 5 what other people see us. It is dialogic in the sense that what we are is determined by our behavior, as well as by the way others name that behavior based on other behaviors they observed in the past. It is performative because, in order to emerge, individuals make unconscious and conscious linguistic and extralinguistic choices. As recent scholarship brought to bear, the “phatic” aspect of social interaction is particularly evident in social media performance (Bauman 2010; De Fina 2016; Miller 2008). I will argue that hybridity is central to comprehend how identities emerge on social media in a context of political unrest. The concept of linguistic hybridity is attributed to Bakhtin (1981), who defined it as: a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one other by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor. (358) Although the interplay between different language varieties and registers had been studied extensively across linguistic contexts, including Arabic, through the theory of code-switching (Blom and Gumperz 1972) and later developments of it, the notion of hybridity was revitalized in the 1990s by scholars of bilingual communication and linguistic anthropology (Hall and Nilep 2015). A focus on hybridity, operationalized as code alternation (Auer 1995) and translingual simultaneity (Woolard 1999) was urged by these scholars to avoid the pitfall of a purely descriptive consideration of code-switching as the exceptional encounter of bounded varieties and to emphasize the historical and political value of language, erstwhile theorized by Bakhtin (1981). In Arabic, hybridity has been conceptualized as the individuals’ choice to mix fuṣḥā and the vernaculars in spoken and written contexts, in reaction to a politics of diglossic separation (Al Batal 2002; Brustad 2017; Eid 2002, 2007; Mejdell 2006, 2014, 2017). An interest in hybridity has surged among scholars of language, identity, bilingualism and social media (Blommaert 2017; Hall and Nilep 2015). Several terms have been proposed to capture individuals’ multilingual practices, such as crossing (Rampton 1995), heteroglossia (Bailey 2007), polylingualism (Jørgenson 2008; Møller 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2014) and translanguaging (Williams 1994, cited in García and Lin 2016), defined by García (2009) as “the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximise communicative potential” (140).7 The increased focus on hybrid practices has raised concerns among scholars about the explicative power of hybridity (Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014). These concerns, as observed by Rubdy and Alsagoff, are mainly due to an analysis of hybridity as a synchronic, rather than a social, historical and political phenomenon, as it was theorized by Bakhtin (1981) and envisaged by Woolard (1999). The political aspect of translingual practices, grounded in a study of language as a social and historical phenomenon

6  Introduction (Blommaert 2005; Makoni and Pennycook 2007), was also raised by Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) in terms of “fixity” and “fluidity”. Citing Auer (2005), they argued that hybrid practices cannot be fully understood without considering the ideological and political tensions that engendered them. These sociopolitical conditions have become increasingly “complex” in a time of globalization, and such complexity has had significant repercussions on how identities emerge through language (Al Zidjaly 2019a; Blommaert 2016, 2017, 2019; Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Blommaert and Varis 2011; Blommaert et al. 2015). The historical dimension in which translingual practices are imbued is what informs my analysis of Syrian dissidents’ hybrid practices in this book. Hybridity implies going beyond a deductive understanding of language forms as the result of well-defined codes (Otsuji and Pennycook 2014) and calls for an inductive, context-sensitive analysis, which includes individuals’ motivations underlying linguistic choices as well as an analysis of the discourses in which these forms emerge. As I will explain further in the next chapter, an analysis of the symbolic meaning of hybrid forms through the lens of indexicality (Agha 2005; Bassiouney 2014; Blommaert 2005; Johnstone et al. 2006; Silverstein 2003) can help connect these forms with their sociohistorical function. The study of hybridity in Arabic social media contexts is at its infancy.8 The wider and wider presence of uncodified vernacular forms on social media, envisaged by Mejdell (2017) as emblematic of an irreversible historical phase of “destandardisation”, however, make this endeavor necessary. I approach hybridity from the speaker’s perspective as the full range of individuals’ linguistic choices, based on the symbolic (historical) meanings they attribute to the selected linguistic forms. Through a longitudinal study of Syrian dissidents’ social media practices, I will add empirical evidence to an understanding of hybridity as the power of individuals and groups to shape discourses and be visible through language. Additionally, I will shed further light on the historical, dynamic and symbolic character of hybridity by contextualizing social media hybrid practices in different sociopolitical phases, before and after the 2011 uprising, drawing on the notions of chronotope (Bakhtin 1981; Blommaert 2015a; Blommaert and De Fina 2017; Woolard 2013) and scale (Blommaert 2015a). These notions have been identified by Blommaert (2017, 2019) as key ingredients of a sociolinguistics of complexity (also see Al Zidjaly 2019a). In what follows, I frame my analysis within the notions of discourse, new media discourse and digital practices. I then introduce the concept of diglossia and explain why the diglossic situation in Syria is particularly interesting in terms of language and identity and in the light of social media discourse. I finally introduce my data, provide a chapter outline and discuss the contributions and the limitations of this work.

2 Discourse The notion of discourse is central in sociolinguistic investigation. Gee (1989, 1999) distinguished between “ ‘discourse’ with a little ‘d’ ”, namely “connected

Introduction 7 stretches of language that make sense”, and “ ‘Discourses’ with a capital ‘D’ ”, which denote “forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions and clothes” (1989: 6–7). The relationship between these two types of discourses has been the focus of studies on language and power. Wodak et al. (1999: 8) argued that “Discourse constitutes social practice and is at the same time constituted by it”. Citing Van Dijk (2008), Bassiouney (2014) explained that “public discourse, on the other hand, refers to media discourse, educational discourse, political discourse, and scholarly discourse”. She argued that “media discourse [. . .] is the main component in public discourse, [and] refers to the organizations that produce communication devices, such as the press, cinema, broadcasting, publishing and so on”, and added that “the term ‘media’ is also used to denote the cultural and material products of these organizations” (18). According to KhosraviNik (2014), there are two ways one could look at the relationship between power and discourse, namely “power behind” discourse and “power in” discourse. Whereas, he explained, the former refers to the top-down direction of power exerted by public and media discourses, quoting respectively Farfan and Holzscheiter (2011: 140) and Jager and Maler (2009: 38), he posited that: Power in discourse is the study of power ‘by looking at concrete and very limited social settings in which a number of individuals seek to influence each other through communicative interaction.’ This is the space where various identities may be constructed, challenged, and perpetuated (e.g., in features of conversation and content) and individuals would contribute in ‘supra-individual’ construction of discourse. KhosraviNik (2014: 293) KhosraviNik further explained that the distinction between “power behind”, bottom-down, Foucauldian and “power in”, bottom-up, Habermasian discourses is purely theoretical. Spitulnik (2009) challenged the presumed absolute power of mass media in the creation of shared identities by showing how, by “repeating, recycling and recontextualizing” media discourse through their linguistic practices, individuals “play an active role in the interpretation and appropriation of media texts and messages” (95–96). This echoes one of the main tenets of the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis, namely that “discourse is both socially constitutive and constituted” (KhosraviNik 2014: 294). Building on these premises, Bassiouney (2014) contended that an analysis of linguistic practices in public discourse is a useful exercise to understand collective identities, as these practices “mirror attitudes and ideologies within a specific community” (20). KhosraviNik (2014) noted that “The interactive, participatory nature of new media texts has arguably compromised the power behind discourse” (294), chartering “a new dynamic for the public sphere in Habermasian terms [. . .]” (301).9 The interest in the public sphere as a laboratory of discourse and identity has grown with the diffusion of new modes of communication, known as Web

8  Introduction 2.0 or new media, which arguably facilitated the multiplication and the spread of bottom-up, subversive discourses. In this book, I understand discourse both as social media discourse, as well as in terms of sociopolitical discourses, to which hybridity and the identities engendered by it, are anchored (KhosraviNik 2018).

3 Social media Whereas a great deal of work on language, discourse and identity has focused on data from mass media, such as newspapers, literature, radio and television, the data analyzed in this book concentrates on language in social media. The intersection between language, identity and technology has been at the center of a growing body of sociolinguistic investigation (e.g., Al Zidjaly 2010, 2012; Al Zidjaly and Gordon 2012; Androutsopoulos 2008; Barton and Lee 2013; Gordon et al. 2017; Graham 2005, 2007), a subset of which has analyzed language and sociopolitical activism on social media (Al Zidjaly 2014, 2017, 2019a, 2019b; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016). My focus on this type of discourse is motivated by the increasing presence of social media in contemporary communication as well as by the role new media played during the Arab Spring as an instrument of political mobilization (see Al Zidjaly 2014, 2017). As explained by Tufekci (2017), social movements have always capitalized on the available technologies to make their voice heard. Since the 1990s, these technologies have multiplied, and each of them has enabled different ways of protest. For example, protesters in Tahrir Square were able to send live tweets across the world and make their protest visible despite censorship in a way that would have been unthinkable ten years earlier (Tufekci and Wilson 2012). Social media discourse has been analyzed in media studies since the early 1990s. Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi (1994) coined the term “small media” to define “participatory, public phenomena, controlled neither by big states nor big corporations” (20) and emphasized the role of these media in the shaping of revolutionary identities in 1979 Iran.10 They also pointed out that what makes these media “small” is not an intrinsic characteristic of the medium itself, but rather the way it is used. For example, a traditional media platform such as the radio can also be classified as “small media” if used by nonstate groups. These new media contributed to a decentralization of identity production, facilitating the emergence of alternative, collective identities (SrebernyMohammadi and Mohammadi 1994). Additionally, Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi argued that new media changed the nature of political exile and led to a “ ‘deterritorialization’ of politics” (30), enabling the circulation of discourses from outside. The late 1990s saw the emergence of new media phenomena defined as Web 2.0, a term used for the first time in 2004 by entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly and defined by Herring (2013: 4) as web-based platforms that emerged as popular in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and that incorporate user-generated content and social

Introduction 9 interaction, often alongside or in response to structures or (multimedia) content provided by the sites themselves. (2013: 4) Social media discourse has been the object of study of computer-mediated discourse analysis, an area of language inquiry that is still understudied in the field of Arabic linguistics. As argued by Androutsopoulos (2006), throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, studies of computer-mediated communication focused on the description of linguistic and communicative features and “paid less attention to the socially situated discourses in which these features are embedded” (420). According to him, Herring’s (2004) Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) contributed to “a shift of focus from medium-related to user-related patterns of language use [. . .]”, emphasizing how “communications technologies are locally appropriated to enact a variety of discourse genres” (421). Building on CMDA, Androutsopoulos (2008) elaborated the Discourse-Centered Online Ethnography (DCOE), which integrates “systematic observation” of online platforms with ethnographic tools, such as interviews with the social media text authors and readers. In line with critical discourse analysts, Androutsopoulos focuses on online discourse “as socially situated and institutionally regulated language practice with a reality-constructing capacity” (Androutsopoulos 2013: 48). Whereas “Androutsopoulos argues for entry level of context for data collection with an emphasis on online context”, KhosraviNik contends that “discourse is independent of the medium” (KhosraviNik 2018: 585) and emphasizes that online practices stem from discourses circulating in the wider social and political context. Additionally, as posited by KhosraviNik and Zia (2014), “the interest is not only in what happens in media per se, but in how it may shape and influence the social and political sphere of society, that is, the network of discourses-in-place in society” (KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2017: 3616 ; KhosraviNik and Zia 2014; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). The impact of social media communication on the public sphere has been at the center of a recent strand of studies in the sociolinguistics of the Arab world. Al Zidjaly (2010, 2014, 2015, 2017) showed how digital practices can lead to social change within the domains of politics, education, religion and disability. Through the tools of mediated discourse analysis, she developed an agenda for the study of digital activism through the tools of multimodality and longitudinal ethnographic studies (Al Zidjaly 2019b). In discussing the role of language in the context of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Bassiouney (2014: 309) provided an example of social media discourse, namely a poem that legitimized the identity of the Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square. She explained how this poem was first broadcast by a television station and subsequently went viral on new media platforms, including YouTube and Facebook. Linguistic practices on social media have complicated the idea of audience (De Fina 2016) and consequently the investigation of how shared identities take shape. If previous research aimed at reconstructing individual identities as reflected in public discourse, social media discourse is exciting because it offers researchers

10  Introduction an insight into how these identities are shaped through individuals’ and groups’ bottom-up practices. Although social media have undoubtedly provided tools and spaces for social movements to emerge, scholars have also warned about new, dark dynamics involving social media discourse and which may affect political activism. State actors have appropriated new technologies – such as Facebook and Twitter – for their own communication purposes or, even worse, have colluded with social media corporations to obtain sensitive data about political dissidents (Deibert 2013; MacKinnon 2012). Tufekci (2017) explained how the order in which content appears on Facebook and Twitter is regulated by algorithms created for marketing purposes, making a social movement’s effort to be visible a happygo-lucky endeavor. Della Ratta (2018) analyzed the relationship between image, violence and new media in the context of the Syrian conflict, introducing the concept of “expansion”: expansion only happens when a place, to which several symbolic layers of time and space are attached simultaneously, is disrupted by a violent or highly contentious event that provokes a mixing up of those layers and a breakdown of meaning. This inner connection between expansion and violence, and the disruption of meaning that it generates, has added a further layer of reflection in the discussion of Web 2.0 participatory cultures. While the latter have often been depicted as quintessentially progressive, creative, and moving towards pluralism and freedom of expression, expansion has shown the dark side of peer-production, sharing and other participatory practices. These practices could eventually act as detonator of violence, as much as they can enable creativity and empowerment. (Della Ratta 2018:102) In my final analysis chapter, I will show how social media has served as a vehicle for top-down discourses through the example of a commercial released by the Kuwaiti telecommunications company Zain during the month of Ramadan 2017. The message conveyed by the ad, I will show, is consistent with a Western narrative that Muslims have not yet done enough to distance themselves from terrorism and was contested by Syrian dissidents, who argued that it acquitted the Syrian government of war crimes. Recent studies have also problematized the consequences of terminology such as “new media”. The term “new” implies a false dichotomy with “old media”, and it evokes another false dichotomy, which is that between offline and online discourse (see Blommaert 2017), also known as “digital dualism” (Jurgenson 2012). Old-new and online-offline dichotomies were emphasized by scholars who argued that online practices have no consequences on the “real world” or who thought that online dissident practices would prevent dissidents from “offline”, ostensibly more effective ways of protest. Such a view was espoused by Morozov (2011), who labeled online activists derogatorily as “slacktivists”.

Introduction 11 Keeping in mind the complexity surrounding new media discourse and its definition, my focus is to raise awareness in the field of Arabic sociolinguists about the new dynamics of linguistic interaction revolving around digital practices and their repercussions in an analysis of language and identity.

4 Digital practices The notion of “practice” is central to studies in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. As explained by De Fina (2016), it is theoretically related to Wenger’s (1998) concept of “Community of Practice” (CoP) and to Bourdieu’s (1991) theory of “habitus”. The introduction of the term “Community of Practice” in sociolinguistics challenged previous structuralist assumptions of languages as bounded systems anchored to a geographic territory, which conflated around the notion of “speech community”. Accordingly, it is around common practices that language evolves and acquires social meaning. Eckert and Wenger (2005: 583) defined practice as “a way of doing things, as grounded in and shared by a community”. They also considered the notion of practice as linked to the “acceptance” in a community. Depending on the social context, a specific linguistic feature may constitute a symbol by virtue of which an individual is recognized and accepted as part of the CoP. Unlike previous understandings of speech community, Blommaert (2005) used this term to describe a group of people “who produce, share, and exchange orders of indexicality” (215). The concepts of CoP and indexically-centered speech community are particularly relevant to the present study of Syrian dissidents’ bottom-up social media practices. Through their linguistic practices across platforms, they engage in the political discourse articulating different aspects of their anti-Asad dissident identities. The notion of “practice” is central to recent approaches on language and social media. Al Zidjaly (2014, 2015, 2017) further analyzed the relationship between local linguistic practices and social change. She conceptualized the digital texts of a group of Omani teachers on WhatsApp as types of “mediated action”, which, building on Scollon (2001), she defined as “the moment social actors act in real time within complex nexuses of linked practices, through the use of verbal (language) or non-verbal mediational means or cultural tools” (Al Zidjaly 2014: 107). Similarly, Jones et al. (2015: 3) defined digital practices as ‘assemblages’ of actions involving tools associated with digital technologies, which have come to be recognised by specific groups of people as ways of attaining particular social goals, enacting particular social identities, and reproducing particular sets of social relationships. In elaborating a methodology to analyze digital activism, Al Zidjaly (2019b) conceptualized digital practices as actions toward social change, arguing that “larger discourses are grounded in people’s actions on social media platforms, and how the latter feed into and create social change in their daily lives” (Al Zidjaly 2019b: 5).

12  Introduction In this book, I analyze the multi-platform digital practices of three Syrian dissidents between 2009 and 2017, with a focus on Facebook, which has been one of the most widely used social media sites since the Arab Springs. The large presence of written texts displaying oral varieties lacking official status, as will be explained further below, enriches our understanding of hybridity and identity. Each chapter illustrates how dissidents, through their social media practices, positioned themselves discursively vis-à-vis the Syrian conflict. Two of my case study participants, for example, changed their Facebook practices as soon as the 2011 uprising started in order to reposition themselves as dissidents. A third one collaborated with a dissident radio and at the same time used her Facebook page daily to express dissent. On the two platforms, she engaged with different imagined audiences, used different text forms and genres and exploited the different affordances (see Hutchby 2001) as well as the symbolic meanings of linguistic and multimodal texts. I will argue that it is through these hybrid digital practices that political identities emerge. Through the analysis of the discursive practices of Syrian dissidents, I show how Arabic and the Syrian context, in particular, provide fertile ground for studies on language and identity in a time of conflict, particularly due to the co-presence of two groups of linguistic varieties: formal, written varieties known as fuṣḥā and spoken vernaculars. I will show how the symbolic choice of these varieties, a well-studied sociolinguistic phenomenon known as diglossia, and of other linguistic and semiotic forms and registers constitutes a prolific resource for the emergence of identities on Syrian dissidents’ social media platforms.

5 Language and diglossia in Syria. Historical and political context Ferguson (1959) described diglossia as a particular (socio)linguistic situation characterized by the presence of two varieties of the same language: spoken vernaculars on the one hand, which he named “(L)ow” varieties, and formal written varieties, or “(H)igh”, on the other. The former are known in Arabic as ‘āmmiyya, from the word ‘āmm (“public, common”), to denote that everyone is equipped with them. The latter are known as fuṣḥā (“the most eloquent”). English translations of this term include Literary Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Quranic Arabic. Ferguson argued that H and L differ in function, prestige, literary heritage, standardization, grammar, lexicon and phonology. Additionally, he posited that diglossia is a rather stable phenomenon, and “the communicative tensions which arise in the diglossia situation may be resolved by the use of relatively uncodified, unstable, intermediate forms of the language” (333). I will return to the concept of diglossia later in the book, with reference to the discussion it spawned in Arabic sociolinguistics, and how this informed the notions of diglossic switching and code choice. However, what I should like to emphasize here is the symbolic and ideological function that fuṣḥā acquired in the Syrian sociopolitical context toward the construction of a supraconfessional national identity.

Introduction  13 For centuries, the cradle of a myriad of ethnicities, religions and languages, under the Ba‘athist rule, which seized power in 1963, Syria implemented one of the most sophisticated linguistic policies in the Arab world, privileging the (modern) standard variety of Arabic and marginalizing the spoken vernaculars and other minority languages (Miller 2003). This policy, known as ta‘rīb (“Arabization”), is rooted in the nineteenth-century movement known as al-nahḍa al‘arabiyya (“Arab Renaissance”), during which a modernization of the Arabic language occurred in concomitance with the translation of Western literature and scientific texts. During the same period, this modernized version of fuṣḥā spread with development of the printed press and developed into a variety known as Modern Standard Arabic (Suleiman 2003). Arabization acquired a stronger political meaning in the first half of the twentieth century. It developed in the work of pan-Arab intellectuals, such as the Syrian thinker and Minister of Education Sāṭi‘ al-Ḥuṣrī, and it was implemented through the establishment of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Damascus and of the major state universities (Suleiman 2003). Besides collecting old literary work and acquiring modern scientific books, the Arabic Language Academy provided the government with new Arabic terms to use instead of foreign words, and Arabic textbooks were developed at the College of Medicine in Damascus in 1919, where Arabic was the only means of instruction, and efforts intensified in the following years to create new scientific terminology in Arabic (Badinjki 1994). The linguistic policy of Arabization was particularly encouraged by secular intellectuals of non-Muslim Syrian minorities to emphasize ethnic unity, despite religious differences (Miller 2003; Suleiman 2003), and as an important asset against colonialism and imperialism. In this respect, Modern Standard Arabic was instrumental to a discourse of us (Syrians, Arabs) versus them (the Western colonizer). While maintaining an unofficial status, dialects occupied very specific spaces in public discourse, including television dramas, colloquial poetry and satirical productions (Behnstedt 2005). As an example of strict code separation, Behnstedt noted that mixing at the morphosyntactic level of the Syrian vernacular and fuṣḥā, which he exemplified through the sentence “w alʾān binaltaqi bi (‘and now we meet’)”, does not occur on Syrian television. Although the dialects are a central component of Syrians’ language and identity, their official stigmatization is dictated by historical and political reasons in a colonial and post-colonial context. Across the Arabic speaking world, the British and French occupiers’ emphasis on the spoken vernaculars led to a perception of them as instruments to divide and rule; conversely, Modern Standard Arabic, by virtue of its relation with religious and secular literary texts used across the Arab and Islamic world, has a unifying symbolic function (Eisele 2002; Suleiman 2003). Arabization acquired further political and symbolic value under Hafiz al-Asad’s regime (1971–2000). Consistent with the narrative of a supraconfessional and anti-colonialist pan-Arab nationalist project, the emphasis on code separation and the valorization of Modern Standard Arabic as a “unified and unifying” variety was instrumental toward the construction of a social identity of Syrians as Arabs rather than Christians,

14  Introduction Muslims or Shiites.11 At the same time, it could be argued that it befitted the socialist ideal of educating the masses, turning the elitist variety of fuṣḥā into an egalitarian language. It is probably as a result of this policy that Syrians are known in the Arab world for their mastery of fuṣḥā. Despite their lack of official status, non-Arabic and Arabic vernacular varieties have continued to be used in everyday linguistic practices and play an important role in Arab individual identities. In an interview with the periodical Al-Ahram, the famous Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said beautifully described the relationship between Arabic diglossia and identity as follows: [A]n educated person has two quite distinct linguistic personae in the mothertongue. [. . .] [T]he spoken dialect is invariably the language of intimacy. [. . .] Somehow there is an implicit pact that governs which Arabic is to be used, on which occasions, for how long, and so forth. [. . .] [E]ducated Arabs actually use both the demotic and the classical, and that this totally common practice neither prohibits naturalness and beauty of expression nor in and of itself does it automatically encourage a stilted and didactic tone [. . .]. The two languages are porous and the user flows in and out of one into another as an essential aspect of what living in Arabic means. [. . .].12 Over the last two decades, the Arabic sociolinguistic landscape has seen a dramatic change. The ideologically driven separation between written and spoken Arabic has become more and more blurred through the diffusion of social media (Brustad 2017). This led to an unprecedented presence of written vernacular forms across social media platforms, as well as to a dramatic increase in the presence of what Ferguson called “unstable forms” (1959: 333) of the language (Mejdell 2017; Mejdell and Høigilt 2017). Aside from the mixing of H and L varieties, new linguistic forms included local and global features, such as the English ­supervernacular (Blommaert 2011), and a variety known as Arabizi, a Romanized form of vernacular Arabic. This trend has also had implications at the identity level. As brought to bear by Gonzalez-Quijano (2014: 164–165), “writing in Arabizi became a status symbol among young urban, Western-educated Arabs to show – and sometimes to show off – their modernity [. . .]. Like many cultural artifacts and productions of contemporary Arab culture in the fields of music or visual arts, Arabizi deliberately assumed a globalized hybridity”. Increased social media communication has arguably led to a higher reflection on the symbolic role of language, a phenomenon described by Blommaert and Rampton (2011) through the term “metapragmatic reflexivity”. Through the analysis of Syrian linguistic practices, I look at the implications of such a trend on the identity level. A question accompanying the analysis is: What happens when vernaculars and nonstandard forms are written? What identities emerge from these new writing practices in the vernacular? Maher and Nawar, two of my case study participants, had familiarized with Facebook and other new media technologies a few years before the uprising and used Facebook to communicate with friends, family and acquaintances. Their

Introduction 15 practices on Facebook before the uprising included local and global forms (Sinatora 2019), which were at odds with the diglossic model reinforced by the Ba‘athist linguistic policy, but were at the same time consistent with a sociopolitical context of globalization and with Bashar al-Asad’s display of cosmopolitanism (Wedeen 2013). Immediately after the uprising, dissidents positioned themselves vis-àvis the conflict through a questioning of the linguistic symbols which reinforced allegiance to the government, including the Alawite register, popular idioms and a use of fuṣḥā as a tool of oppression. The choice of the Syrian vernacular is shared by the three case study participants. I will show in the analysis of data how this choice is dictated by various individual and social motivations. Whereas the vernacular is a rather conscious choice related to their positioning toward the “macro” sociopolitical context, individuals, consciously or unconsciously, choose from a plethora of hybrid linguistic and discursive resources to articulate their dissident identities at the “micro” level, for example, by interacting with other dissidents in the commentary section of a Facebook post.

6 Sociohistorical background Home of some of the earliest civilizations, after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the tenth century BCE, the territory occupied by the Syrian Arab Republic was controlled by several powers; in the seventh century, under the Umayyad rule, Damascus became the center of the neo-born Arab-Islamic Empire (cf. Hourani 1991). It subsequently became a province of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War. Ottoman ruler Jamal Pasha’s repression of political opponents in 1915 and 1916 (cf. Cleveland 2018) is vividly present in the collective memory of Syrians. The ruler was referred to with the epithet as-saffāḥ (“the bloodthirsty”), which was later used for Hafiz al-Asad. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Syria was placed under French mandate until independence in 1946. This was followed by a period of political instability, which lasted until the 1960s (Cleveland 2018). These tumultuous years saw a centralization of power in the hands of the military and the security forces, along with an increasingly weakening of the parliament, controlled by different parties representing an elite, composed by landowners and Sunni urban notables (Hinnebusch 2001). The instability was aggravated by the geopolitical turmoil, such as the 1948 ArabIsraeli war and the 1967 war, which led to the Israeli military occupation of part of the Golan Heights territory, previously controlled by Syria (Cleveland 2018). In 1963, the Ba‘ath Party, which had been established in 1947, seized power under the command of the Alawite Salah Jadid. Hinnebusch (2001) labelled the form of government enacted by the Ba‘ath as “popular authoritarianism” and attributed its rise to several social, political and economic factors, including the consolidation of “supra-state irredentist ideologies – Pan-Arabism, Pan-Syrianism and Pan-Islam” as a reaction to Western colonialism; the presence of a disillusioned “growing salaried and/or small-property-owning ‘new middle class’ ”; an empowered class of military officers “recruited from the lower middle class and/or marginal ethnic groups, or from the rural hinterland”; the resentment of

16  Introduction low-class impoverished minorities such as “the Druze, Isma‘ilis and above all the Alawis, [who] embraced the most radical versions of Arab nationalism as a way of both integrating into the national community on an equal basis and contesting the power of the dominant Sunni elite”; and “the recruitment of peasant youth” in politics and in the military (Hinnebusch 2001: 1–4). The economic difficulties and the climate of political instability culminated with Hafiz al-Asad’s coup in 1970. Hafiz al-Asad hailed from a coastal area of Syria known as the home region of the Alawite sect, a religious minority associated with the Shiite strand of Islam. Supported by senior army officers and the “new middle class”, “Asad’s rise marked the victory of the military over the radical intelligentsia” (Hinnebusch 2001: 65). Additionally, the 1970s saw the increase of the Alawi presence in the public sector. “The use by the Alawi community of the army, police and public sector to get out of the village and advance their fortunes gave them a stake in preserving the dominant roles of state institutions over the private market where the Sunni bourgeoisie retained power. In such a climate, class identities tended to be superseded by sectarianism which became most salient during the challenge of the Muslim brotherhood (1976–1982) to what it called an ‘Alawi regime’ ” (Hinnebusch 2001: 70). Although, as noted by Hinnebusch, the composition of the government remained cross-sectarian, “resentment of Alawi dominance remains the main source of the regime’s legitimacy deficit” (72). The emergence of an Alawi elite in the capital redressed a longstanding situation of socioeconomic marginalization (Salamandra 2004). “The Alawis of the coastal villages of northern Syria were an oppressed and exploited minority who often worked as sharecroppers and sent their daughters to the cities – Damascus in particular – to work as servants in wealthy households” (Salamandra 2004: 8). Their status dramatically changed under al-Asad’s presidency. “Once a pejorative, the term ‘Alawi’ now suggests the source of political power and repression” (Ibid: 9). From a linguistic perspective, what is interesting to note is that the Alawi accent is indexically associated with the register used by the muḫābarāt (“secret services”) to oppress political opponents. This register will be the object of metalinguistic discussion in my Facebook data. Against the backdrop of these complex socioeconomic, religious and ethnic dynamics, the Ba‘ath party promoted the construction of a national Syrian identity in connection with an Arab supranational and supra-ethnic identity. According to Thompson (2000), a Syrian national identity did not exist until the rise of the Ba‘ath party. Until the First World War, Syria was a province of the Ottoman Empire, and under the French mandate, city affiliations, such as Damascenes and Aleppines, prevailed (Thompson 2000). The project of a Syrian and Arab national identity was purportedly consistent with a socialist egalitarian ideal, which aimed at effacing the local and social distinctions of ethnicity, class and religion. Such a project found its most symbolic expression in the linguistic policy of Arabization. Whereas for decades since the beginning of the Ba‘ath nationalization project, the public expression of local identities was a taboo, this changed in the 1990s: A relative easing of constraints on freedom of expression during the 1990s opened up space for the public expression of difference, as the global demise

Introduction 17 of socialist ideology weakened its homogenizing principles. Lively debate over formerly taboo subjects began to take place in and around the media and performing arts. After a long period of keeping a deliberately low profile, the Damascene merchant class – sons and daughters of the old urban ruling elite – began to re-assert itself. The Damascene elite expresses a local religious, cultural and lass identity long antithetical to Ba‘ath Party policy and to the current regime, and it does so loudly. (Salamandra 2004: 10) Hopes for greater freedom of expression arose in the early 2000s, when Hafiz al-Asad’s son, Bashar al-Asad, became president after his father’s death. The first two years of Bashar al-Asad’s presidency, known as the Damascus Spring, saw the emergence of a vibrant political scene, including the phenomenon of the muntadayāt, namely gatherings or salons during which intellectuals openly discussed political and social issues (Ghadbian 2015). During these years, the famous cartoonist Ali Ferzat published the satirical periodical “al-Dumari (‘The Lamplighter’)”, which was the first independent periodical in Syria since the rise of the Ba‘ath Party in 1963 (Ghadbian 2001: 637). In an interview with The Guardian, Ali Ferzat narrates that this project stemmed from an encounter with Bashar alAsad, who allegedly enjoyed his cartoons about making fun of the Syrian security apparatus.13 Interestingly, in the same article is stated that former Syrian Information Minister Adnan Umran declared against opening up to more independent publications too quickly for fear that this would lead “to a chaotic free-for-all situation”. The attempt of the government to keep controlling information was at odds with reality, in which opposition global satellite media and the internet were about to penetrate the public sphere (Hinnebusch and Zintl 2015). Ten years after the Damascus Spring, the photo of Ali Ferzat in the hospital with his hands broken by the muḫābarāt (“secret agents”) went viral on social media. The hopes for more freedom and dignity did not materialize and resonated in the slogans of protesters during the Syrian uprising. The economic reforms introduced by Bashar al-Asad were not accompanied by political reforms, such as the lifting of the oppressive emergency law, introduced by the Ba’ath party when it went to power in 1963 (Hinnebusch and Zintl 2015). Oppression did not end under Bashar al-Asad; it simply changed guise, a process captured by Heydemann (2007) through the term “authoritarian upgrading”. Political scientist Lisa Wedeen (2013: 843) argued that the “fantasies of multicultural accommodation” and “upward mobility” propagated by Bashar al-Asad’s government, and which gained ground particularly in the urban centers of Damascus and Aleppo, led to the consolidation of a “neoliberal autocracy”, through which political control was exercised through noncoercive means. Dissident activity, however, was still repressed, and activists were imprisoned (Ghadbian 2015; Heydemann 2007). In this work, I look at the ongoing Syrian conflict through the lenses of three dissidents’ and their followers’ linguistic practices across online platforms. The unexpected turnout of the protests in Egypt, largely due to the activists’ use of Facebook as a mobilization tool (Tufekci and Wilson 2012), and the subsequent fall of Mubarak’s regime most likely motivated Syrian activists to pursue the

18  Introduction same avenue. The uprising started in February and March 2011. Initially the largest protests were far from the capital Damascus and were violently repressed by the police. Bashar al-Asad’s failure to meet the citizens’ demands and the brutal repression led some members of the Syrian army to defect and lead a militia called the Free Syrian Army in July 2011. In 2012, radical Islamic groups emerged, including the al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat an-Nusra (“The Nusra Front”) and, in 2013, ISIS (cf. Lister 2015). Different groups fought against the Syrian regime to control different parts of the territory. The onset of the Islamic groups is interesting to analyze from a linguistic perspective. A young man from the city of Raqqa referred to me how ISIS fighters would use Quranic Arabic in everyday conversation. He suggested that this is because many ISIS fighters, unlike other groups such as Jabhat an-Nusra, are not Syrians. Linguistic registers, as I will show, are used symbolically in the social media practices of Syrian dissidents. Between 2013 and 2015, radical Islamic groups obtained significant victories. The consolidation of these factions put several secular dissidents in the situation of rearticulating their

Figure 1.1 Map of Syria

Introduction 19 sociopolitical positioning. In the following years, the conflict appeared more and more as a proxy war among regional and international actors, including Turkey, Russia, Iran and the United States. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Syrians died since the beginning of the conflict and millions are displaced.14 Many of them, including my case study participants, fled to neighboring countries, such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and subsequently escaped to Europe. The international intervention contributed to a downsizing of radical Islamic groups and a reconsolidation of Asad’s power. In the next sections, after introducing my data and methodology, I provide a chapter outline and conclude with the contributions and the limitations of this study.

7 Methods and Data Online ethnography Data for this work is drawn from an online ethnography of the digital practices of a group of Syrian dissidents between 2009 and 2017. Online ethnography was elaborated by Androutsopoulos (2006, 2008, 2013) as a tool to analyze new media discourse as social practice. As explained above, his Discourse-Centered Online Ethnography (DCOE) integrates the “systematic observation” of an online environment and of the relationship among different online environments, with ethnographic methods, such as interviews with the text producers. My understanding of online ethnography is also informed by KhosraviNik’s (2018) Social-Media Critical Discourse Studies, which studies online discourse as part of wider discourses circulating in society. In this work, I analyze the digital practices of three Syrian dissidents, with a focus on their Facebook practices. The choice to concentrate on their Facebook activity is motivated by different reasons. As posited by Tufekci (2017: 138–139), “Facebook [. . .] combines multiple functions that are indispensable for social movements, from the public to the private, for access to large audiences and to facilitate intimate interpersonal transactions” and functions as “a de facto public sphere reaching large sections of population in countries that heavily censor mass media news”. Tufekci and Wilson (2012) showed that Facebook contributed to the high turnout in Tahrir Square, which led to the downfall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt. This may well have motivated Syrians to recur to the same platforms. Additionally, Arab media and communication scholar Donatella Della Ratta suggested that “Facebook, has become the real platform where the dissent and the creativity – or, better, the creative dissent – of Syrians is manifested”.15 Facebook was probably the most dominant social media platform used at the beginning of the Syrian uprising. Although the Syrian government obscured YouTube and Facebook between 2007 and 2011, many Syrians circumvented the ban through proxy servers and used Facebook to communicate and bond with family and friends (York 2014). When the uprising sparked, this is the social platform most people and their friends were familiar with. Also, through Facebook, it was

20  Introduction possible to show one’s political stance maintaining a certain degree of anonymity, as Maher did by creating a group page using the name of Ali Ferzat’s famous dissident periodical Al Dumari.16 Through Facebook, many dissidents developed linguistic strategies that allowed them to make their political stance public and connect with people who also shared similar political views. In February 2011, a few days after Syrian activists began using Facebook and Twitter to organize the first wave of demonstrations, the first one of which was named Yawm al-Ġaḍab (“The Day of Rage”), the government restored the access to social media platforms, probably in an attempt to control rebellion (York 2014). Facebook soon became an instrument of political dissent. “Several Facebook pages were created to mock the regime, including a popular page called ‘Chinese Revolution’, with 155,000 fans as of November 2012, and which satirized the events in Syria as if they were happening in China” (York 2014). In the years immediately following the Syrian uprising, Facebook was a platform where artists would publish their dissident work (Cooke 2017). Although Facebook was arguably the most effective tool of political mobilization, I will show how dissidents’ discourse developed across a plethora of media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, the radio, mobile phones, soundcloud, Avaaz. Transcribing, transliterating or transcripterating? A large quantity of the social media data analyzed in this book is written. Very few studies thus far have addressed the complexities of contemporary written Arabic. Eid (2002) analyzed the written practices of a group of female Egyptian writers who mixed the Egyptian vernacular and fuṣḥā, shedding light on the complexity of interpreting written texts that could be read both in fuṣḥā and in the vernacular.17 “In the absence of any disambiguation tools, which may be intentional on the part of the writer, multiple interpretations of language variety are resolved in one of two ways by the reader. One is to affirm the ‘accepted norm’ of dichotomous language duality and assign standard pronunciation/transliteration throughout. The other is to assign an interpretation, or reconstruct the writer’s intention, through textual clues and contextual references” (Eid 2002: 212). Mejdell and Høigilt (2017) present a compelling body of research in regard, discussing new forms of written Arabic from a historical and political perspective, in the light of what Mejdell (2017) defined as an irreversible phase of “destandardisation” in the history of the Arabic language. The written Facebook data analyzed in this book contains a large quantity of nonstandard, uncodified vernacular expressions whose representation is problematic, nevertheless necessary, to account for the hybridity underlying the emergence of identities on social media. A mere transliteration of these forms would not do justice to them, as it would be tantamount to imposing the written norm on something that is purposefully intending to challenge it. A transcription of these is also complicated by several factors. Their unofficial, uncodified status often relies on fuṣḥā orthography and allows for a significant degree of variability. I will illustrate these issues, already raised by Eid (2002), through a few examples.

Introduction 21 A) The expression “they want” is represented by the commenters in the appendix in three different ways: ‫( بدن‬biddon), ‫( بدهم‬biddhum) and ‫( بدهون‬biddhon or biddhūn?). In the first one, the nūn suffix reveals the adherence to the vernacular pronunciation. In the second one, the writer used the suffix -hum. The vernacular realization of biddhum has been documented in Behnstedt (2000: 416). However, -hum also corresponds to the fuṣḥā suffix, which the writer may have chosen to facilitate the reader’s interpretation of this uncodified form. The third option is also documented in Behnstedt (2000: 268–274). B) Vernaculars and fuṣḥā share a significant amount of lexical items (Bassiouney 2009). When written, these items can be read both in fuṣḥā and in the vernacular, due to the peculiar absence of short vowels in the Arabic script (Mejdell 2014; Somekh 1991). For example, the word ‫“( مقابلة‬interview”) could be represented in several different ways, such as muqābala, muqābale and m’abale, whereby the first one is a fuṣḥā transliteration and the last one is “the closest” to an urban vernacular representation. C) Whereas the sound qāf is represented through a hamza (“glottal stop”) in order to reflect a ­Damascene realization (note that the latter choice can also have political implications, as illustrated in chapter five), for many shared words there is no way to disambiguate the writer’s intention. For example, it is impossible for a writer to give hints to the reader on whether the word ‫“( مدرسة‬school”) should be read madrasa or madrase. Similarly, the word ‫“( جيش‬army”) can be read as ğayš and ğēš, where the latter corresponds to a vernacular realization.18 D) There is significant morphological and phonetic variation among different Syrian dialects. For example, the word ‫“( بيت‬house”) is realized as bēt in the Damascene vernacular. However, in coastal dialects, it is only realized as such when it is not combined with suffixed pronouns, such as baytna, in which the diphthong is maintained (Behnstedt 2000: 108). E) As observed by Eid (2007) with reference to the Egyptian situation, some mixed oral realizations, in which vernacular phonetic features are applied in a fuṣḥā environment, are perceived as standard by native speakers. For example, the pronunciation of the vernacular emphatic alveolar sibilant ẓ instead of the emphatic interdental sibilant counterpart in an MSA environment does not cause the word to be perceived as vernacular by Syrian native speakers. F) The choice of which dialect to represent is also problematic, particularly when there are not enough orthographic clues and when the text is embedded in mixed environments. In sum, the larger and larger presence of uncodified forms in written social media texts constitutes a relevant dimension of hybridity that the researcher needs to take into consideration. As I will argue through my analysis, this dimension of hybridity is not a mere linguistic encounter between oral and written, but it is central to understanding emergent political identities. A codification of these written practices needs to take into account how these forms are functional to the construction of these political identities. In my work, I address this complexity through a method that I refer to as transcripteration. Building on Eid’s (2002) second way to approach ambiguous texts, transcriperation means going beyond the written representation as an abstract construct and attempting to interpret what the writer is doing through that written representation. Transcripteration is not a perfect, one-size-fits-all method. Rather it is a locally and contextually motivated

22  Introduction representation of social media authors’ choices underlying the articulation of their political identities through language. Transcripteration will become particularly relevant in the analysis of post-uprising written forms, where, I argue, a higher political awareness of the written form arises. Maher, Layla and Nawar The three main participants of my case studies are Maher, Layla and Nawar. Maher and Layla are both journalists who have known each other since their political activism in Syria. As noted by Tufekci (2017), activists and journalists are usually the first ones who recur to new technologies to mobilize and circumvent censorship. Nawar is an actor who became famous for his role in the Syrian historical drama series Bāb al-Ḥāra (“The gate of the neighborhood”). The series was a celebration of Syrian nationalism against the French mandate and colonialism (Della Ratta 2015, 2018). He became politically involved only after the beginning of the uprising. He is from the central city of Homs, theater of some of the largest anti-Asad protests. He appeared in YouTube videos in which he incited the protestors, who welcomed him as a symbol of the revolution. Since 2011, he has written daily posts on his personal page to incite the revolution. Besides his dissident work on Facebook, he directed “Shakespeare in Zaatari”, which features a group of young Syrians living in Jordan’s refugee camp “Zaatari” play in adaptations of some of Shakespeare’s plays, including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and King Lear. More recently, he acts in the theatrical piece mawlāna, written in the Syrian vernacular by Fares Alzaheby. Between 2015 and 2017, he also collaborated with Radio Orient, a Syrian dissident radio in Amman, Jordan. Maher, Nawar and Layla escaped from Syria after 2011. Maher went to Egypt, where he wrote pieces for the satirical newspaper yā ḫabar (“oh news!”). He then moved to Turkey and currently lives in Austria as a refugee. His scarce knowledge of English and German were an impediment to continue working as a journalist. In March 2011, when he was still in Syria, in addition to his personal page, he started a public Facebook page called ad-dōmari19 (“The Lamplighter”). Through his Arabic Facebook page, he could continue to be a Syrian dissident despite the geographical and linguistic limitations. Layla left Syria in 2013 and lived in Amman until 2015, where she also collaborated for Radio Orient. She currently lives in Paris, where she participates in anti-Asad street demonstrations and performances, of which she posts photos on her personal Facebook page. On Facebook, she continues writing and sharing dissident posts and interacting with other dissidents. Additionally, through her Facebook page, she raised awareness about and worked toward the Avaaz campaign against a commercial broadcast by the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain in 2017, accused of acquitting the Syrian government of war crimes. Nawar currently lives in France with his family. Like Maher and Layla, he has been using his Facebook page uninterruptedly since 2011 to express dissent. While all of them used Facebook to communicate and bond with friends and family before the uprising, soon after the Arab Spring started, they began sharing political content, using their Facebook pages as tools to express dissent.

Introduction  23 During my fieldwork in 2014 and 2015, two places were particularly significant: Jadal and Radio Orient. There, I engaged with several Syrian dissidents, including Layla and Nawar, and I was introduced to others, through the friend-ofa-friend method (Milroy and Gordon 2003). Maher, Nawar and Layla are the dissidents with whom I was able to interact more extensively during my fieldwork. I conducted several interviews with them in person, via Skype and using the Facebook chat. During the face-to-face unstructured interviews, I elicited information about their language choices on social media and their attitudes toward them. Additionally, I asked them to talk about their social media practices, to show me their Facebook posts and to read the ones with me that they deemed most significant. Some of them were initially confused about my interest in their Facebook pages, which they had hitherto considered as a marginal practice of their social and political activism. After presenting them with their posts, they saw them from a different perspective and valorized them, reflecting on the consequences of these texts in terms of the participation they created. The interviews also informed my selection of the texts presented in this book. The analysis starts with Maher’s and Nawar’s Facebook practices between 2009 and 2012. Unlike several other dissidents, who closed and reopened their Facebook pages several times throughout the years, Maher’s and Nawar’s pages display an uninterrupted activity, which allowed a comparison between their pre-2011 and post-2011 uprising linguistic choices. The longitudinal “systematic observation” (cf. Androutsopoulos 2008) also allowed me to attend to the evolution of dissidents’ discourse vis-à-vis the unfolding sociopolitical context. Jadal Jadal is a cultural center and a café in the heart of Amman, Jordan. The building is located on top of one of the oldest steps of the city, and it resembles a traditional Syrian house with its courtyard and water fountain. As explained to me by its founder, Fadi Amireh, a young Jordanian engineer who decided to abandon his career to devote his efforts entirely to this project, the idea of Jadal came up in the context of the Arab Spring. “I was thinking of a place where people from different walks of life, faith and opinions could get together. A venue for discussion and cultural encounters”. During my fieldwork in 2014, I met Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians and Jordanians who were frequenting Jadal regularly. The center hosts cultural activities, such as poetry, music and art events delivered by young Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi and Jordanian artists. Other events included monthly potluck dinners, which attracted Western students and activists, as well as Arabs of different generations. Several of the young Syrian people I met at Jadal in 2014 and 2015 left Jordan in the following years and relocated to Europe. Radio Orient Radio Orient is a Syrian oppositional radio in the heart of Amman, owned by Ghassan Abboud, Syrian tycoon and founder in 2009 of the television channel

24  Introduction Orient TV, based in the United Arab Emirates. Orient TV is one of the channels that first started broadcasting footages of the initial demonstrations in Syria in March 2011. In an interview with the Mideastwire Blog, Ghassan Abboud said about Orient TV, also called Orient Channel, Orient Channel was launched on 2/2/2009, and in less than two months was able to enter the hearts of the Syrians because it was the only one with a different voice . . . We worked on a series of shows depicting the different Syrian groups, with all their sects, ethnicities, belongings and even occupations. We revealed the other, because if you do not know what is in your neighbor’s house, you will always fear him. We opened the people’s houses to each other, and allowed all the sects to see what the others were doing. This is why they loved this channel, because Syria under the rule of the Ba’th party annulled the privacy of human groups and tried to make them similar [. . .].20 In the same interview, it is alleged that Rami Makhlouf, President Bashar alAsad’s cousin and Syrian business tycoon, asked Ghassan Abboud to become business partners, which would have facilitated the state’s control over the oppositional channel. After rejecting the offer, the TV channel offices in Damascus were raided by the security forces, and Ghassan Abboud moved the headquarters to Dubai. Radio Orient is part of Ghassan Abboud’s media group and is headquartered in Amman. During my fieldwork in the summer of 2015, I visited Radio Orient several times. Nawar introduced me to the director Fares Alzaheby and to the staff. I observed informal and work meetings, rehearsals of recorded radio programs and live programs. The radio hosts a wide range of programs in Arabic. These include news coverage with local correspondents in Syria, entertainment and call-in programs, as well as radio soap operas. Two interesting shows I followed closely are ‘āyle ‘alā l-ḥudūd (“A family on the border”) and ḥkāyā ’ahālīnā (“Stories of our people”). ‘Āyle ‘alā l-ḥudūd is the story of a displaced Syrian family that crosses the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. The script was written by France-based Syrian author Ṣubḥī Ḥalīme and features the actors Nawar Bulbul, May Skaff and Zaina Ḥallāq, who recorded her part from Tunisia. The program was aired during the month of Ramadan, in concomitance with state-controlled Ramadan series analyzed by Della Ratta (2015). Ḥkāyā ’ahālīnā is a biweekly radio show written by Layla and Dina.21 Each episode treats a different topic related to the politics and the history of Syria, from a critical, dissident perspective.

8 Chapter outline Chapter 2 introduces the key theoretical concepts that informed my understanding of linguistic hybridity in connection with identity on Syrian social media practices. Analytical chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 illustrate hybridity in different phases of Syrian dissidents’ practices on social media between 2009 and 2017 with relation to the sociopolitical context. Chapter 3 focuses on Maher’s and Nawar’s

Introduction 25 Facebook repertoire before the uprising (2009–2011), demonstrating how hybridity, consisting of the entextualization of global and local symbols, was finalized at the construction of cosmopolitan identities. Chapter 4 analyzes a shift in the type of hybridity displayed with relation to the new sociopolitical context of the uprising. Capitalizing on the symbolic values of the Syrian vernacular and fuṣḥā, Maher and Nawar foregrounded their identities of dissidents as “real” Syrians, in reaction to Bashar al-Asad’s delegitimization of protestors as infiltrators.22 In chapter 5, I show how post-uprising hybrid practices underlie the emergence of new political identities and a new “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005) through the interaction among commenters on a revolution Facebook page. Chapter 6 explores the role of hybridity in a sociopolitical context characterized by the advancement of radical Islamic groups through Layla’s practices on Facebook and on the radio. It analyzes hybridity through the notions of “synchronicity” (Blommaert 2005) and language choice (Bassiouney 2010, 2012; Eid 2002). In chapter 7, I draw on the notions of “layered simultaneity” and “synchronicity” (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005), as well as chronotope and scale (Blommaert 2015a) to make sense of how dissidents’ voices have been erased in an increasingly complex sociopolitical context, characterized by an escalation of violence, a reconsolidation of Asad’s power and the social media involvement of a telecommunication company in the discourse of the Syrian conflict. Throughout these analysis chapters, I intend to shed light on the dynamic, context and discoursedependent character of hybridity and the role played by internet users in their enactment of hybridity through symbolic choices.

9 Contributions and limitations of this study Although interest in the Syrian sociopolitical situation has surged in the past few years, no books, to my knowledge, have approached the issue from the perspective of language and identity. This work fills this gap. Additionally, this work builds on a burgeoning strand of research in Arabic sociolinguistics, which looks at the relationship between the symbolic function of language and identity in a situation of conflict (cf. Bassiouney 2014; Suleiman 2013a) and heeds Blommaert’s call for a society-grounded sociolinguistics in a context of globalization, underlying a sociolinguistics of complexity (Blommaert 2016, 2017, 2019; Blommaert et al. 2015; also see Al Zidjaly 2019a). Whereas much work on language and identity in Arabic has focused primarily on national, public identities and public discourse, emphasizing how public discourse “highlights and selects [. . .] specific components of identity while ignoring others, exploiting language form and content in this process by laying claim to access to linguistic resources” (Bassiouney 2014: 37), this book approaches identity and discourse from the opposite direction, looking at how individuals interact with discourse through the lens of dissident practices on social media. Building on sociolinguistic literature on code choice (Bassiouney 2012), hybridity (Eid 2002, 2007; Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014) and simultaneity (Mejdell 2014; Woolard 1999), through this work I propose going beyond an analysis of

26  Introduction code-switching to analyze language and identity in social media Arabic contexts. I show that what individuals do through mixing on social media, particularly in contexts of political turmoil, is to foreground symbolic snippets, or “fragments” (Agha 2005) of linguistic registers, varieties or modes in order to interact with other individuals or groups through hybrid social media texts.23 In addition, I shed light on some of the challenges in analyzing written social media material in Arabic and suggest theoretical and practical tools for the interpretation and the representation of these. Some of the biggest challenges social media discourse analysts encounter are the overwhelming amount of data, the complexity of discourse and the everunfolding sociopolitical context. When I began this research, several Syrians had relocated to neighboring countries, including Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. After a multi-year observation of dissident Facebook pages, including Maher’s ad-dōmari (“The Lamplighter”) and pro-government pages (such as al-ḥaqīqa alsuriyya, The Syrian Truth), I embarked on a preliminary field trip to Amman in the summer of 2014 with the intent to meet some of these text producers. Despite my effort, I was not able to find and interact with Asad supporters who were politically active on social media. Conversely, I observed a tight network of dissidents who interacted on a daily basis through social media and in physical spaces, such as Jadal and Radio Orient. Through them, I was able to get in touch with Maher, who lived in Turkey at the time. The focus on a few dissidents’ practices is a clear limitation of this study. These text producers are neither representative of all dissidents, let alone of all Syrians. My selection was motivated by reasons of availability and my curiosity to analyze reactions to institutional narrative in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between language, identity and the unfolding sociopolitical context. This said, the texts are not representative of all Syrian dissidents’ practices but serve to shed light on some strategies enacted by them to sustain their dissident discourse and position themselves throughout the ongoing conflict. Finally, another limitation of this study is the exclusive qualitative focus, as a result of the large amount of data and the fine-grained analysis conducted at the micro level. Moreover, the sociopolitically sensitive nature of the topic and the data adds a dimension of ethical complexity. With the deterioration of the conflict into a proxy war among regional and world powers and the radicalization of anti-Asad forces, my focus on “one side” of the conflict can be seen as an oversimplification and a biased misrepresentation. Nevertheless, I believe that a focus on Syrian dissidents’ everyday linguistic practices constitutes an entirely new type of political discourse that researchers have not yet had the opportunity to engage with, particularly in this region, and presents one perspective that is not visible in Arab or Western media. Another ethical consideration derives from the decision of not anonymizing the study participants (with the exception of one of them), as interactional sociolinguistics, for example, has traditionally done. Not only is a complete anonymization of social media texts unattainable (Androutsoupolos 2008), but it would also detract from the nature, the scope and the context of the data itself. Through these texts, the authors for the first time have had a voice in

Introduction 27 Syrian political discourse. As one of the study participants put it, whereas before the Syrian uprising public spaces in Syria were covered with posters of the Asad family, through Facebook, Syrians for the first time put their own face in public. Upon the participants’ request, I decided not to anonymize their names. However, I deleted the names and photos of post commenters, with whom it was not possible to establish direct contact. Despite these study limitations, this work contributes to the study of language, identity and new media from a bottom-up, grassroots perspective, integrating new tools of analysis and shedding light on new perspectives for Arabic linguistic investigation.

Notes 1 I will discuss the notion of hybridity further in this and the next chapter with reference to its application in the fields of literature, language, media and communication, linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics (Bakhtin 1981; Kraidy 2002; Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014; Woolard 1999). 2 The blog is no longer accessible. 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5wek_1nq0U 4 What is often referred to as Syrian Arabic is in fact a simplification (cf. Suleiman 2003: 142). Through the book, I  use the term Syrian Arabic or Syrian vernacular to refer to any Syrian varieties when it is not sufficiently clear from the written data which variety is being used. The distinction among different regional varieties becomes more salient in chapters 4, 5 and 6, in which I use the terms Damascene vernacular and ‘Alawite register’ in order to emphasize the deliberate choice of the study participants to use distinct regional varieties for political purposes. Additionally, Suleiman (2013b) argues for the incorporation of an “Arabic folk linguistics” perspective in the study of language and society in the Arab world, advocating the use of the Arabic terms ‘āmmiyya instead of vernacular and fuṣḥā for all written varieties. In this book, I use the English terminology for two reasons. Firstly, I intend to facilitate comprehension for readers who do not speak Arabic. Secondly, as will become clear later in this chapter and in the final analysis chapters, terms such as Modern Standard Arabic and Quranic Arabic better render the study participants’ social and political perception of the Syrian government’s and the radical Islamic groups’ uses of these varieties. 5 Throughout the book, I use the term “multimodality” (Iedema 2003; Kress 2010) as a broad umbrella term to refer to texts in which meaning is coded through different modes, such as audio, visual and written. 6 For a discussion on his distinction between the “symbolic” and the “instrumental” functions of language, see Suleiman (2011, 2013a). 7 This notion was particularly developed in the field of bilingual education (see, for example, Canagarajah 2011; García and Li Wei 2014). 8 See Mejdell and Høigilt (2017) for a compelling collection of studies toward this direction. 9 The “public sphere” is a key notion used by critical discourse analysts with reference to discourse. Fraser (1990: 57) explained it as “a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state”. In addition, Fraser theorized the presence of multiple public spheres, arguing that these are “arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities” (68). 10 Sreberny-Mohammadi observed that Jankowsi et  al. (1992) referred to this type of media through the term “the people’s voice”.

28  Introduction 11 Suleiman (2003: 143) quotes the expression “unified and unifying language” from the Arab nationalist ideologue Sāṭi‘ al-Ḥuṣrī. 12 http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/archive/2004/677/cu15.htm 13 www.theguardian.com/world/2001/apr/03/brianwhitaker 14 https://www.unhcr.org/syria-emergency.html 15 www.jadaliyya.com/Details/30064/The-Whisper-Strategy-Drama-and-Power-Rela tions-in-Syria-An-Interview-with-Donatella-Della-Ratta 16 See Ghadbian (2001). 17 I will discuss Eid’s (2002) study further in chapter 2. 18 I am aware of the fact that diphthongs are not completely absent in dialects. 19 The Facebook page name is spelled in Arabic ‫الدومري‬. Throughout the book, I adopted this transcription to reflect a Syrian oral pronunciation. 20 https://mideastwire.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/orient-tv-founder-on-the-mechanicsof-corruption-in-syria/ 21 Layla and Dina are pseudonyms. 22 Some of the examples analyzed in chapters 3 and 4 appeared in Sinatora (2019). 23 The images of symbolic snippets and fragments are inspired by Blommaert’s (2011) notion of “bits” with reference to “supervernaculars”, within the framework of a sociolinguistics of mobility (Blommaert 2010), as well as to Agha’s (2005) definition of “entextualized voices” as the selection of register “fragments”. Throughout the analysis, I  approach hybridity as the juxtaposition of symbolic fragments in reference to these theoretical frameworks.

2 Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media

A key notion I refer to throughout the analysis of Syrian dissidents’ social media practices is that of linguistic hybridity, identified by Bakhtin (1981) as the mixing of language forms underlying linguistic variation and change. Bakhtin distinguished between “organic” and “intentional” hybrid language. Young (1995) explained that the former refers to uncontested “forms of amalgamation” (21) underlying language development, whereas the latter implies tension and “contestation” (Ibid.). Linguists’ recent interest in hybridity, Hall and Nilep (2015) observed, arose in reaction to the notion of code-switching, elaborated by Blom and Gumperz (1972) and developed by scholars across linguistic situations, including Arabic, in order to account for speakers’ changes of register across languages or linguistic varieties. Studies in bilingual communication warned against a consideration of code-switching as an exceptional phenomenon, arguing that this would lead to a reification of previous assumptions of code boundedness that permeated structural monolingual approaches to language (Auer 1995; Gardner-Chloros 1995; Hall and Nilep 2015). Through her study of bilingualism in autonomous Catalonia, Woolard (1999, 2013) proposed an analysis of hybridity as “translingual simultaneity”, contextualizing it as a historical and political phenomenon. The historical dimension of language was further highlighted by Blommaert (2005, 2015a), who argued that, despite its “synchronized” appearance, communication is a “condensation of several historical layers into one, synchronic” (2005: 157). Hybridity as the everyday practice of mixing local and global forms in ­globalized environments, such as immigrant communities and social media, has been a recent primary focus of sociolinguistic investigation (Al Zidjaly 2019a; Androutsopoulos 2010; Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Hall and Nilep 2015; Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2014; Pennycook 2007; Rubdy ad Alsagoff 2014; Varis and Wang 2011), and several terms have been coined to capture the nature of translingual phenomena (Blommaert and Rampton 2011), including crossing (Rampton 1995), code alternation (Auer 1995, 2005; Georgakopoulou 2011), ­polylingualism (Jørgenson 2008; Møller 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2014) and translanguaging (García 2009; Canagarajah 2011). Through these notions, scholars emphasized the active role of the speaker in drawing from and crossing the boundaries of what was previously described as discrete varieties in order

30  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media to shape identities and discourses in everyday communication (Hall and Nilep 2015). Such a focus, however, has raised concerns about the utility of such a notion as hybridity. If hybridity is immanent, what is it that makes it subversive?1 Rubdy and Alsagoff (2014) argued that “notwithstanding its quotidian nature, hybridity is a helpful concept because it provides a profoundly reflexive perspective in transcending binary categories” (9). Quoting Pieterse, they affirmed that hybridity proves “that boundaries are historical and social constructions” and that “As Pieterse observes, what is new is the recent acceleration of this awareness: ‘mixing has been perennial as a process but new as an imaginary’ ” (Pieterse 2004: 52; Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014: 9). The political dimension of hybrid phenomena was further emphasized by Makoni and Pennycook (2007) and Otsuji and Pennycook (2010). The latter proposed analyzing translingual practices as processes of “fixity” and “fluidity”, arguing for the impossibility to comprehend hybrid forms without considering the ideological conditions that underlay the separation of codes in the first place. These ideological factors have to do with the symbolic, or indexical meanings, evoked by hybrid forms. Arabic is a privileged context for the study of hybridity in society due to the peculiar sociolinguistic situation of diglossia, namely the presence formal written and informal spoken varieties, each having different social functions (Ferguson 1959). Whereas these varieties, as explained by Mejdell (2017), have long been described as discrete, and intermediate forms have been considered as the exception in the history of the Arabic language rather than the norm, Brustad (2017) argued that such a separation is purely ideological and instead proposed an analysis of diglossia in terms of “stylistic performance”. Similarly Bassiouney (2014, 2017) argued for an understanding of diglossia through the lens of the indexical meanings associated with the different varieties, through which, she demonstrated, individuals construct identities in discourse. By showing how individuals mobilized symbolic resources across different phases of the Syrian conflict, through a longitudinal analysis of Syrian dissident practices on social media, I emphasize the mobile and historical dimension hybridity, envisaged by Blommaert (2005, 2015a), Otsuji and Pennycook (2010, 2014) and Woolard (1999), thus bringing the historical and ideological dimension of hybridity to the center of Arabic sociolinguistic investigation. I will argue that a focus on hybrid practices is necessary to attend to how identities emerge in discourse, particularly in a conflictual sociopolitical context. In line with a vision of hybridity as “fixed” and “fluid” (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2014), I conceptualize hybridity as the mixture of features indexically associated with and at the same time eluding fixed categories. I will show how the hybrid practices analyzed on Syrian dissidents’ social media do not consist of switches between varieties, but they appear as the incorporation of symbolic fragments of registers and varieties (Agha 2005, Blommaert 2010) which are enough (Blommaert and Varis 2011) to foreground certain identities over others in determined sociohistorical contexts. I understand this symbolic use of language in terms of indexicality (Agha 2005; Bassiouney 2014; Blommaert 2010; Silverstein 2003), further explained below. I also intend to show how this symbolic “fixity” is involved in a dynamic process. By mobilizing symbolic resources, individuals not only draw from language

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  31 symbolism, but through their hybrid practices they change the symbolic meanings of it, turning “fixity” into “fluidity” (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2014). In what follows, I will introduce the notions that informed my analysis of hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media. I will start with a review of code-switching (Blom and Gumperz 1972), code alternation (Auer 1995; Georgakopoulou 2011), diglossia (Ferguson 1959) and simultaneity (Woolard 1999) and explain how these notions were applied in Arabic sociolinguistic studies. I will then provide a brief description of the terms intertextuality, entextualization, voice and register (Agha 2005; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Blommaert 2005; Leppänen et al. 2014; Tannen 2007). Finally I examine the notions of scales, chronotopes, indexical orders, orders of indexicality and polycentricity (Bassiouney 2014; Blommaert 2005, 2015a; Blommaert and Varis 2011; Silverstein 2003; Johnstone et al. 2006; Woolard 2013), used throughout the analysis to locate Syrian dissidents’ social media practices historically and to explain the symbolic value of linguistic and extralinguistic resources animating these practices.

1 Code-Switching The term code-switching was introduced by Blom and Gumperz (1972) in a study of two varieties of Norwegian, a standard and a dialect, both used by the inhabitants of a Norwegian fishing village. The authors identified two types of alternation between the two varieties, which they termed “situational” and “metaphorical code-switching”. Situational code-switching is determined by the type of situation. The repeated use of one variety in a certain social context establishes an association between that variety and the social context. A similar process was described by Ferguson (1959) in terms of diglossia, a concept analyzed in more detail below with relation to code-switching, code-alternation and hybridity in Arabic. According to Hall and Nilep (2015), Blom and Gumperz conceived situational code-switching as an agentive process. Instead of being the situation determining the code, they explained, speakers choose codes in order to “produce the situation” (Hall and Nilep 2015: 600). Metaphorical code-switching refers to the switch between two varieties within the same social activity. Through this type of switch, speakers evoke, or recreate other social contexts metaphorically, within the same situation (Blom and Gumperz 1972). Gumperz (1982), Hall and Nilep observed, further built on the notions of situational and metaphorical codeswitching to formulate the concept of contextualization cues, namely linguistic and extralinguistic strategies used by nonbilingual speakers to shape the social context. Hall and Nilep (2015) also suggested that Goffman’s (1981) notion of footing describes a similar process occurring within metaphorical code-switching. “In talk it seems routine that, while firmly standing on two feet, we jump up and down on another” (Goffman 1981: 155). The image of footing depicted by Goffman to describe a vertical movement interestingly evokes metaphors used in later approaches to linguistic hybridity, such as “metrolingualism”, depicted by Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) as movement between “fixity” and “fluidity”. According

32  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media to Hall and Nilep (2015), metaphorical code-switching also informed Woolard’s (1999: 16) notion of “virtual simultaneity”: In [Woolard’s] reading of the literature, Blom and Gumperz’s work advanced an understanding of social identities as “simultaneously inhabitable” (17), inspiring attention to the way speakers make use of language alternatives to “create, invoke, or strategically maintain ambiguity between two possible identities” (16). (Hall and Nilep 2015: 601)

2 Diglossia and Code-Switching (CS) in Arabic Blom and Gumperz’s (1972) definition of “code-switching” and Gumperz’s (1982) notion of “contextualization cues” inspired a wide literature on bilingualism. Gumperz (1982: 59) defined CS as “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems”. Bassiouney (2003, 2006, 2009), Eid (1988) and Mejdell (2006) argued that the term CS does not only refer to different languages, but it can apply to the switch between varieties of diglossic languages like Arabic. The term diglossia was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by the European scholars Krumbacher (1902), Psichari (1928)2 and Marçais (1930) and became known to American and Arab linguists through the work of Charles A. Ferguson (1959), who described it as “a particular kind of standardization where two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the community, with each having a definite role to play” (325). He argued that these two varieties differ in function, prestige, literary heritage, standardization, grammar, lexicon and phonology. Ferguson’s characterization of diglossia highlights a particular social phenomenon, whereby resources of power and legitimization, such as religious and cultural texts, are transmitted in a language – labelled by Ferguson as “high” (H) as opposed to the vernaculars (“low”, or L) – which can only be acquired through formal education. He claimed that H is associated with certain social contexts, including “sermons in church or mosque, personal letter, university lectures, speeches in parliament, political speeches, news broadcasts, newspaper editorials, news stories, captions on pictures, and poetry” (329). Conversely, he argued, L is used in “instructions to servants, waiters, workmen, clerks, conversation with family, friends and colleagues, radio ‘soap opera’, captions on political cartoons and folk literature”. Moreover, Ferguson emphasized that diglossia is a “relatively stable language situation” (336) and that “the communicative tensions which arise in the diglossia situation may be resolved by the use of relatively uncodified, unstable, intermediate forms of the language (Greek mikti, Arabic al-lugah al-wusṭā, Haitian créole de salon”) and repeated borrowing of vocabulary from H to L” (332). Ferguson further argued that: Diglossia seems to be accepted and not regarded as a ‘problem’ by the community in which it is in force, until certain trends appear in the community.

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  33 These include trends toward (1) more widespread literacy (whether for economic, ideological or other reasons), (2) broader communication among different regional and social segments of the community (e.g., for economic, administrative, military, or ideological reasons), (3) desire for a full-fledged standard ‘national’ language as an attribute of autonomy or of sovereignty. (338) When these trends occur, he continued, leaders in the community begin to call for unification of the language, and for that matter, actual trends toward unification begin to take place. These individuals tend to support either the adoption of H or of one form of L as the standard, less often the adoption of a modified H or L, a ‘mixed’ variety of some kind. The proponents of H argue that H must be adopted because it connects the community with its glorious past or with the world community and because it is a naturally unifying factor as opposed to the divisive nature of the L dialects. [. . .] The proponents of L argue that some variety of L must be adopted because it is closer to the real thinking and feeling of the people. (338–339) Suleiman (2003) showed how these calls for unification gained prominence in the first half of the twentieth century in response to Western colonialism. In the post-colonial period, these discourses culminated in policies of Arabization across the Arab world, which favored Modern Standard Arabic over the vernaculars and minority languages (Miller 2003). Ferguson’s model was expanded by later Arabic linguists, who put great effort in the description of intermediate forms and varieties, losing focus, I argue, on the ideological dynamics (Brustad 2017) animating them. 2.1 Levels, continuum and multiglossia Ferguson’s (1959) study of diglossia inspired a large body of literature, which investigated the occurrence of intermediate varieties of Arabic.3 Blanc (1960) emphasized the presence of two phenomena, one known as “leveling” and the other one as “classicizing”. The former relates to episodes of overlap between dialects, and the latter refers to the mixture of low and high. Based on data deriving from Egyptian radio programs, Badawi (1973) theorized the presence of five levels of speech constituting the sullam luġawyy (“linguistic stairway”) of the Egyptian linguistic community, which he named ʽāmmiyyat al-’ummiyīn (“the vernacular of the illiterate”), ʽāmmiyyat al-mutanawwirīn (“the vernacular of the enlightened”), ʽāmmiyyat al-muṯaqqafīn (“the vernacular of the educated”), fuṣḥā- al-‘aṣr (“the fuṣḥā of contemporary times”) and fuṣḥā al-turāṯ (“the fuṣḥā of the tradition”). He provided examples of radio programs that adopted the use of each of these levels, as well as stereotypical examples of Egyptians whose speech is associated with each level. For example, he suggested that fuṣḥā al-turāṯ

34  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media is used by religious men, such as Al Azhar scholars. Conversely, programs using ʽāmmiyyat al-mutanawwirīn feature a predominantly female presence.4 It should be noted, however, that Badawi did not consider levels as well-defined varieties, but rather as fuzzy categories, similar to Ferguson’s conceptualization of intermediate forms as uncodified. Badawi often emphasized the importance of societal cohesion, claiming that ʽāmmiyyat al-muṯaqqafīn (“vernacular of the educated”) plays an important role in it. Later scholars expanded on this term to develop the notion of “educated spoken Arabic” (El-Hassan 1977; Mitchell 1986). Building on Schmidt’s (1974) “one-system” theory, Hary (1992) argued for a “multiglossic” framework, consisting of a “continuum” of “infinite number of language varieties” (1992: 3) regulated by a single grammatical system rather than by a diglossic one. He contended that Arabic native speakers’ perceptions play a crucial role in associating words with one variety or the other rather than features inherent to the variety itself. 2.2 Diglossic-switching Eid (1988), in one of the first studies that applied syntactic CS principles to Arabic, proposed the term diglossic code-switching to describe the alternation between “Standard Arabic” and “Egyptian Arabic” in her data. Similarly, BoussofaraOmar (1999, 2003, 2006), who argued against the characterization of one or more third or middle varieties, referred to the intermediate forms previously studied as part of the continuum through the term “Arabic diglossic switching”, a phenomenon “governed by [syntactic] structural constraints”, which, she claimed, are “systematic and predictable” (2003: 33). Bassiouney (2009), building on Holes (1993) and Mejdell (1999), analyzed the social motivations of code-switching, thus treating diglossic switching in terms of code choice. She “examine[d] the relation between code choice and choice of role by the speaker” and argued that “in political speeches in general there is a direct relation between change of role and change of code” (Bassiouney 2009: 72–73). This, she contended, reinforces Goffman’s (1981) and Gumperz’s (1982) claims, according to which changes in footing and contextualization cues signal changes in the role of the speaker within the communicative situation. She concluded her analysis of code choice in Mubarak’s political speeches arguing that “Persuasion often involves role change. The question remains whether the relationship between change of role and codeswitching is limited to political speeches, or whether it is a general phenomenon as some linguists have claimed” (85). Moreover, Bassiouney (2009) noted that the situation of Arabic diglossia is more complicated than other bilingual situations, due to the presence of a large set of terms that can equally belong to both fuṣḥā and the vernacular. According to her, Egyptians’ code-switching practices are characterized by the presence of “predictable composites”, which challenge previous structural constraints on code-switching, and attributed the presence of these mixed forms to the Egyptians’ increased exposure to fuṣḥā throughout the second half of the twentieth

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  35 century (2009: 55–56). Anderson (2014) discussed the social impact of “composites” through the notion of “middling discourse”, which will be treated further below. Albirini (2016) analyzed the functions of Standard Arabic and Syrian Arabic in a Syrian Revolution Facebook page. His findings “show that speakers use SA [Standard Arabic] to: (1) highlight the importance of a segment of discourse, (2) introduce direct speech, (3) produce rhyming stretches of discourse, (4) theorize or preach, and (5) index their personal identities” (281). Additionally, he explained that “speakers shift to QA [Syrian Arabic] to (1) make sarcastic, often underhandedly offensive, remarks, (2) introduce daily-life sayings, and (3) scold or insult” (285). Moreover, Albirini noted that “one of the most visible patterns of employing QA [Syrian Arabic] is sarcasm”, through which “users [. . .] discuss offensive issues in an indirect way” (Ibid.). The use of humor in connection with the Syrian vernacular as a strategy to convey dissent was observed in my data and will be discussed with reference to Maher’s linguistic practices in chapters 4 and 5. I will argue, however, that humor and sarcasm, both on Facebook and on the radio, are also cued through hybrid practices, such as “simultaneity” (Woolard 1999) and “code alternation” (Auer 1995; Georgakopoulou 2011). Consistent with previous studies on code-switching, Albirini intentionally disregarded hybrid forms. “In cases of mixed SA [Standard Arabic]-QA [Syrian Arabic] sentences, the beginning of a switch was based on clear cases, where a language form is not shared by the two varieties” (281). The identities emerging from the Syrian dissidents’ practices analyzed in this book are indexed through a plethora of hybrid linguistic and extralinguistic strategies. These forms and strategies challenge the term “switching” as an alternation between distinct codes with clear functions assigned to them. Moreover, they problematize the very notion of “codes” and further substantiate more recent approaches, analyzed in more detail below, which look at language as resources. These approaches are grounded in a shift in bilingualism, which considers CS no longer as an exceptional phenomenon (see Auer 1995; Gardner-Chloros 1995). “The assumption dominating linguistics continues to be one which views as the normal or the unmarked case the monolingual speaker in a homogeneous speech community” (Milroy and Muysken 1995: 2–3). A focus on hybrid forms and strategies to index identity, it will be argued, is particularly relevant in an analysis of digital discourse in a time of sociopolitical unrest. In order to better contextualize this study’s data and the theoretical framework informing it, I introduce Woolard’s (1999) notions of “linguistic simultaneity” and “strategic bivalency”, as well as Mejdell’s (2014) application of “bivalency” to the Arabic context.

3 Hybridity as “simultaneity” One of the most influential theories that informed the linguistic dimension of hybridity in this work is Woolard’s (1999) notion of “simultaneity”, developed

36  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media in the context of Castilian and Catalan bilingual communication and informed by Bakhtin’s (1981) vision of language as “heteroglossic” and “polyphonic”, two notions through which he alluded to the presence of a multiplicity of social voices in each utterance (also see Tovares 2016). Woolard observed that simultaneity contributed to an important shift of perspective in bilingual studies, which drifted away from a conception of language as a set of discrete, bounded codes, labeled as the “new orthodoxy of code-switching” (Auer 1995; Gardner-Chloros 1995; Woolard 1999: 5), and emphasized the need to focus on bilingualism in sociolinguistic investigation. She identified three types of linguistic simultaneity, namely “bivalency”, “linguistic interference” and “conversational code-switching”, as well as two types of simultaneity in terms of communicative function: “multiple simultaneous social identities of a speaker” and “the simultaneous messages of communication in the contact zone”. Woolard defined bivalency as “the use by a bilingual of words or segments that could ‘belong’ equally, descriptively and even prescriptively, to both codes” (7). She explained that the increased perception of duality and separation exacerbated by the language policies following the transition of Catalonia to autonomy were challenged by the bivalent practices of comedians and their large audiences. A particular form of bivalency, she argued, is constituted by “bilingual – or perhaps better termed, interlingual – puns [. . .], in which there is identity in form (phonological or orthographic) but incongruity in the significance of the sign in the two languages” (10). She quoted an example from Heller’s (1994) study, in which French-English bilingual students in Canada “play with bilingual puns to juxtapose the languages that are usually constructed socially as mutually exclusive, and the humorous move provides a release from the tension of the sociolinguistic opposition” (1999: 10). In the present study, puns and humor underlie an entertaining function. Bivalent puns, I will show, are also powerful instruments among dissidents’ practices in order to code dissent, denounce social oppression and reclaim linguistic authority. Finally, while suggesting that bivalency is used more or less consciously in different sociolinguistic contexts, Woolard emphasized that these forms are “strategically marshaled and rhetorically manipulated by speakers” (12) and can constitute the backbone of ideological and political debates. Citing Haugen, Woolard (1999: 14) defined interference as the application of “two systems [. . .] simultaneously [. . .] to a linguistic item”. She illustrated this phenomenon through the following sentence from her data: “estabas/estaves a Igualada” (“you were in Igualada”). The use of “estabas” is prescriptively appropriate in Castillian, and the preposition “a” is prescriptively appropriate in Catalan. However, both terms exist in both languages. Moreover, she emphasized that interference may occur at different levels of linguistic communication. She quoted Alvarez-Cáccamo’s (1990) example of the application of Galician vernacular prosody to a sentence composed using the Spanish syntax and lexicon. According to Woolard, “bivalency” and “interference” are relevant to understand a shift from “sequential” to “metaphorical” code-switching (1999: 16–19). Whereas, she argued, before the autonomy of Catalonia code-switching practices

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  37 “index[ed] a sequence of orientations to different addressees” (18), after 1979 code-switching began to be perceived “as metaphorical simultaneity, an invocation of dual perspectives or identities” (18).5 Finally, quoting Pratt (1991: 36–37), Woolard emphasized that “Discourses in multilingual contact zones are ‘heterogeneous on the reception end as well as the production end,’ and are ‘read very differently by people in different positions in the contact zone’ ” and that the multiple ways in which these messages can be interpreted is due to “the social and linguistic positioning of participants” (21). As will be discussed below, this is a central tenet of Blommaert’s (2010) “sociolinguistics of mobility”, underlying the concept of “non-shared knowledge” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 8). In the case study of Syrian dissidents’ digital practices, the heterogeneity of discourses is connected with the highly politicized context. Multiple interpretations are further complicated by the large presence of Arabic terms belonging to both fuṣḥā and the vernacular (Bassiouney 2009), as well as by the “ambiguity of unvowelled Arabic script” (Somekh 1991: 120; Mejdell 2014, 2017). In sum, the relevance of Woolard’s work on simultaneity lies in the centrality it places on ambiguous, intermediate forms, which previous studies on code-switching neglected. These forms, she showed, carry relevant information in terms of language and identity. They can subvert a language ideology of separation, as was the case of the comedians from Barcelona, and they constitute important resources for the construction of social identities and the production and reception of multiple messages. Woolard’s analysis is rooted in a linguistic, sociopolitical and communicative context that differs from the one considered in this work. Whereas the bulk of her data derived from the oral domain, the large presence of written data in my case study complicates the analysis of bivalency, as will be discussed below.

4 Code alternation Another dimension of hybridity that informs the present study is Georgakopoulou’s (2011) application of “code-alternation” to the digital environment of e-mail communication. Borrowing the concept of code alternation from Auer (1995), who described it as “the juxtaposition of semiotic systems such that the appropriate recipients of the resulting complex sign are in a position to interpret this juxtaposition as such” (116), she operationalized it as “[. . .] rapid, unexpected, and even incongruous departures from the surrounding co-text” (Georgakopoulou 2011: 4). Analogous to Woolard’s (1999) “simultaneous” phenomena, code alternations, according to Georgakopoulou (2011), “contribute to the creation of a multivoiced and pastiche or hybrid style; in Bakhtinian terms, they foreground the texts’ polyphony or heteroglossia” (9). One of the functions of code alternation in digital discourse, she argued, is to provoke humor. I will show how humor and satire in the Syrian dissidents’ digital practices also rely on code alternation as a discourse strategy. According to Auer (2005), linguistic hybridity does not automatically lead to the emergence of hybrid identities. Rather, he claimed that the function of code alternation in discourse should be understood as the symbolic, indexical reenactment of social identities. He explained this through Rampton’s

38  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media (1995) notion of crossing, which is what individuals do when they incorporate in their speech features that do not belong to the social categories they are associated with. This argument, further corroborated by Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) through their description of hybrid practices as processes of “fixity” and “fluidity”, is relevant to understand the symbolic function of the resources employed by Syrian dissidents on their social media platforms in connection with the construction of dissident identities.

5 Linguistic hybridity in Arabic Mixing between Modern Standard Arabic and the vernacular has been documented extensively in Arabic linguistic literature in terms of lexical, syntactic, morphological and phonological variation (Badawi 1973; Blanc 1960; Haeri 1996; El-Hassan 1977; Holes 1987; Meiseles 1981; Mitchell and El-Hassan 1994; Owens and Bani-Yasin 1987; Palva 1969; Schmidt 1974; Schulz 1981; Van Mol 2003). Whereas these studies have treated mixing in the spoken domain with a predominantly descriptive intent, hybridity as an intentional strategy has been a focus of research in the spoken and written domains only in more recent scholarship on Arabic literature and media. I will discuss here a few key studies that shaped my understanding of linguistic hybridity in Arabic, including Al-Batal (2002), Eid (2002, 2007), Mejdell (2006, 2014, 2017), Rosenbaum (2000) and Somekh (1991, also cited in Mejdell 2014). Somekh (1991: 119) explained that, in 1956, the Egyptian author Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm published a play entitled al-ṣafqa (The Deal) that introduced a type of Arabic that he believed could solve the diglottal problem in the field of drama. In his postscript of the play, the author explains that the type of language he devised is comprehensible both in terms of FU [fuṣḥā] and of spoken Arabic. By producing such a text, the playwright is released from the dilemma as to which of two linguistic types to employ in his dialogue. In other words, the device would make it possible to write plays that, when read, could be understood in accordance with the norms of Classical Arabic. When staged, however, the text is automatically adaptable to the level of the local dialect without incurring many textual changes. Somekh (1991: 119) Additionally, Somekh (120) argued that Al-Ḥakīm’s ‘new language’, then, is not only an experiment at producing an FU text that is reminiscent of the spoken idiom. It is also an attempt to create a bivalent text that exploits the inherent ambiguity of unvowelled Arabic script. Al-Ḥakīm’s experiment, as noted by Somekh, was the subject of heated criticism and did not gain ground in Arabic literature. However, Somekh observed that in

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  39 the 1950s and 1960s, authors such as Nağīb Maḥfūz employed a simplified form of fuṣḥā in the dialogues contained in their novels. Rosenbaum (2000, also cited in Mejdell 2014) coined the term fuṣḥāmmiyya to describe an “intentional”, “planned” and “written” stylistic strategy of “alternation” found in Egyptian literature. This strategy, he argued, is widely deployed by writers and has different functions, one of which is to provoke humor. Eid (2002) examined hybridity in the context of the mixed linguistic choices of a group of Egyptian female writers. Their use of both the Egyptian vernacular and fuṣḥā, she argued, underlies a “question of agency” (205), through which these writers disrupted diglossia as a male-dominated “social institution”. In the context of media and politics, Al-Batal (2002) analyzed the interplay between fuṣḥā and the Lebanese vernacular in the Lebanese satellite channel LBCI. He suggested the term “language tension” over “language conflict”, in order to emphasize the “coexistence” of linguistic varieties rather than the suppression of one over the other (91–92) and the way media outlets “exploited [this co-existence] in order to express social and political views” (93).6 Al-Batal noted substantial differences among the types of register mixing analyzed in previous studies, such as Badawi’s (1973) ‘āmmiyyat al-muṯaqqafīn, Mitchell’s (1986) “educated spoken Arabic”, Gamal Abd al-Nasir’s code-switch practices (Holes 1993) and his data, arguing that “one of the main features of LBCI Arabic appears to be ‘word-level hybridization’, combining features of both F and C in the same word” (111). Al-Batal further linked the emergence of this mixed register to an issue of identity in the sociopolitical context of postwar Lebanon. In particular, he contextualized it vis-à-vis two contrasting linguistic ideologies (which he defines as “a broader tension”): “Arabism”, which sees Lebanon as part of the Arab world, and “Lebanonism”, which emphasizes the specificity of the Lebanese culture and language. These two ideological strands have had repercussions during the Lebanese civil war. Through this mixed register, al-Batal argues that LBCI represents an attempt of resolving this ideological tension. Eid (2007: 410) further discussed hybridity as “a global feature of text or discourse. It applies to forms of language that look more like a ‘collage’, created out of two or more linguistic codes, where the borders between varieties are blurred or no longer distinct” and code-switching as “a conversational and stylistic strategy” (410), which is local and meaningful within the text. The media, she argued, “represent ‘hybrid’ contexts that mix and at times merge, the public and the private, the formal and the informal” (403). Through the examples of two “multi-textual” (426) televised interviews, she showed how hybrid language, as the product of media “hybrid contexts”, underlies the performance of multiple identities.7 Mejdell (2006) construed the lexical, morphosyntactic and phonological variation in the genre of academic presentations in terms of “mixed styles”. These styles do not constitute distinct varieties, but are the result of speakers’ choices and perceptions of the situation (Mejdell 2006, 2012). Mejdell (2011–2012) further proposed the study of these styles through qualitative methods, arguing for a focus on speakers’ choices from a “common ground” or “repertoire” (37). The emphasis on perception is key to understand how these linguistic features are

40  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media chosen. With reference to Trudgill (1986), Holes (1987) and Owens and BaniYasin (1991), Mejdell (2012: 164) suggested that speakers, in fact, perceive some linguistic forms as more “salient” and with higher “awareness” than others. This saliency, which I refer to in my analysis as symbolism, can be analyzed in terms of indexicality, a notion I will discuss further below. In a more recent study on mixed written data, Mejdell (2014) expanded on the relationship between mixing and style with reference to Woolard’s (1999) “simultaneity”. She interpreted the “written mixed style” of ‘Īsā Ibrāhīm’s commentaries in the Egyptian newspaper al-Dustūr through Woolard’s (1999) and Woolard and Genovese’s (2007) notion of “bivalency”, which Mejdell defined “as a strategy to erase the boundaries between the varieties. Bivalent forms are – to paraphrase Woolard – not either fuṣḥā or ‘āmmiyya, nor neither fuṣḥā nor ‘āmmiyya, but rather both fuṣḥā and ‘āmmiyya” (2014: 274). She compared ‘Īsā Ibrāhīm’s “defiant practice of writing” (277) to the Egyptian author Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s effort to challenge a linguistic ideology of homogeneity by effacing the divide between fuṣḥā and ‘āmmiyya. Mejdell (2017) argued that the perception of fuṣḥā and ‘āmmiyya as separate systems is the result of a historical process of standardization. The onset of social media, however, has led to the diffusion of written mixed digital practices, underlying an irreversible trend of “destandardization” (68) in the history of the Arabic language. In a similar vein, Brustad (2017) argued that the boundary between fuṣḥā, traditionally associated with written domains, and ‘āmmiyya, linked to oral domains, is ideological.8 Finally, an interesting perspective about hybridity in the sociopolitical context of the Arab Spring is offered by Anderson (2014). Building the concept of “composite” (Bassiouney 2009) outlined above, Anderson contended that similar hybrid practices facilitated the performance of an oppositional identity in the context of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Hybridity, he explained, was documented by Abdalla (2010) and Mejdell (2014) in their analysis of mixed fuṣḥā and Egyptian vernacular in the opposition newspaper al-Dustūr. These practices, he argued, defied a decades-long linguistic ideology of code separation. “Rather than the practice by al-Nāsir and Mubārak of using fuṣḥā to express authority and masri to express the population’s need for interpretation or its backwardness, the opposition signaled its identity by combining both” (178). Anderson defined these practices as “middling discourse”, through which “Egyptians cued identity by combining fuṣḥā and masri within single syntactical units, rather than alternating between them” (Ibid.). He added that this type of discourse also underlay the performance of multiple identities during the 2011 uprising both on the side of the repressed population and on that of young government officials. Through the mixing of fuṣḥā and the vernacular and other discursive strategies, the slogans chanted by protesters conveyed their competence for politics, “mocking Mubārak as a foreigner”, denying his authority, and helped “negotiating, for the sake of avoiding violent repression, the divide between repressors and those suffering repression” (179–180). Hybrid practices have become increasingly visible with the onset of social media communication (Mejdell and Høigilt 2017), blurring more and more the

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  41 ideological boundary between spoken and written domains (Brustad 2017). In the light of this trend, Arabic sociolinguists have conceptualized diglossia in terms of “stylistic performance” (Brustad 2017) and examined it with relation to identity through the lens of indexicality and stance (Bassiouney 2014, 2017). An analysis of hybridity in written Arabic contexts is complicated by the large presence of shared lexical items between fuṣḥā and ‘āmmiyya, often due to the unavailability of alternative lexical items in the vernacular (see Bassiouney 2009 and Holes 1993). Such an analysis is further complicated by the nature of the Arabic writing system, which conceals short vowels (Somekh 1991; Mejdell 2014). This poses a new set of challenges for interpretation and transliteration. One could argue that the very large presence of shared items, for which there is no vernacular alternative, constitutes a theoretical fallacy in the application of bivalency to the Arabic diglossic situation. Is the word madrasa (“school”), for which there is no alternative in the vernacular and whose written shape does not allow to disambiguate, always bivalent? Further, when it appears in a written context, should it be transliterated as madrasa or transcribed as madrase? When are shared items used strategically and available for multiple interpretations and for the performance of identities? These questions do not have a straightforward answer. A clear-cut taxonomy of what is bivalent and what is not is neither possible nor desirable, and it might be tantamount to imposing the “new orthodoxy of code switching” and well-defined third varieties through simultaneity (Woolard 1999: 5; Gardner-Chloros 1995). Related to Bailey’s (2007) understanding of heteroglossia as a phenomenon that “directs the analyst to historical social relations, rather than just details of surface form” (269), I see bivalency, as part of linguistic hybridity, as a broader complex phenomenon whose analysis involves several levels of context, discourse and ideology. In line with Woolard (1999), I treat bivalency as the potential for shared items to be used strategically. It is their strategic use in discourse that is relevant for discussion, due to the opportunities it opens up for multiple messages, interpretations and identities. In other words, hybridity needs to be locally, contextually and discursively motivated. Rather than being driven by a classificatory intent, the question guiding my analysis is: What is being done through hybridity in context? Whereas language mixing is a common practice in Arabic social media (Brustad 2017) and the intersection of hybridity and identity has been studied extensively in the literature of technology and multilingualism (e.g. Leppänen et al. 2014; Otsuji and Pennycook 2010; Varis and Wang 2011), a focus on hybridity is even more relevant in the context of Syria, where a “standard language ideology” of separation (Brustad 2017) was more advanced (Miller 2003). Building on Woolard’s historicization of language through simultaneity (1999) and in line with a sociolinguistics of complexity (Blommaert 2016, 2017), which proposes to analyze linguistic variation as actions toward social change (Al Zidjaly 2019a, 2019b), I analyze hybrid practices as a gateway to the exploration of changing sociopolitical dynamics. It is the peculiar diglossic status of Arabic

42  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media that requires hybridity to become a central focus in an analysis of language and identity. Such an analytical focus is urged by the recent postulation of “diglossia as ideology” and “stylistic performance” (Brustad 2017), by the current trend of “destandardization” (Mejdell 2017) accelerated by social media practices, as well as by the symbolic use of language in a highly politicized context and in a situation of conflict (Suleiman 2013a).

6 Identity and discourse Hybridity, as it emerges from Syrian dissidents’ social media practices, is not a simple mixing of linguistic varieties, but it is instrumental to the construction of identities in discourse. My analysis is grounded in previous approaches to discourse and identity, which emphasize the interactional, performative and emergent aspect of identity processes (De Fina et al. 2006: 2–6). In particular, I refer to Blommaert’s (2005: 207–214) definition of identity as “semiotic potential”, meaning that one can locate the emergence of identities in the way individuals manipulate symbolic resources and the way they structure these in a “repertoire” (Blommaert 2005: 207–214). Identity and discourse has become a focus of a recent strand of studies of computer-mediated language and communication (Androutsoupoulos 2006). Zappavigna (2012: 38) argued that Facebook status updates, for example, contribute to “an ongoing performance of identity”. Through my case studies, I will show how Syrian dissidents perform identity on social media through the entextualization of voices and registers (Agha 2005; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014). Building on Bauman and Briggs (1990), Leppänen et al. (2014) claimed that “with entextualization [. . .] it becomes possible to investigate how social media participants, through extracting ‘instances of culture’ (language forms, textual or other semiotic material) and relocating them in their discourses and repertoires, perform identity at the grassroots level of their social media activities” (115). Through this process, individuals “can claim a degree of social power”, which “manifests [. . .] in their access to the activity of entextualization, in the legitimacy of their claims to re-use the texts, in their competence in such re-use, and in the differential values attached to various types of texts” (Ibid.). The social and political aspect of entextualization becomes clear in connection with the notions of voice and register. 6.1 Voice and register Two key notions to understand how identities emerge through linguistic hybridity in the social media texts analyzed are voice and register. Agha (1999) defined the term “register” as “a linguistic repertoire that is associated, culture-internally, with particular social practices and with persons who engage in such practices” (216). He added that an important characteristic of registers is that they are not fixed, but they are “historical formations caught up in group-relative processes of

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  43 valorization and countervalorization, exhibiting change in both form and value over time” (25). Moreover, he argued that “encounters with registers are not mere encounters with voices (or characterological figures or personae) but encounters in which individuals establish forms of footing and alignment with voices indexed by speech and thus with social types or persons, real or imagined, whose persons they take them to be”. (2005: 38) Agha (2005) further explored the connection between voice and register through the notion of “enregistered voices” (39). The “social” dimension of “enregistered voices”, he argued, is twofold: First, a register’s forms are social indexicals in that they index stereotypic social personae (viz., that the speaker is male, lower-class, a doctor, a lawyer, an aristocrat, etc.), which can also be troped upon to yield hybrid personae of various kinds; thus every register has a social range, a range of figures performable through its use. Second, registers are social formations in the sense that some language users but not others are socialized in their use and construal; thus every register has a social domain, a group of persons acquainted with – minimally, capable of recognizing – the figures performable through use. (39–40)9 Although, according to Agha (2005), unlike “entextualized voices”, “enregistered voices” are not context-sensitive, in the sense that they can be recognized independently from their occurrence in specific communicative contexts, “enregistered voices are always and only experienced in the course of entextualized voicing effects” (48). In this sense, Agha argues that “entextualized voices differ from, yet dominate, enregistered ones” (49). As will be shown in chapter 5, Facebook commenters humorously repeat and reconfigure forms associated with different registers – namely Modern Standard Arabic, the Alawite, both associated with Bashar al-Asad’s government – and the Damascene vernacular. Through the repeated entextualization of “enregistered voices” (i.e. Modern Standard Arabic and the Alawite registers), dissidents align with and against the post author. Through the entextualization of symbolic fragments indexically associated with these registers, such as the sound qāf, contained in idioms, lexical items, anecdotes and rhythmic stretches of discourse resembling nursery rhymes, they add a cacophonic touch that makes their own voice stand out more clearly.10 By entextualizing MSA and the Alawite registers they “dominate” (Agha 2005: 49) it and nullify its power. Two additional frameworks that informed my understanding of the notion of voice are Tannen’s (2007) explanation of voicing phenomena as “interpersonal involvement” through “repetition”,

44  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media to which I will return later in the analysis, and Blommaert’s (2005) “synchronicity” and “layered simultaneity”. 6.2 Intertextuality Tannen (2007) explained that the term “intertextuality” was coined by Julia Kristeva (1974; 1980) to introduce Bakhtin’s (1981) linguistic theories of polyphony and heteroglossia. Intertextuality: refers to the insight that meaning in language results from a complex of relationships linking items within a discourse and linking current to prior instances of language. (Tannen 2007: 9) Tannen (2007) added that her understanding of intertextuality is grounded in Bateson’s (1979), Becker’s (1995) and Bakhtin’s (1986) theories of language. According to Bateson, she explained, “things exist only in relation to other things” (Tannen 2007: 10) and language is the process of making sense of things based on observed similarities that are both inherent and depend on the relationship between an object and the external world. Tannen operationalized these two types of relationship through the terms “synchronic” and “diachronic” repetition. Whereas the former, she argued, refers to the internal relationships between texts within the same discursive event, “diachronic repetition”, or “dialogue”, refers to the relationships between texts produced in different communicative events. A recurrent form of repetition in my data is that of “constructed dialogue”, a term used by Tannen (2007) in order to emphasize the interactional function of repeating someone else’s words in discourse. Building on Becker (1995), Tannen envisions repetition in language as a dynamic and constitutive process, namely as “the grammar of a language” (Tannen 2007: 49). Quoting Becker, she argued that “ ‘Languaging’ (the term he prefers to the more static “language”) ‘is context shaping’ ” (Tannen 2007: 10). Tannen’s framework of “repetition as intertextuality”, she explained, is what underlies “the construction of identity in interaction” (15). A particular type of intertextuality, which, as Tannen (2007) observed, is concerned with the relationship between language and power, is the notion of “interdiscursivity” (Fairclough 1992). Fairclough elaborated this notion to emphasize the “relations between a text and other texts which constitute its more or less immediate or distant contexts: texts it is historically linked with in various time-scales and along various parameters, including texts which are more or less contemporary with it” (103). He added that “the intertextuality of a text can be seen as incorporating the potentially complex relationships it has with the conventions (genres, discourses, styles, activity types – see below) which are structured together to constitute an order of discourse” (Ibid.). Although intertextuality has been extensively studied in interactional s­ociolinguistics with relation to identity (see Al Zidjaly 2010; Gordon 2009; Hamilton 1996;

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  45 Tovares 2005), in my analysis, I refer particularly to Tannen’s (2007) framework of “intertextuality as repetition”. A peculiar form of intertextuality encountered in the analysis of my data is constituted by idioms. Idioms are textual devices that encapsulate societal norms and behaviors, indexing meaning by association with an image (Tannen, PC).11 Tannen (2007) analyzed proverbs, sayings and idioms within her theory of repetition as a form of “interactional involvement”. Citing previous theories on language and meaning creation (Bakhtin 1981; Becker 1984a, 1984b), she showed how these fixed forms are often modified and recontextualized, thus constituting a “resource of creativity” (Tannen 2007: 49). The framing and context-shaping dynamic underlying the performative power of proverbs has been studied by DomínguezBarajas (2010) in terms of “socio-cultural continuity and reconfiguration” (76). According to Domínguez-Barajas, proverbs have an important socialization function. “By virtue of granting the listeners the opportunity to come to their own interpretation of a proverb’s meaning and a speaker’s intention in uttering it, the listeners become active participants in the discursive enterprise” (9). Albirini (2016) documented the presence of sayings in Syrian revolution pages, in connection with the use of the Syrian vernacular. Embedded in Standard Arabic texts, he argued that “the purpose of introducing these sayings is to allow the audience to grasp the commenter’s point, concretize a certain idea or concept, or dramatize the point under discussion by adding an affective dimension to it” (286). In my data, idioms occur in linguistically hybrid contexts, and I suggest they carry a social and political meaning. In chapter 4, I show how Nawar consciously reconfigured a popular idiom and employed marked Syrian vernacular features in order to position himself and the new generation of Syrians as dissidents. I delve further into the political and socializing functions of idioms in chapter 5. The concept of intertextuality occupies a central position in the recent field of computer-mediated communication. Androutsopoulos (2010: 205) argued that social media have rendered a large number of people “ ‘intertextual operators’ who digitally modify multi-modal text, for instance by adding subtitles, by replacing voices or images, and so on”. In the analysis of my data, I use intertextuality and interdiscursivity in connection with the notion of entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990), applied by Leppänen et al. (2014) to the study of identity performance on social media. Entextualization refers to the power exercised by individuals in the extrapolation of texts from certain contexts and their insertion in new ones. A concept that Leppänen et al. (2014) analyzed in concomitance with entextualization is the multimodal notion of resemiotization, defined by Iedema (2003) as the mutation of meaning that occurs to a text when it is transposed from one mode to another; for example, when a written text is transformed into a visual one and vice versa. According to him, resemiotization helps to explain why texts are reproposed in different modes and to clarify the relationship between the shift of meaning and broader discourses. Throughout the analysis, I show how hybridity, achieved through strategies of voicing, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, entextualization and resemiotization, is

46  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media constantly enacted by the study participants to make their voices heard and interact with broader discourses. The “agency” of hybrid practices (Eid 2002) surfaces in the way individuals creatively mobilize symbolic meanings to impact on discourses and interactions and is grasped through an approach to language that foregrounds symbolic meanings as resources.

7 Hybridity on social media: language, identity and globalization My connection between identity and linguistic hybridity on social media is grounded in an understanding of language as a resource, “access to which is unequal and negotiated” (Bassiouney 2014: 16). Blommaert (2005, 2010) contended that issues of access and negotiation have become more complex in an era of globalization, characterized, as theorized by Appadurai (1996), by an “intensification” of political, economic and cultural “flows”. Blommaert (2010) called for the adoption of new linguistic tools of analysis to comprehend this recent trend of globalization, theorizing a shift from a “sociolinguistics of distribution” to one of “mobility”. More recently, he argued for a further shift toward a “sociolinguistics of complexity” (Blommaert 2017). This paradigm explores the role of language in the shaping of new “light” forms of social aggregation, which emerge at the intersection of online and offline discourse (Blommaert 2017, 2019; also see Al Zidjaly 2019a). The notions of scales, chronotopes, orders of indexicality and polycentricity (Blommaert 2005, 2010, 2015a) in connection with inequality are key to understanding this new paradigm. 7.1 Scales and chronotopes When people communicate, Blommaert (2015a) explained, they do so on different scales and through different historical dimensions, known as chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981; Blommaert 2015a; Blommaert and De Fina 2017; Dick 2010; Karimzad 2016; Koven and Simões Marques 2015; Sinatora 2019; Woolard 2013). Blommaert contends that chronotopes can be understood as a combination of social, historical and political conditions framing interactions and discourses. Through the term “chronotopic identities”, Blommaert and De Fina (2017) argued that chronotopes have implications in terms of the identities that we perform and we enact. Blommaert further defined chronotopes as “invokable histories” (2005: 112), namely sociohistorical scenarios and conditions that can be reenacted through discursive practice. For example, as I will show in chapter 4, Maher, through a simultaneous display of Modern Standard Arabic and intertextual references to historian al-Jabartī’s commentary to the French proclamation (see Suleiman 2013a), evoked a historical framework, that of the French invasion of Egypt, which reenacted determined identities, such as colonizer and colonized.12 In so doing, he made these identities relevant to the present context and assigned the identities of foreign invader and oppressor to Syrian Presidents Hafiz al-Asad and Bashar al-Asad. Whereas chronotopes are histories mobilized, or invoked by

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  47 individuals in discourse, scales, according to Blommaert (2015a), correspond to the “scope of communicability of such invocations” (105). Citing Braudel, Blommaert (2005: 127–128) explained that there are three types of historical times, namely “slow time or structural time”, “intermediate time or conjunctural time”, and “event-time”. He added that, in producing or receiving communication, people are grounded in the historical dimension of “event-time”, which corresponds to “our experiential present” (136), the personal “here-and-now” (134). Such a dimension determines the way we perceive social and communicative events. In other words, “people speak from a particular point in history, and they always speak on history” (126). In sum, Blommaert (2005; 2015a) conceptualizes scales as social actors’ distinct levels of action within the same historical phenomena. The relationship between scales and chronotopes becomes clearer in connection with two other concepts proposed by Blommaert (2005), namely “layered simultaneity” and “synchronicity”. Whereas the former refers to the historical complexity behind the meaning of texts, the latter, he explained, concerns the limited human capacity to fully comprehend such complexity. Synchronisation in discourse is a tactic of power. The denial of the layered nature of simultaneity in discourse, or, to put it differently, the reduction of overdetermination to just one single (clear, transparent) meaning, results in images of continuity, logical outcomes, and textual coherence. It is a denial of the complexity of the particular position from which one speaks, and of the differences between that position and that of others. (136) Through the notions of “layered simultaneity” and “synchronisation”, Blommaert further elaborates the concept of voice. People’s voices are synchronized in different time-space dimensions, which, he argued, account for the erasure of voices in discourse. In his own words, “synchronization elides all kinds of possible voices” and produces coherent meanings, or “continuity” (152). “Discontinuity”, conversely, arises from the encounter of voices synchronized in different dimensions (Ibid.). The concepts of layered simultaneity and synchronization were further expanded by Al Zidjaly (2012), who showed how the erasure of voices through historical simplification is achieved multimodally in discourse. I will return to these concepts more in depth in chapters 6 and 7. 7.2 Indexical orders and orders of indexicality According to Blommaert, the relation between scales is of indexical nature, in that “[. . .] it resides in the ways in which unique instances of communication can be captured indexically as ‘framed’, understandable communication, as pointing towards socially and culturally ordered norms, genres, traditions, expectations – phenomena of a higher scale-level” (2010: 33). He theorized two ways in which indexicality works, through “indexical orders” (Agha 2003, 2005; Silverstein 2003) on the one hand and through “orders of indexicality” on the other. Whereas

48  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media the former is useful to understand how resources are manipulated symbolically within certain repertoires in order to foreground determined identities, the latter is particularly relevant to the present study, as it allows to see how hybrid repertoires are not static but change dynamically in relation to broader discourses. The notion of “indexical orders” was developed in the field of linguistic anthropology by Silverstein (1976/1995, 2003) in order to explain how meaning is created through the association between the contexts in which words are used.13 Silverstein (2003) distinguished between “n-th indexicals”, or “first-order indexicals” and “n-th+1”, or “second-order indexicals”. He described the relationship between the two coining the terms “presupposition” and “entailment” and used these terms to explain that each language form is related to previous usage, and this relationship informs its use in future contexts. The difference between “n-th” an “n-th+1” is also reflected in the way language variation is perceived by society, whereby the former tends to be considered as natural by community insiders and the latter is “enregistered” (2003: 210), meaning that “it has become associated with a style of speech and can be used to create a context for that style” (Johnstone et al. 2006: 82). Moreover, Silverstein (2003) contended that indexical orders can be understood in terms of Labov’s (1972) distinction between “ ‘indicators’ ”, “ ‘markers’ ” and “ ‘stereotypes’ ”, whereby “indicators” correspond to a “dialectal variant”, “markers” describe a “macro-social identity” and “stereotypes” are forms about which individuals are fully “conscious” (Silverstein 2003: 217–220). In their study on identity and Pittsburghese, Johnstone et al. (2006: 78) explained that “stereotypes”, or “third-order indexicals”, are used for “more reflexive identity work”. According to them, third-order indexicality can be observed when People noticing the existence of second order stylistic variation in Pittsburghers’ speech link the regional variants they are most likely to hear with Pittsburgh identity, drawing on the increasingly widely circulating idea that places and dialects are essentially linked (every place has a dialect). These people, who include Pittsburghers and non-Pittsburghers, use regional forms drawn from highly codified lists to perform local identity, often in ironic, semiserious ways. (83, Table 1) Indexicality was further elaborated by Eckert (2008) through the notion of “indexical field”, and it was identified by Eckert (2012) as a central component in the conceptualization of linguistic variation as “stylistic practice”. In the Arabic context, Bassiouney (2014) applied the notion of indexicality to her study of Egyptian collective identity, within the diglossic context of Arabic. Diglossia, she argued, can be explained in terms of first and second-order indexicalities. Whereas first-order indexicals, she claimed, result from “habits and practices” (107), second-order indexicals stem from “ideologies and attitudes” (108). First-order indexical meanings of fuṣḥā are “formality, abstract and distant contexts, as well as written rather than spoken contexts”, whereas vernaculars

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  49 first-order indexical associations are “informality, concrete, and intimate contexts and tend to occur more in spoken than written contexts” (Ibid.). At the secondorder level, fuṣḥā is associated with “the realm of the divine, authority, and legitimacy” (145). These indexes are motivated by the connection between fuṣḥā and Islam. Additionally, Bassiouney explained that fuṣḥā is associated with the unity of the Arab nation (Bassiouney 2014; Eisele 2002; Miller 2003; Suleiman 2003). Bassiouney (2014) also claimed that fuṣḥā has negative connotations in Egypt because of its association with the depiction of Arabic language teachers in the movies as unsophisticated, lower-class people coming from rural parts of the country. Egyptian Arabic, she claimed, is associated at the second-order indexical level with authenticity and prestige and is perceived by some intellectuals as a corrupted deviation from fuṣḥā. English is ideologically associated with Western colonialism, but also with prestige (Bassiouney 2014). One can note similar indexical associations in the Syrian diglossic context. For example, the entextualization of English resources in Maher’s and Nawar’s pre-uprising repertoires, which will be the focus of chapter 3, is connected with prestige, as it contributes to the creation of desirable cosmopolitan identities. A main difference between the Egyptian and the Syrian context concerns the status of MSA, due to the linguistic policy of Arabization (see Miller 2003; Suleiman 2003). Probably in reaction to the link between the Ba‘athist policy of Arabization and MSA, Syrian dissidents, as will emerge from the data, perceive the Syrian vernacular positively, associating it with the authentic language of the people. Fuṣḥā, on the other hand, is used by virtue of its indexical association with authority and legitimacy. Bassiouney (2017) argued that indexicality and stance are central processes in the study of variation in Arabic and demonstrated how these concepts underlie the construction of identities in Egyptian public discourse. Bassiouney (2018) further edited a collection of studies that explored the connection between locality and identity across sociolinguistic contexts, showing how dialects are often used as a resource for identity performance. 7.3 Orders of indexicality and polycentricity The second type of indexicality theorized by Blommaert (2005) is that of “orders of indexicality”, which he defined as “systemically reproduced, stratified meanings often called ‘norms’ or ‘rules’ of language” (73). These rules, he argued, are attributed to authoritative centers, to which individuals orient in discourse in order to perform social activities (75). In other words, Blommaert’s notion of orders of indexicality can be understood as a ʻsocial symbolic grammarʼ, which arises and develops through socialization within a specific time-space dimension.14 This grammar is not random or equal (Blommaert 2005), inasmuch as it constitutes “patterns of authority, of control and evaluation, and hence of inclusion and exclusion by real or perceived others” (Blommaert 2010: 38). As explained by Blommaert and Varis (2011), language is regulated by “perpetually shifting normativities” (12). In other words, the norms composing this indexical grammar derive from multiple sources, or

50  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media scales, which exercise different types of control (Blommaert and Varis 2011; Varis and Wang 2011). Varis and Wang (2011) claimed that what underlies the relationship between translingual practices and the presence of multiple norms at different scale levels is a “project of authenticity” (81). The principle organizing these practices, as adduced by Blommaert and Varis and Varis and Wang, is indexicality, namely the study of the symbolic meaning of language in context. For example, Varis and Wang showed how a Chinese hip-hop artist projected an authentic hip-hop identity through the entextualization in their lyrics of English words indexically associated with global hip-hop culture and language, and how such an entextualization is regulated at the local and at the state level. Blommaert further clarified the multi-scalar provenance of norms through the concept of polycentricity. “[. . .] Authority emanates from real or perceived ‘centres’, to which people orient when they project an indexical trajectory in semiosis. [. . .] The authority of centres is evaluative, and it often occurs as an authority over clusters of semiotic features, including thematic domains, places, people (roles, identities, relationships) and semiotic styles (including linguistic varieties, modes of performance etc.)” (Blommaert 2010: 39). Blommaert developed the notion of “orders of indexicality” in connection with a theory of voice. He argued that “having a voice”, and therefore emerging in discourse, is the semiotic capability to cross normative domains. In chapter 5, I will show how commenters to a post of the ad-dōmari Facebook page orient (Blommaert 2005) toward different norms, including dialectal registers and fuṣḥā, in order to position themselves politically through their hybrid texts. The combination of these norms underlies a new “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005) distinct from the pre-uprising one. The resources valued within the pre-uprising and post-uprising repertoires are “polycentric”, and they are valued through and only make sense within two different sociopolitical contexts. These two “orders of indexicality” operate within and across different chronotopes (see Sinatora 2019). In the analysis chapters, it will emerge how individuals exploit linguistic hybridity differently, from different time-space dimensions, capitalizing on and mobilizing resources, or discourse-appropriate indexicals in order to make their voices emerge and to interact with other voices. 7.4 Prestige The concepts of scales, chronotopes, orders of indexicality and polycentricity complicate and shed light on the dynamicity of the notion of prestige (Blommaert 2005), studied in Arabic sociolinguistics in connection with diglossia since the 1980s. As Ibrahim (1986: 115) put it, “the identification of H[igh] as both the standard and the prestigious variety at one and the same time has led to problems of interpreting data and findings with Arabic sociolinguistic research”. Urban dialects, he argued, also have considerable prestige over rural varieties. In Syria, Damascene Arabic has acquired prestige over time. A form that is associated stereotypically with the prestigious Damascene vernacular is the glottal stop in place of the uvular sound /q/.15 The latter corresponds to the fuṣḥā realization and is a

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media 51 salient feature of some rural dialects, including some coastal dialects of Syria (see Behnstedt 1997), with which the Alawite register is indexically associated.16 I will show how what counts as prestigious is determined by the type of identities individuals wish to foreground through their local practices in order to promote certain discourses and identities over others and within determined chronotopes. English and the romanized script carried a certain degree of prestige over local varieties among young Arabs at the eve of the uprisings and were a symbol of modernity (cf. Bassiouney 2014 and Gonzalez-Quijano 2014). Written English and vernacular forms entered in competition with the official norm of writing in Modern Standard Arabic, and the entextualization of fragments (Agha 2005) of these was conducive to the projection of cosmopolitan identities, as I will show in chapter 3. I will show how Modern Standard Arabic forms exert prestige in the post-uprising phase, by virtue of the fuṣḥā indexes of authority and legitimacy (Bassiouney 2014). 7.5 Superdiversity, hybridity and authenticity Coined by Vertovec (2007) to describe the increasingly complex interaction of the variables underlying the flow of immigrant communities in the United Kingdom, the term “superdiversity” was introduced in sociolinguistics by Blommaert and Rampton (2011), who claimed that a study of communication and new technologies with relation to new migrant communities can offer further insight into the nature of social interaction in an era of globalization. Whereas the increased complexity of postmodern social phenomena with relation to migration and new ways of communication had already been theorized by previous scholars (cf. Appadurai 1996; Jacquemet 2005), Blommaert (2010) and Blommaert and Rampton (2011) emphasized how such societal trends accompanied a “shift of paradigm” in sociolinguistics. A vision of languages as “repertoires” (Blommaert 2005) and no longer as discrete entities led to an expansion of the studies of these in the light of indexicality and multimodality (Blommaert and Rampton 2011). The new paradigm, Blommaert and Rampton explained, is characterized by a research focus on hybrid, heteroglossic (Bakhtin 1981) linguistic phenomena, captured through the notions of crossing, metrolingualism and translanguaging (Creese & Blackledge 2010; García 2009; Rampton 1995; Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2014) as well as by a focus on “metapragmatic reflexivity about language and semiotic practice” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 8). Androutsopoulos and Juffermans (2014: 5), argued that “digital language practices in settings of superdiversity extend and complicate the semiotic resources available to people for their performance of identities and social relationships”. Hybridity is not unregulated, but it is subject to and gives rise to new forms of normativity (Blommaert and Varis 2011). Referring to the internet as “the superdiverse space par excellence”, due to the innumerous possibilities of engagement and participation for individuals, Varis and Wang (2011: 71) argued that these new norms are sustained by “a project of authenticity” (Ibid. 81). Authenticity is a burgeoning theme in sociolinguistic research (Blommaert and Varis 2011, 2013,

52  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media 2015; Coulmas 2014; Coupland 2003, 2010, 2014; Bucholtz 2003; Eckert 2003; Gill 2012; Varis and Wang 2011; Lacoste et al. 2014). Coulmas (2014) emphasized a paradox between sociolinguistic traditional understanding of authenticity and what this concept means to European societies. While the former associated authenticity with oral production, the latter “tend to regard writing as more genuine and trustworthy than speech, which is not surprising in a society that relies so much on literacy” (289). Unlike “first-wave” variationist studies, which emphasized the putative purity and naturalness of oral contexts as opposed to performed oral and written production (see Eckert 2012), recent sociolinguistic approaches, based on anti-essentialist social constructionist views of identity (cf. De Fina et al. 2006), have emphasized the importance of locating authenticity in discourse and interaction (Coupland 2014). The performative aspect of authenticity is captured in the term “authentication” (Bucholtz 2003), described by Coupland (2010: 6) as “a discursive process, rather than authenticity as a claimed or experienced quality of language or culture, [which] can then be taken up analytically as one dimension of a set of intersubjective ‘tactics’, [and] through which people can make claims about their own or others’ statuses as authentic or inauthentic members of social groups” (Coupland 2010: 105). The notion of authenticity as performance is strongly connected with the concepts of hybridity and creativity. Whereas a “sociolinguistics of mobility” has brought hybridity and creativity to the center of the investigation, creativity and “social agency” are, according to Al Zidjaly (2019a), central to an understanding of how social groups emerge within a “sociolinguistics of complexity” (Blommaert 2016, 2017, 2019). The intersection between creativity and normativity underlying the performance of authenticity in connection with the emergence and the erasure of identities is a leading theme in my analysis. I will show how, through their hybrid social media practices, Syrian dissidents and their Facebook page followers entextualize symbolic fragments (Agha 2005) of registers, varieties and modes in order to make their voices stand out. The combination of these fragments is enough (Blommaert and Varis 2011, 2015) for them to authenticate (Bucholtz 2003; Coupland 2010) their identities, discourses and political alignments.

8 Conclusion: Hybridity and identity In this chapter, I reviewed the notion of hybridity as a key concept to attend to how identities emerge in discourse. Rubdy and Alsagoff (2014: 9) envisioned “hybridity’s conceptual and interpretive openness as a strength that may render it potentially more powerful in its capacity to explicate the complex multidimensionality of global processes than a single-meaning model”. The explicative power of hybridity in connection with the onset of new technologies is what Blommaert (2010, 2015b) advocated for in a “sociolinguistics of globalization”. We should not too quickly dismiss new e-phenomena as merely a re-enactment of phenomena already known and understood. A change in knowledge

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media  53 infrastructure is a change in the entire economy of knowledge, and even if things look the same linguistically (i.e. in terms of formal qualities), they can have a very different sociolinguistic role, distribution and function. (2015b: 84) More interestingly, Blommaert emphasized that what is new is not only the complex environment in which these forms appear, but also: The paradigmatic perspective [. . .] that enables us not just to analyze the messy contemporary stuff, but also to re-analyze and re-interpret more conventional and older data, now questioning the fundamental assumptions (almost inevitably language-ideological in character) previously used in analysis. It’s a new theoretical approach to language in society, a new key in which sociolinguistics can be played. And since it is an approach that starts from what earlier was seen as ‘exceptional’, it will explain exceptions better than the theory that produced these exceptions. (Ibid.) Building on Rubdy and Alsagoff (2014), this study takes hybridity as a “starting point” (Otsuiji and Pennycook 2014) for sociolinguistic investigation. An exclusive focus on the “fluidity” of hybrid practices, as argued by Otsuji and Pennycook (2010, 2014), risks to efface the political dimension engendering them. Throughout this chapter, I explained the terminology that I use in my analysis to add empirical evidence to the historical dimension of (hybrid) linguistic practices envisaged by Blommaert (2005, 2015a), Makoni and Pennycook (2007) and Otsuiji and Pennycook (2010, 2014). In order to understand this dimension, I argued, it is necessary to focus on the symbolic meanings of language and how these are mobilized in discourse through the notions of intertextuality, scales, chronotopes and polycentricity reviewed above. Similar to Otsuji and Pennycook’s (2010) notion of metrolingualism as “hybridity that accommodates complex movement between fixity and fluidity” (97), I see hybridity as a force that involves a relentless process of meaning formation, a reflective play between old and new indexical, symbolic meanings of language. I analyze hybrid practices on Syrian dissidents’ social media through Blommaert’s (2005) notion of indexically ordered repertoires. These repertoires, which can be visualized as workshops of hybridity, are functional to the construction of determined identities, through which individuals interact with broader sociopolitical discourses. As discourses change in time, the shape of these repertoires is also in constant change (Blommaert 2005). Through an analysis of these repertoires, it is possible “to observe linguistic norms being manufactured, interrogated or altered, or to see norms that have changed and are new/different in the social networks being studied. We can see, in short, the emergence of structure out of agency” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 9). In sum, the present work reinforces the notion of hybridity as a historically situated dynamic process in order to attend to processes of language and identity on social media in a context of sociopolitical upheaval.

54  Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media

Notes 1 This scholarly concern was outlined by Kraidy (2005) and cited in Rubdy and Alsagoff (2014). Kraidy (1999, 2002, 2005, 2016) developed the notion of hybridity in the field of media and intercultural communication studies. He warned against a mere descriptive use of the term and suggested seeing it “as a communicative practice constitutive of, and constituted by, sociopolitical and economic arrangements” (2002: 318). Additionally, he showed how Bakhtinian “intentionally hybrid texts” (2005: 93) are at the core of “creative insurgency”, a term he used to describe the burst of subversive actions that animated the Arab springs (Kraidy 2016). 2 Cited in Schieffelin and Charlier Doucet (1998: 308, n. 6). 3 This section only outlines some significant examples that preceded a study of Arabic diglossia in terms of code-switching. For an in-depth discussion of studies analyzing intermediate varieties, see Owens (2001) and Mejdell (2012). 4 The establishment of a direct link between identity and social variables is consistent with “first-wave” variationist studies (Eckert 2012) and was refuted by later sociolinguistic studies. For in-depth accounts and discussions of how gender, education and religion have been analyzed in Arabic sociolinguistics, see Al Wer (2013) and Bassiouney (2009). Al Wer (2013: 247) argued that education is a “proxy variable” that can only be studied in the context of individuals’ social networks. Whereas earlier studies (e.g., Daher 1998) correlated vernacular features with female speech, Bassiouney (2010, 2012) argued against a direct correlation between code and gender, showing how women also use MSA to project authoritative identities. 5 The shift in the perception of variation outlined by Woolard evokes an indexical shift (Johnstone et al. 2006) or a shift in “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2010). Johnstone et al.’s (2006) explained such shift, building on Labov (1972) and on Silverstein’s (1976/1995, 2003) indexical orders, in a study on the indexicality of Pittsburghese. In first-order indexicality, Pittsburghese variants are only perceived in comparison with other geographic regions by mobile subjects. In second-order indexicality, “regional features become available for social work” (Johnstone et al. 2006: 82). 6 The term “tension” was previously used by Ferguson (1959) in the context of diglossia. 7 Eid’s (2007) use of the term “multi-textual” is similar to the concept of multimodality. 8 This ideological separation evokes Tannen’s (1983, 2007) argument that the boundary between written and spoken is fictitious and that oral and written discourse share similar discourse strategies. 9 As explained by Agha (2005: 57, footnote 2), “the competence to recognize a register’s forms/effects may have a much wider social domain than the competence to speak the register fluently (cf. Table 8, C); in the case of prestige registers, this type of asymmetry is often a principle of value maintenance that preserves”. 10 Agha (2005) uses the word “fragment” to explain the relationship between “entextualized voices” and “enregistered voices”. “Voices are encountered in social life only as fragments of entextualized voicing effects [. . .]” (49). 11 I am indebted to Deborah Tannen for pointing out to me the relationship between idioms and images and to Yasir Suleiman for directing my attention to the large presence of idioms in Maher’s and Nawar’s post-uprising repertoires. 12 Building on Irvine and Gal’s (2000) notion of differentiation, Koven and Simões Marques (2015) explained how chronotopes evoke dichotomous identities. 13 The term “indexicality” has its origins in the work of Charles S. Peirce, who theorized three types of relationships between signs and objects, namely iconic, indexical and symbolic (see Johnstone et al. 2006). Indexicality influenced seminal work in the study of language and society. Ochs (1990) argued that indexicality is a key component in the “symbolic function of language”, and it is what underlies the “socializing function of language” (288). 14 The term ʻsocial symbolic grammar’ is inspired by two traditions in the study of language and society. On the one hand, it refers to Ochs’s (1990) theory of indexicality as

Hybridity on Syrian dissidents’ social media 55 an instrument of socialization. In defining her use of the terms grammar and discourse, she understands “discourse [as] a set of norms, preferences and expectations relating language to context, which speaker-hearers draw on in modifying and producing and making sense out of language in context” (289). The other tradition is cognitive linguistics. According to Langacker (2017), “grammar is symbolic in nature, [meaning that it] is the pairing between form and meaning” (88). 15 Palva (1982) showed that in the Levant, in Yemen and Egypt, the use of the glottal stop has over time become more widespread than the qāf. 16 I will return to this in chapter 5.

3 Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities

1 Introduction This chapter examines hybridity on Maher’s and Nawar’s Facebook pages between 2009 and 2011. Hybridity presents itself as a “truncated repertoire” (Blommaert 2005, 2010) composed of linguistic and multimodal “bits” (Blommaert 2011) of English and Arabic. The entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of English resources, such as audio-visual references to Western pop culture and modernity, is symbolic, inasmuch as it allows Maher and Nawar to display cosmopolitan identities within a particular sociopolitical context, or chronotope, that of pre-uprising Syria. Maher and Nawar belong to a generation of Syrians who grew up in a sociohistorical context, under Hafiz al-Asad’s rule (1971–2000), in which Modern Standard Arabic, diglossia and the marginalization of vernaculars, minority and foreign languages (cf. Miller 2003) functioned as a tool underlying the construction of a Syrian and Arab identity. An opening up to Western cultural influences began in the 1990s and became more and more visible since Hafiz al-Asad’s son, Bashar al-Asad, seized power in 2000. The booming of internet cafés and international restaurants as well as the increased presence of foreign tourists and students turned Damascus into a more cosmopolitan city. Although banned between 2007 and 2011 (York 2014), Syrians were able to use Facebook through proxy servers, and writing on Facebook began to represent a significant portion of Syrian youth’s everyday linguistic practices. Between 2009 and 2011, Maher and Nawar used social media to communicate and maintain rapport with friends and family. Through the entextualization of global forms and resources in their pre-­ uprising Facebook practices, Maher and Nawar, who lived in the Syrian cities of Damascus and Homs before the uprising, jumped chronotopically (Blommaert 2005; Sinatora 2019) from a local to a global, modern, more desirable reality. Such a reality, however, did not exist in a political vacuum but is embedded in a 2000s trend of globalization, a youth culture of “globalized hybridity” (GonzalezQuijano 2014) and a sociopolitical context of cosmopolitanism (Wedeen 2013). Bashar al-Asad’s display of symbols of modernity was, according to Wedeen, concomitant with “an ideology of ‘the good life’ ” (2013: 842), enriched by

Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities 57 “fantasies of multicultural accommodation” (843). Wedeen explained her use of the term “multicultural” as the way in which experiences of difference among Syrians, such as those produced by sectarian organizations or by distinct regional practices, were rendered cultural and thereby unthreatening in the official discourse. The concept of culture operates as a celebratory term to denote good, conflictfree, folkloric variety, unlike sect, which conjures up fitna or dangerous, destabilizing forms of societal discord. (843, note 6) In other words, the ostentation of cosmopolitan values superseded topics and practices, such as sectarian and ethnic divisions, which were taboo in public discourse. In the next chapters, I will show how these topics became repoliticized and became part of everyday’s linguistic practices after the uprising. The focus on Maher’s and Nawar’s pre-uprising cosmopolitan identities is useful as a term of comparison with their post-uprising Facebook identities as dissidents. The symbols constituting Maher’s and Nawar’s pre-uprising hybrid practices are not random, but they are the core of an “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005, 2010) which will lose currency in the context of the 2011 Syrian uprising.

2 Key concepts The analysis of Maher’s and Nawar’s pre-uprising online practices draws on a definition of identities as “particular forms of semiotic potential, organised in a repertoire” (Blommaert 2005: 207). Maher’s and Nawar’s pre-uprising repertoires are characterized by the entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of several local and global, linguistic and multimodal resources. According to Leppänen et al. (2014), entextualization, namely the reconfiguration of linguistic resources from a context to another, is a key concept to understand how individuals “perform identity at the grassroots levels of social media activities” (116). A particularly interesting type of entextualization encountered in Maher’s and Nawar’s texts is that of linguistic and visual features related to Western and American culture. In his effort to conceptualize new tools of analysis to study language in a time of globalization, Blommaert (2011: 3) discussed this particular type of entextualization, which involves the use of global languages and forms in everyday communication through the notion of supervernaculars.1 Citing Jacquemet (2005), he defined supervernaculars as “semiotic forms that circulate in networks driven, largely, by new technologies such as the Internet and mobile communication devices”. He explained that these global forms can only be observed and make sense in local contexts. In other words, they do not correspond to a fully fledged register or language, but they present themselves as “deglobalized” (11) resources used in local interaction. They appear as “little bits of English, encapsulated in and conditioned by the local sociolinguistic economies

58  Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities in which they appear” (5). An important aspect of supevernaculars, according to Blommaert, is that they are not randomly deployed, but they are regulated by social norms belonging to a different “scale”. In other words, these are organized according to a different “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2011: 9). Varis and Wang (2011) argued that the organizing principles regulating the entextualization of supervernaculars are linked to an issue of authenticity. They showed, for example, how a Chinese artist appropriated specific English forms, indexically associated with global hip-hop culture, in order to construct the identity of an authentic hip-hop artist. The localization of supervernaculars, therefore, appears as the choice of forms that carry particular symbolic value in a determined social context. The “systematic observation” (Androutsopoulos 2008) of repeated status updates and comments (see Bolander and Locher 2015) revealed the presence of recurrent repertoire patterns. Through their posts, Maher and Nawar deployed a mixture of local and global features to communicate exclusively with a Syrian audience. I will suggest that Maher’s and Nawar’s linguistic choices are finalized to the projection of modern young Syrian identities in a cosmopolitan sociopolitical context, in which Western cultural forms are valued. According to Suleiman (2011), the code-switching between English and Arabic vernaculars among Arab youth is motivated by “the perception of prestige and modernity it evokes by virtue of its connection with power and globalization” (63). Whereas the use of the English supervernacular (Blommaert 2011) is concentrated in their status updates, Maher and Nawar predominantly used the Syrian vernacular to communicate with their friends. An aspect that emerges in the analysis is the use of the Romanized script, also known as arabizi. As brought to bear by Gonzalez-Quijano (2014: 164–165), “writing in Arabizi became a status symbol among young urban, ­Western-educated Arabs to show – and sometimes to show off – their modernity [. . .]”. Whereas the entextualization of these two symbols of modernity, namely the English ­supervernacular and arabizi, are valued in the pre-uprising ­sociopolitical context, I will show how they will no longer be part of Maher’s and Nawar’s repertoires after the Arab Spring.

3 A tech-savvy, romantic guy On September 29, 2010, Maher created a contemporary version of a mixtape by uploading a videoclip of the American TV show, Grey’s Anatomy. He replaced the actual movie sound with the English pop song No promises, a love song he liked at the time, and he wrote the subtitles in fuṣḥā. As he states in the post caption, Maher created the videoclip and dedicated it to “someone who knows who I’m talking about”, meaning someone special. The image in the example is a screenshot taken at a random time during the videoclip, and the subtitles in this specific segment read, in fuṣḥā, “I want to start all over again”. The post is followed by his aunt’s comment and Maher’s reply to it. This example is explicative of the resources characterizing his pre-uprising repertoire. It also exemplifies the themes

Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities 59 of women and love pervading his personal page until March 2011, as well as the absence of social and political issues. The status update contains several linguistic resources, including English, such as the song title “no promises” (PL1), the Arabic transliterated word il-klīb (“the clip”), the Syrian vernacular and the use of a smiley emoji, used to emphasize the

Figure 3.1 Maher’s September 29, 2010 post

60  Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities Post Line 1 (PL1) ‫ بس الكليب انا عاملو‬no promises ‫اغنیة‬ ’uġnyat no promises bass il-klīb ’ana ʻāmlo here’s the song “no promises”, but I made the clip Post Line 2 (PL2) ‫وئت عملت الكليب كان اهداء لحدن بيعرف حالو‬ wa’et ʻamalt hal-klīb kān ihdā’ la-ḥadan byʻarif ḥālo when I made it, it was dedicated to someone who knows who they are Comment 1 (Aunt) (C1) Azdak 2lii t2brni ???? mouaaaaaaaaaaaah how cute, you mean it’s for me???? Mwaaaaaaaaaaaaah Comment 2 (Maher) (C2) ‫ھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھھ‬ hahahahaha ‫مووووووه ئلبي‬ mwaaaahh ’elbī mwaaahhh my dear

happy mood of the status update (see Evans 2017). The reference to Western pop culture through the entextualization of an American clip is a multimodal supervernacular (Blommaert 2011) feature, “de-globalized” (Blommaert 2011) through local linguistic forms, including Syrian vernacular words, such as bass (“only”, PL1) and wa’et (“time”, PL2), as well as through the addition of the subtitles in fuṣḥā, an action that indexes Maher’s tech savviness. Through a hybrid mixture of linguistic and multimodal resources, Maher foregrounded the identities of a young romantic and a tech-savvy guy. Maher’s hybrid repertoire relies on the juxtaposition of symbolic “bits” of languages and varieties, which are “enough” (Blommaert and Varis 2015) for Maher to be perceived and appreciated by his Facebook friends as a young and carefree cosmopolitan Syrian.

4 A globe-trotting actor The following example is a status update that accompanied Nawar’s photo album entitled “Holywood”. The post is representative of a recurrent theme in Nawar’s pre-uprising Facebook page, which is that of his international career travels and achievements. The name of the photo album (“Holywood”) and the status update (“Wth [friend’s name] participating to San Francisco International Arts festival . . . May 2010”), in English, can be considered as declinations of a supervernacular (Blommaert 2011). Similarly, Nawar accompanies the status update with global symbols, such

Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities  61 as photos of the “Universal Studios” sign, a vintage car, probably used in an old American movie, and palm trees, which evoke the Californian landscape. The comments to the post are all in the Syrian vernacular. Nawar’s replies contain the Syrian vernacular (comment 3) and arabizi (comment 5). In both comments, he elongated the final vowel in the idiomatic phrase ‘alā rasīīīīīīīīīīī (“thank youuuuuuuuuuu”), followed by three exclamation marks. Commenter 2 uses a similar orthographic device by repeating the dots after addressing Nawar

Figure 3.2 Nawar’s May 26, 2010 post

Figure 3.2 (Continued)

Comment 1 ‫بدي قلك انك اروع من نجوم هوليود بس الحقيقه انك‬ biddi ’illak ’innak arwaʻ mn nğūm hōlywūd bass il-ḥa’ī’a ’innak I want to tell you that you’re way more wonderful than the Hollywood stars, the truth is ‫نجمنا النا نحنا انشاهلل مزيد من التقدم والتوفيق‬ niğmna ’ilna naḥna nšaḷḷāh mazīd mn at-ta’addum wa-t-tawfī’ you’re our star. I wish you all success Comment 2 ‫ اا‬. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‫احلى ابو النور‬ ’aḥla ’abū n-nūr. . . . . . . . . . !! beautiful Abū n-Nūr. . . . . . . !! Comment 3 ‫لك على راسييييييييييييييييييي وهللا‬ lak ʻala rāsīīīīīīīīīīī waḷḷāh thank youuuuuu!!!!

Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities  63 Comment 4 ‫مابينقصكم شي وهللا ومن جد وجد وما بينخاف عليكم‬ ma byn’aṣkum ši waḷḷā u-mn ğadd u-ğadd u-ma bnḫāf ‛alēkon you have all it takes. Efforts are rewarded, I have no doubts you’ll make it big ‫انت ورامز حبيب القلب انا واثق رح يجي اليوم يلي رحانشوفكم فيه نجوم عالميين‬ ’inte u-rāmiz ḥabīb il-’elb ’ana wāsi’ raḥ yiğī al-yōm ’yilli raḥ nšūfkum fih nğūm ‛ālamiyīn you and the dear friend Ramiz I’m sure some day we’ll see you as international stars ‫الصبر طيب يا استاذنا الغالي والجهد مطلوب وهللا ولي التوفيق انشاء هللا‬ iṣ-ṣabr ṭayyeb yā ’ustāḏnā l-ġālī wa-l-ğahd maṭlūb wa-aḷḷāhu walīy t-tawfīq ’inšā’ ’aḷḷāh patience is good our dear teacher, and efforts are necessary. May God help you succeed Comment 5 3ala ras-eeeeeeeeee thank youuuuu!!!

through his nickname Abū n-Nūr and concluding with two exclamation marks. These heterographic (Blommaert 2008) signs have been commonly observed in digital interactions across languages and cultures. Tannen (2013: 108) posited that orthographic repetition is used in digital communication as an “enthusiasm constraint” used to cue “sincerity and depth of emotion”. The use of heterographic features and the exclusive interaction with close friends suggest that Nawar’s use of English in the status update is not aimed at an international audience, but rather at a local, Syrian one. Through the English supervernacular, embedded in a hybrid mixture of linguistic and multimodal resources, Nawar indexes the online cosmopolitan identity of a globe-trotting actor and maintains rapport with his Facebook friends. This cosmopolitan identity is validated by the commenters, as appears, for example, from comment 4 (“You have all it takes. Efforts are rewarded, I have no doubts you’ll make it big”).

5 Conclusion In this chapter, I introduced Maher’s and Nawar’s pre-uprising practices on their personal Facebook pages. I showed how, through repeated status updates displaying a similar repertoire (see Bolander and Locher 2015), Maher and Nawar positioned themselves respectively as a young tech-savvy romantic guy and as a globe-trotting actor. These cosmopolitan identities were valued by their Facebook friends, who interacted with them through comments to their status updates. What stands out from Maher’s and Nawar’s repertoire is the entextualization of global

64  Hybridity and cosmopolitan identities forms, such as the English supervernacular (Blommaert 2011) and visual references to American pop culture, in a local vernacular context. It is interesting to note that these linguistic and multimodal global forms are not randomly located in the post, but they are predominantly present in the status updates and absent in the interaction between Maher, Nawar and their Facebook friends in the commentary section. This may suggest that they are consciously treated as symbols, or indexicals, deployed to construct cosmopolitan identities. These forms were “enough” (Blommaert and Varis 2015) for Maher and Nawar to perform authentic cosmopolitan identities (Varis and Wang 2011) and to be included in Syrian youth urban culture at the dawn of the uprising. Their cosmopolitan identities were taken up as such and valued by their Facebook friends in the light of a sociopolitical context of “globalized hybridity” (Gonzalez-Quijano 2014) and of “neo-liberal autocracy” (Wedeen 2013). The entextualization of English in a vernacular context represents a valorization of linguistic forms stigmatized under Hafiz al-Asad’s rule (1971–2000), during which an MSA monolingual policy underlay the project of a Syrian and Arab national identity. Through these forms, Maher and Nawar performed a “scale jump” (Blommaert 2005) to a more desirable modern reality. These forms are well organized and situated in an “order of indexicality” underlying the construction of cosmopolitan identities in a determined sociopolitical climate, and will not “travel well” (Blommaert 2005: 78–83) across the time and space line of the Syrian uprising. The renewed sociopolitical context of the Syrian uprising led both Maher and Nawar to reposition themselves through their Facebook pages. Such a repositioning, as I will show in the next chapter, involved a metalinguistic reflection, which led to the emergence of new norms through a reorganization of their entire repertoire.

Note 1 Blommaert (2011) explains that the term “supervernacular” was coined by Karel Arnaut.

4 Hybridity and dissident identities

1 Introduction In this chapter, I show how Maher and Nawar reorganized their Facebook repertoires at the beginning of the 2011 uprising. Whereas before the uprising the entextualization of the English supervernacular (Blommaert 2011) and of visual symbolic resources evoking Western culture contributed to the construction of cosmopolitan identities, within a sociopolitical and historical context, or chronotope (Blommaert 2015a) of “neo-liberal autocracy” (Wedeen 2013), Maher’s and Nawar’s post-uprising repertoires stand out for the entextualization of local linguistic and multimodal resources, including the Syrian vernacular, fuṣḥā, idioms and satirical cartoons. These appear in Maher’s and Nawar’s Facebook posts as well as in the “paratexts” (Suleiman 2013a), such as in Maher’s new public page ad-dōmari’s wall, profile pictures and description sections.1 This reorganization is analyzed in relation to a new sociopolitical context and in reaction to a shift in public discourse. On the wave of the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions, which led to the fall of Ben Ali’s and Mubarak’s governments in a short period of time, Syrians took to the streets in the spring of 2011 to demand freedom and dignity. Whereas Syrian state-controlled media initially denied the occurrence of the protests, in the following months President Bashar al-Asad, drawing from an age-old rhetoric reminiscing his father’s repertoire, delegitimized protestors, labelling them as mundassūn (“infiltrators”), pawns of a mu’āmara kawniyya (lit. “universal conspiracy”) and guided by sectarian intents. Fuṣḥā and the Damascene vernacular are functional to the construction and legitimization of local political identities of dissidents as ʻrealʼ Syrians. I suggest that Maher’s and Nawar’s entextualization of these resources should not be perceived as a code switch, through which they index pre-existing social identities (see Auer 2005). Rather these resources are deployed “simultaneously” (Woolard 1999), and the indexicalities of fuṣḥā and the Damascene vernacular play a key role in the indexing of political identities. These symbolic resources are the backbone of a new “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005), functional to the projection of collective dissident identities. The new mixture of resources is concomitant with a shift in the topics and themes of their status updates. In addition to his personal page, Maher launched

66  Hybridity and dissident identities the public page ad-dōmari (“The Lamplighter”), where he stopped chanting about women and love and focused exclusively on the current sociopolitical events. Similarly, Nawar ceased to promote his personal career achievements and used his personal Facebook page to reposition himself politically. From this chapter, it will emerge how a focus on hybridity is central to capture how Maher and Nawar re-positioned themselves toward a broader societal shift through their social media practices. This re-positioning is chronotopic (Sinatora 2019) in the sense that the resources employed are indexically conformant (Blommaert and De Fina 2017) with the sociohistorical context of the Syrian uprising and underlie the emergence of political identities distinct from the cosmopolitan identities indexed through their pre-uprising repertoire.

2 Simultaneity and code alternation Woolard (1999: 6) argued that simultaneity in bilingual communication “can dismantle (but does not simply neutralize) binary distinctions” and operationalized it in terms of linguistic form and communicative function. She identified three types of linguistic simultaneity, namely “bivalency, interference and conversational code­ switching” and two communicative functions, namely the performance of “multiple simultaneous social identities of a speaker” and “the simultaneous messages of communication in the contact zone”. Bivalency in bilingual communication is understood by Woolard (1999: 9) as “a socially meaningful, potentially strategic form of language choice” and defined as “simultaneous membership of an element in more than one linguistic system” (6). Additionally, Woolard (1999:12) posited that bivalency can be “strategically marshaled and manipulated by speakers”, particularly in contexts in which a separation between languages or language varieties is emphasized ideologically. According to Brustad (2017), such an ideological separation is what characterizes Arabic diglossia. Mejdell (2014) operationalized the notion of bivalency in the context of written Arabic, arguing that “Bivalent forms are – to paraphrase Woolard – not either fuṣḥā or ‘āmmiyya, nor neither fuṣḥā nor ‘āmmiyya, but rather both fuṣḥā and ‘āmmiyya” (2014: 274). Woolard (1999) developed the concept of “virtual simultaneity” in the sociopolitical shift to Catalonian autonomy, explaining how Castilian and Spanish, erstwhile associated with distinct ethnolinguistic identities, became simultaneously available to speakers to index both identities at the same time. Similarly, I suggest that the metalinguistic component permeating Maher’s and Nawar’s texts underlies an indexical shift, whereby the Syrian vernacular and fuṣḥā began to be perceived as resources, whose “integration” (Eid 2002) is at the core of the emergence of new political identities. In the analysis, I will also draw on code-alternation, a particular type of simultaneity described by Auer (1995: 116) as the “contiguous juxtaposition of semiotic systems such that the appropriate recipients of the resulting complex sign are in the position to interpret this juxtaposition as such”. Additionally, Auer (2005) argued that bilinguals’ use of hybrid forms is to be interpreted symbolically as the enactment of different social identities. These identities, he claimed, are not hybrid, but they reflect already existing social categories and groups. Building on

Hybridity and dissident identities  67 this insight, Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) argued that hybridity is not a new reified entity and it cannot be understood besides the political constraints of the categories enacted in the process of creating hybrid forms. Building on Auer (1995), Georgakopoulou (2011) operationalized code alternation as “rapid, unexpected, and even incongruous departures from the surrounding co-text” (4). A particular function of code-alternation in digital bilingual communication, she observed, is to provoke humor. I will show through the examples below how simultaneity and code alternation are strategies underlying the construction of a new “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005), namely a new “symbolic social grammar”, functional to the emergence of dissident identities during the 2011 uprising sociopolitical context.

3 A chronotopic repositioning In the aftermath of the uprisings, Maher sought for a way to position himself politically, capitalizing on his social media resources and skills. Through the examples below, I will show how this repositioning occurred through the symbolic entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of fuṣḥā and the Damascene vernacular. This symbolic entextualization is enhanced by other discursive and multimodal strategies – such as the intertextual reference to historical documents against Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and to Palestinian resistance literature – and the inclusion of cartoons evoking local Syrian resistance. Similarly, Nawar reconfigured a Levantine idiom within the context of the Syrian uprising and entextualized the Syrian vernacular in his Facebook status updates. Underlying these entextualization strategies is an issue of local authenticity. Through them, Maher and Nawar legitimized the identities of dissidents, accused by President Bashar al-Asad of being foreign infiltrators, as ‘real’ Syrians. Moreover, this symbolic reconfiguration is chronotopic. By entextualizing these resources, Maher and Nawar invoked (Blommaert 2015a) different historical and sociopolitical scenarios, or chronotopes, and the identities animating them in order to act within the current sociohistorical environment of the Arab Spring. The Arabic language in my country Maher published this status update on his personal page before launching the public page ad-dōmari (“The Lamplighter”) on March 17, 2011, following the repression of the initial demonstrations. The profile picture depicts a young Che Guevara, a revolutionary symbol for Maher. “The Arabic language in my country” is the first of a series of posts in which dissent is coded through a metalinguistic analysis of Syrian society and marks a sharp shift from the linguistic strategies and the themes of his pre-uprising repertoire. The post consists of a political metaphor, in which the author compares the agentive parts of fuṣḥā grammar to the Syrian government and its security apparatus and the nonagentive ones to the people. Fuṣḥā grammatical terminology is used as a contextualization cue (Gumperz 1982) to convey a metaphorical message of social oppression.

68  Hybridity and dissident identities The entextualization of fuṣḥā is highly symbolic. Fuṣḥā is indexically associated with authority (see Bassiouney 2014), and it epitomizes the Ba‘athist linguistic policy of Arabization. I will show how, through the entextualization of it and of bivalent forms (Woolard 1999), Maher conjures up the sociohistorical scenarios of Hafiz al-Asad’s coercive politics and Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Through these chronotopic scenarios, he assigns to Bashar al-Asad the identities of foreign invader and oppressor, thus rejecting the identity of armed foreign infiltrators used by the president to delegitimize protestors. In order to emphasize the different layers of meaning, particularly when the grammar particles function as cue to the metaphorical reading, I adopted a three-line gloss, whereby the third line, when present, contains the metaphorical meaning.2 This post appeared on Maher’s personal page a few days after the beginning of the uprising, during a phase in which Maher affirmed that he was looking for

Figure 4.1 Maher’s March 19, 2011 post

Line 1 ..‫للغة العربية في وطني شأن اخر‬ li-l-luġa l-ʻarabiyya fī waṭanī ša’n ’āḫar.. the Arabic language has another meaning in my country.. Line 2 ..‫حيث انك ال تستطيع نصب فعل ما‬ ḥayṯu ’annak lā tastaṭī‘ naṣb fi‘l mā . . . whereby not just any verb can be subjunctivized.. not just anyone can defraud another being.. !!..‫فالنصب في الوطن العربي للسلطة فقط‬ fa an-naṣb fi-l-waṭan al-ʻarabiyy l-s-sulṭa faqaṭ..!! because the subjunctive, in the Arab nation, is the prerogative of the authority..!! because defrauding is the prerogative of the utmost authority..!!

Hybridity and dissident identities  69 Line 3 !!..‫والخبر يسبق دائما المبتدأ إلى رجال األمن‬ wa-l-ḫabar yasbuq dā’iman al-mubtada’ ’ilā riğāl al-’amn.. where the predicate always precedes the subject..in front of secret agents..!! where even before you know what you did, the secret agents are informed about it..!! Line 4 ..‫ ال يجر بحرف الجر‬..‫واالسم المجرور‬ wa-l-ism al-mağrūr..lā yuğarr bi-ḥarf al-ğarr.. and the genitive.. is not genitivized by a genitivizer.. and if someone is feeling dragged down, they aren’t feeling that way because of life’s normal circumstances !!..‫بل بعناصر الجر‬ bal bi-ʻanāṣir al-ğarr..!! but rather by genitivizing particles.!! but because of the secret services..!! Line 5 ..‫والفاعل يبقى كما هو دائما مرفوع‬ wa-l-fāʻil yabqā kamā huwa dā’iman marfū‘ where the subject noun is always nominative and the President always comes out on top [of all other Syrians and Arabs] ‫وخطاباته المفرطة عالمة رفعه‬ wa-ḫiṭābātuhu l-mufriṭa ʻalāmat rafʻihi and all of his utterances sufficiently demonstrate nominative case and his excessive speeches demonstrate his superiority Line 6 ‫وال نملك من اللغة العربية في وطني‬ wa lā namlik min al-luġa al-ʻarabiyya fī waṭanī and we do not possess anything of the Arabic language in my nation !!..‫ مفعول به‬.. ‫اال ان نكون‬ ’illā ’an nakūn.. mafʻūl bihi..!! other than that of direct objects..!! other than an insignificant object role..!!

a way to “express dissent indirectly”. It depicts a political metaphor, which is a recurrent genre in Maher’s public page ad-dōmari. Maher decontextualized fuṣḥā grammar from a social domain, that of school, and recontextualized it in a sociopolitical domain in order to convey a meaning of social oppression.3 Through this recontextualization, I suggest, Maher reindexicalized fuṣḥā from the language of

70  Hybridity and dissident identities formality, abstraction, legitimacy, national unity, authenticity and formal education (cf. Bassiouney 2014) to an instrument of political oppression (Sinatora 2019). The term ḫabar (“information”, line 3) is the predicate of a nominal sentence. In this context, this grammatical term evokes the word muḫābarāt, the notorious Syrian (“intelligence service”). While in Arabic grammar the predicate generally follows the subject, the pun ironically suggests that the Syrian intelligence services are usually informed about the crimes before they have been committed. Al-ism al-mağrūr (“genitive noun”, line 4) is the grammatical term for nouns following a ḥarf al-ğarr (“preposition”). Ğarr also means “pulling” or “dragging”. In Arabic grammar, nouns following prepositions are said to be mağrūr (“dragged”). In the metaphorical domain, citizens are like genitive nouns. However, instead of being “dragged” by a preposition, they are dragged by the police, or ʻanāṣir al-ğarr (“dragging services”). The fāʻil (“subject of a transitive verb”, line 5) metaphorically represents Bashar al-Asad, and the term marfūʻ (“nominativecase inflected noun or verb”) also means “elevated”. Hence the meaning “and the President always comes out on top”. The terms marfūʻ (“elevated”) and rafʻihi (“his superiority”) allude to Bashar al-Asad’s conceitedness and superiority over the Syrian people. This gap metaphorically evokes another type of separation and superiority, that of fuṣḥā over the vernaculars. In line 6, by suggesting the Syrian population does not “own” of the Arabic language other than a role of “direct object”, the author envisages language as an identity asset of which the Syrian people have been deprived. Maher’s attempt to denounce social oppression metalinguistically evokes another text, namely historian al-Jabartī’s commentary to the French proclamation, issued in Arabic upon the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. In his commentary, al-Jabartī “deploys Arabic as a socio-political motif to comment on this invasion; in short, using the language as a proxy to signal extra-linguistic views” (Suleiman 2013a: 222–229). Similarly, Maher used Arabic symbolically (cf. Suleiman 2011, 2013a) in order to denounce a political appropriation of language. As the French invader used Arabic to ingratiate the Egyptian people and portray itself as the liberator from the Ottoman rule, Hafiz al-Asad used Arabic as a tool of domination, portraying himself as a leader standing against Western colonialism. Throughout the commentary, al-Jabartī, as noted by Suleiman (2013a), plays with the “lexical and semantic multivalency of the term (naṣb)” (229), such as “to inflect in the subjunctive or in the accusative” and “fraud” in order to accuse the French invader’s appropriation of Arabic as a deceitful tool of power control. Similarly, Maher uses the term naṣb in line 2 to allude to the regime’s use of language to defraud the population. Despite the egalitarian intent of the Arabization policy, consistent with the Ba‘athist socialist narrative, only those who exercise official power, such as the president and the official press, use fuṣḥā publicly and actively. The population is a mere passive recipient and largely unaware of the “fuṣḥā-linked standard language ideology” (Suleiman 2013a: 93–94). In Ba‘athist Syria, the “fuṣḥā-linked standard language ideology”, also known as Arabization, supported the creation of a national Syrian Arab identity to the detriment of local specificity. As al-Jabartī, through his commentary, “may [. . .] have aimed

Hybridity and dissident identities 71 at reclaiming textual authority over language as a measure of resistance to the French occupiers” (Suleiman 2013a: 225), Maher’s entextualization of fuṣḥā in the Syrian vernacular context may allude to a linguistic reappropriation and a tool of legitimization and authority, through which Maher positioned himself as a real Syrian and a dissident and rejected the identity of foreign infiltrator. Woolard (1999: 10) argued that bilingual puns constitute a particular type of bivalency. Building on Woolard, I see these puns not as activating separate indexical meanings, but rather as a way to emphasize the sociopolitical tension (Al-Batal 2002) deriving from decades of political oppression and aggravated by the recent crush of peaceful demonstrations in a hybrid linguistic fashion. Rather than switching between fuṣḥā and the vernacular, in this post, Maher simultaneously used symbolic resources, or “chronotopically relevant indexicals” (Blommaert and De Fina 2017: 3) needed to foreground a collective identity, that of the oppressed Syrian people. Although the text appears to be entirely in fuṣḥā, in fact, it can only be understood in the light of the Syrian local linguistic and sociohistorical context. The metalinguistic reflection of this post symbolizes a quest for a new language in a new sociopolitical context of transition and hope. It is striking that, like al-Jabartī, who used language symbolically to comment on a historic event, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, which is taken to mark the watershed between pre-modern and the modern Arab world (Suleiman 2013a), Maher recurred to metalinguistic strategies to describe a major sociopolitical shift in Syrian history. Encouraged by a friend, in March 2011, Maher decided to launch a dissident public page, inspired by Ali Ferzat’s satirical periodical al-Dumari (“The Lamplighter”).4 In the next section, I show how Maher came up with linguistic and discursive strategies to position himself publicly as an anti-Asad dissident on Facebook, capitalizing on his skills and on the “affordances” (Hutchby 2001: 444) of this social media platform.

4 Ad-dōmari (“The Lamplighter”) On March 15, 2011, the day that symbolically marked the beginning of the Syrian uprising, in addition to his personal page, Maher created the public page ad-dōmari, after the name of the first independent satirical periodical published by the famous Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat ten years earlier. Ferzat’s publication emerged in a historical period, known as the Damascus Spring, which coincided with the beginning of Bashar al-Asad’s presidency in 2000 (see Ghadbian 2001). This short phase was characterized by hope for greater freedom of expression. Ten years later, by entextualizing Ali Ferzat’s periodical’s name in his public Facebook page in the context of the 2011 uprising, Maher evoked the climate of hope and euphoria prevailing during the Damascus Spring. Having two Facebook profiles served both safety and discursive purposes. In the months following the initial uprisings, Maher would often share content from ad-dōmari’s page on his personal page so that, he alleged, he would appear as a page follower and not as the administrator in case he had been questioned by al-’amn (“the secret services”).

72  Hybridity and dissident identities The name ad-dōmari, it could be speculated, is also consistent with Maher’s social and political endeavor “to open up Syrian society”. In Syrian folklore, the dōmari was both the city lamplighter and gatekeeper, and it appears in the idiomatic expression ma fī d-dōmari (“lit. there is no dōmari”), used to describe a deserted place. Ferzat’s publication and Maher’s public page recontextualized this idiomatic expression by affirming the presence of the lamplighter and gatekeeper instead of negating it. By extension, through this idiomatic intertextual reference, Maher assumed the identity of an enlightener, namely as someone who “opens up” people’s minds, like a gatekeeper who opens the city gates at dawn. The presence of the dōmari epitomizes a critical and an enticement function carried out through Maher’s ad-dōmari’s page. By referring to Ali Ferzat’s publication intertextually, the ad-dōmari Facebook page also evokes Ali Ferzat’s role of a dissident artist in Syrian society. Additionally, this folkloric expression evokes a common Syrian heritage and local authenticity. Through his witty posts, ad-dōmari’s function is that of an usher, who invites people to engage in critical discussion. The ad-dōmari Facebook page reached a peak of over 150,000 likes in 2014, which made it one of the most followed dissident pages during the first few years of the Syrian revolution. Although Maher left Syria at the end of 2011, he continued curating his ad-dōmari page daily from Egypt, Turkey and eventually Austria. Between 2011 and 2015, he published over a thousand posts on ad-dōmari, sometimes several posts a day. Maher thought out his posts carefully, which denotes the conscious character of his linguistic choices. Initially he would send his posts to friends for feedback before publishing them on the ad-dōmari page. The Syrian vernacular and humor are two linguistic and discursive strategies that are predominant throughout ad-dōmari’s posts. Maher explained that he consciously used the Syrian vernacular to convey suḫriye, a term which denotes “scorn, derision, mockery and irony”. His motivation for choosing the Syrian vernacular, he said, is that “Suḫriye in fuṣḥā turns out to be too cold and heavy. When you use colloquial Arabic you provide another facet of humor”. Humor and sarcasm are consolidated strategies in Syrian dissident literature. For example, Witty (1992) showed how these traits permeated the poetry and prose of Syrian prison writer Muḥammad al-Maġūṭ. Additionally, the ad-dōmari posts are characterized by the presence of symbolic orthographic features, such as the replacement of the letter qāf with an alif or a hamza, in order to reflect a Damascene pronunciation. The Damascene vernacular is entextualized in contrast with the Alawite register of the president. Moreover, Maher shed light on another conscious strategy, which allowed him to convey dissent implicitly: “I couldn’t write directly. So, for example, I had to come up with stories. In every post I would write a story and accompany it with a picture I would find on the internet. Many of the pictures were cartoons from Ali Ferzat. Sometimes I would edit the pictures”. What Maher described as stories can be understood as political metaphors, such as the one I will show in the next chapter. Another way Maher consciously coded dissent is through idiomatic expressions.

Hybridity and dissident identities  73 PROFILE PICTURE

WALL PICTURE

PROFILE NAME

STATUS UPDATE (SU)

CONTAINS LONG AND SHORT DESCRIPTION

Figure 4.2 Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s Facebook page timeline

In what follows, I will illustrate the local linguistic and multimodal strategies enacted by Maher on his ad-dōmari page in order to index his dissident, anti-Asad political positioning. I divide the next examples in two sections. The first section sheds light on the wall picture, the profile picture and the description section. I understand these as “paratexts” (Genette 1997; Suleiman 2013a), namely “framing devices” which “perform three functions: designation, description and temptation or enticement” and which “collectively work to signpost and navigate the text – the main body of a work – in addition to mediating the interaction between the text, the reader and the public” (Suleiman 2013a: 95–96). In the second section, I present an example of linguistic hybridity through a status update published in September 2011. 4.1 Ad-dōmari – Paratextual devices Facebook “affordances” (Hutchby 2001: 444), such as choosing a name for your public page, a profile picture and a description section, arguably carry out similar functions as “paratexts” (Genette 1997; Suleiman 2013a). “Designation and enticement” (Suleiman 2013a: 95) are the most relevant to this case study. By calling the page ad-dōmari, Maher gave the page “an onomastic identity of its own” (2013a: 96). This onomastic strategy (Aldrin 2018) is accompanied by two other paratexts, the profile and the wall pictures. The profile name and the pictures remained unvaried between 2011 and 2017, which conferred stability and continuity to this public dissident identity, despite Maher’s relocation and the increasingly unstable sociopolitical context. The wall picture (Figure 4.3) consists of a satirical cartoon by Ali Ferzat, whose signature is inscribed at the top center. It depicts a journalist interviewing

74  Hybridity and dissident identities

Figure 4.3 Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s Facebook page wall picture

a gentleman sitting at his desk. Behind the interviewee stands the shadow of a funny-looking armed man, whom the interviewee stares at intimidated from the corner of his eyes. A caption on the interviewee’s desk ironically reads “freedom of speech..!! ad-dōmari”. The cartoon alludes to media censorship and propaganda in Syria. Besides framing the content of the ad-dōmari page as subversive, the satirical tone of the image is congruent with the humorous style of ad-dōmari’s status updates. By entextualizing Ferzat’s cartoon, Maher designated his page as a dissident one, similar to Ali Ferzat’s satirical production. By the same token, the wall picture functioned as an enticing device. As a page follower referred to me, “I like the ad-dōmari page because it is a funny commentary of what is shown in the media”, alluding to the condemnation of censorship conveyed by the cartoon. The profile picture (Figure 4.4), probably also a cartoon by Ali Ferzat, depicts a half-naked man sitting at his desk with a puzzled expression and with the top of his head carved out. Behind him is a laundry line on which hang his clothes and his brain, as to suggest that the individual has been brainwashed. Above the laundry line, on the left, a caption reads “My dignity hurts..!!” in the Syrian vernacular. On the top right side, below the image of a jasmine flower, another caption reads “Dignity Strike”. The Dignity Strike was an organized action of civil resistance that took place in several parts of Syria in December 2011. The jasmine flower, a symbol of the city of Damascus, was entextualized as the campaign’s logo. The locality indexed by the use of the Syrian vernacular and by the jasmine flower reinforces the dissidents’ counter narrative that the quest for dignity, freedom and change came from within Syrian society rather than from external powers. The indexes of locality and authenticity expressed by the use of the Syrian vernacular in connection with a discourse of dissidents as real Syrians underlie Maher’s ad-dōmari repertoire and are recurrent in Syrian dissidents’ linguistic attitudes toward the Syrian vernacular as the language of the Syrian people’s struggle for freedom (also see Harb 2013). Through the entextualization of Ali Ferzat’s cartoons, of the Syrian

Hybridity and dissident identities 75

Figure 4.4 Ad-dōmari’s profile picture

vernacular and of local symbols of resistance, Maher positioned himself as a dissident through his Facebook page, linguistically and multimodally. The description section contains a short description and a long description. The short description (Figure 4.5, example 2), in fuṣḥā, reads:

76  Hybridity and dissident identities

Figure 4.5 Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s short description section

naḥnu lā nabṣuq ‘alā aḥad.. We don’t spit on anyone.. bal hum yaqifūn tamāman fī-l-makān allaḏī nabṣuq fīhi. It’s them who stand exactly in the spot where we spit.

A Syrian page follower interpreted these two lines as evocative of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem biṭāqat hūwiyya (“Identity Card”), in which the Palestinian poet confronts an Israeli officer, emphasizing his Arab identity through the famous lines sağğil! ’anā ‘arabyy (“write! I’m an Arab”). Toward the end of the poem, Darwish writes: ‫الناس‬ َ ُ‫أنا ال أكره‬ ‫وال أسطو على أح ٍد‬ ُ ‫جعت‬ ‫ولكنّي إذا ما‬ ‫آك ُل لح َم مغتصبي‬ I do not hate people Nor do I encroach But if I become hungry The usurper’s flesh will be my food5 The choice of fuṣḥā in the short description section is worth reflecting on. Representing a sudden departure from the immediate vernacular environment, it contributes to the witty tone of the page through “code alternation” (Auer 1995; Georgakopoulou 2011). Additionally, it legitimizes Syrian dissidents’ demands and the authenticity of their position through its index of authority (Bassiouney 2014; Suleiman 2003), framing the Syrian dissidents’ struggle within the larger sociopolitical upheaval in the Arab world. The entextualization of fuṣḥā is chronotopic (Sinatora 2019) in that it evokes the recursive colonizer-colonized contrast (Koven and Simões Marques 2015), which already emerged in Maher’s first post with relation to the French invasion of Egypt, where the identity of the colonizer is assigned to Bashar al-Asad’s government. Moreover, through this equation, Maher reverses the long-held official narrative that the Syrian Ba‘athist government is the only real Arab force standing against Israel and colonialism. This collective dissident identity is marked indexically through the use of pronouns. The pronoun naḥnu (“we”) in ad-dōmari’s short description (Figure 4.5) replaces the pronoun ’anā (“I”)

Hybridity and dissident identities 77 in Darwish’s poem and reinforces the reference to a collective Syrian and Arab endeavor. The first-person plural pronoun is also set in contrast with hum (“they”), intended as the foreign invader, i.e., the Syrian government. The long description (Figure 4.6, example 3) reads:

Figure 4.6 Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s long description section

 1) ’ente mfakkir ḥālak ’innak ‘ala ṭūl m‘abbәr ‘an ra’yak.. you always think that you’re expressing your own opinion..  2) bass fakkart ši marra ’innu ra’yak hād mu m‘abbar ‘annak ’abadan.. ?? but did you ever think that this opinion of yours was not yours at all??  3) intabih ’abl ma t‘abbir ‘an ra’yak ma ykūn har-ra’ī hād mu ’ilak.. careful before you express your opinion. Lest this opinion should not be yours..  4) u-ykūn ši ḥada m‘abbәrlak yāh b-ṭrī’a mubāšra ’aw ġēr mubāšra.. but it is something that was referred to you by someone directly or indirectly  5) u-ykūn hal-ḥada ḫallāk tḥәss ’innu hād ra’yak.. and that this person made you feel that this is your opinion  6)  . . . w-ente btiği la-‘anna ba’ā w btṣīr biddak tufruḍu ‘alēna.. and you come bandying it around and imposing it on us  7) u-l-’aḥla min hēk ’innak mfakkir ’innu ra’yak.. and the best part of it is that you think it is your opinion  8) mišān hēk intabih naḥna bidna ra’yak mu ra’ībak r-’a-ī-ba-k.. therefore, be careful, we want your opinion, not that of your controller  9) mulāḥaẓa.. : NB..: 10) laysa li-l-ustāḏ ‘alī ferzāt ‘alāqa bi-ṣ-ṣafḥa nihā’iyyan the gentleman Ali Ferzat has no relation with this page at all

78  Hybridity and dissident identities Whereas the short description section (Figure 4.5) is in fuṣḥā, the long description (Figure 4.6) is entirely in the Syrian vernacular, except for lines 9 and 10. The word mulāḥaẓa (line 9) is bivalent (Mejdell 2014, 2017), whereas the following sentence, introduced by the fuṣḥā negation particle laysa, is entirely in fuṣḥā (line 10). In the long description (Figure 4.6), the author addresses potential dissidents and followers of the page, who have not yet sided with the revolution, through the personal singular pronoun. Throughout the long description (lines 1–8), Maher deploys several Damascene vernacular graphic resources, such as the alif in place of the qāf in the word ’abl (“before”, line 3). Particularly interesting is the homographic pun in line 8. The word ra’yak (“your opinion”) is followed by the word ra’ībak (“your controller”), which is a Damascus vernacular representation of the word “raqībak” (“your controller”). The pun derives from the homographic representation of the first part of the word “your controller” in the Damascene vernacular and the word “opinion”. The word raqībak, in reference to which the word ra’ībak is understood, additionally emphasizes the humorous tone by evoking the uvular sound qāf, stereotypical of the Syrian president’s regional accent. The alternation between vernacular multimodal (the profile name, the profile picture caption and the long description) and fuṣḥā (short description) resources, as well as the abrupt shift from the vernacular to fuṣḥā, constitute a strategy of “code alternation” (Auer 1995; Georgakopoulou 2011). In addition to other creative features, such as puns, this linguistically hybrid environment enhances the irreverent and sarcastic tone of these paratexts. Although Maher is from Damascus, the Damascene vernacular features do not index an ethnic affiliation. Rather, they appear as conscious choices through which Maher indexes a dissident political identity. The hamza, as it will be clearer in the next chapter, symbolically evokes a contrast with the Alawite vernacular register of the president and with fuṣḥā. The collective identity indexed through linguistic resources underlies a “scale jump” (Blommaert 2011) accomplished by Maher by starting the public page ad-dōmari. Maher’s linguistic choices did not pass unobserved among his circle of friends who knew he was the administrator of the ad-dōmari page. “Some of them contacted me privately on Facebook suggesting that my language was too explicit and inappropriate. Some of them criticized my use of the Syrian vernacular. So I launched a survey on the ad-dōmari page, and asked my followers if they thought I should write in fuṣḥā or in the Syrian vernacular. Most said I should use the Syrian vernacular”.6 The following post epitomizes this phase of metalinguistic reflection and negotiation.

5 Alternating fuṣḥā and the vernacular In the following status update (Figure 4.7, Example 4), which was published on ad-dōmari on October 7, 2011, Maher addresses a group of people who had contacted him privately and asked him to soften the sharp political tones displayed on the ad-dōmari page in the previous months. The post is in the Syrian vernacular. However, throughout the text, Maher alternates between bivalent and marked choices associated with urban Syrian vernaculars to align against his critics and to

Hybridity and dissident identities 79 Example 4

Figure 4.7 Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s October 7, 2011 post

1) ..‫صديقات‬ ‫في اصدقاء و‬ fi ’aṣdiqā’ wa ṣadīqāt.. there are some male and female friends.. 2) ..‫عم يطالبوا بتخفيف حدة الحديث‬ ‘am yṭālibu bi-taḫfīf ḥiddat al-ḥadīṯ who are demanding a softening of the tone 3) ..‫ او يعملوا اليك‬..‫قال ماعم يقدروا يشاركوا‬ ’āl ma ‘am y’dru yšāriku.. ’aw ya‘mlu laik.. saying they cannot join or click like 4) !!..‫ و جوزا‬..‫النو عم احكي علنا اسماء‬ li-’annu ‘am ’aḥki ‘alanan ’asmā’.. w-ğōza..!! because I’m making names publicly..and her husband’s [name, too]..!! 5) ..‫ اصدقيائي‬..‫صديقياتي‬ ṣadīqiyyātī.. ’aṣdiqiyyā’ī.. my dear little friends . . .

80  Hybridity and dissident identities 6) ‫؟؟‬..‫ليش خايفين‬ lēš ḫayfīn..?? why are you scared..?? 7) ..‫لك كلشي صار علني‬ lak kil ši ṣār ‘alani. . . . listen, everything turned public.. 8) ..‫ القواص علني‬..‫ االعتداء علني‬..‫ القتل علني‬..‫االغتياالت علنية‬ al-iġtyālāt ‘alaniyya..al-qatl ‘alanī..al-i’tidā’ ‘alanī..il-’uwāṣ ‘alani.. murders are public..killing is public..aggression is public..shooting is public.. 9) !!..‫و سدئني ما ضل غيركون انتوا الي بالسر‬ u-saddi’ni..mā ḍall ġērkun intu bis-sirr.. believe me..you are the only ones who continue hiding.. 10) ..‫ولك يا خيي‬ u-lak ya ḫayy.. com’on dude.. 11) ‫؟؟‬..‫ بدك نفضحن بالسر مثال‬..‫!!ازا عم يقتلونا بالعلن‬ ’iza ‘am y’tulūna bil-’alan..biddak nfaḍḍiḥon bi-s-sirr masalan..??!! if they kill us publicly..are you suggesting we should shame them in private..??!! 12) .‫اي يفضح عيلتن و بالعلن كمان‬ ē yfḍaḥ ‘ilton u-bil-‘alan kamān. let their families be shamed, and in public, too.

position himself as a dissident. I suggest that this alternation, which confers the post a humorous and sarcastic tone, constitutes a linguistically hybrid strategy through which Maher puts into dialogue contrasting political voices. In the gloss, I underlined bivalent forms and bolded and underlined creative forms. Throughout this status update, which Maher published to address the criticism received by friends and acquaintances about the “sharp” language used on his public Facebook page ad-dōmari, Maher deploys a plethora of interesting choices that characterize his repertoire as linguistically hybrid. The text is predominantly in the Syrian vernacular. However, it is interspersed with bivalent and creative forms. Through the alternation of these forms, Maher counterposes two distinct voices, his dissident one and that of his critics. In line (1), he addresses his critics through the nouns ’aṣdiqā’ (male friends) and ṣadīqāt (female friends). Although

Hybridity and dissident identities 81 these forms can also occur in informal conversation, they are more commonly associated with fuṣḥā than with the vernacular – which is equipped with other terms to translate the word friends, such as rif’āt. In line (1), these fuṣḥā/bivalent forms (Mejdell 2014) stand out within the predominantly vernacular cotext and follow the preposition fī, used in the vernacular to introduce the English sentence “there is/there are”. In using the terms ’aṣdiqā’ (male friends) and ṣadīqāt (female friends), Maher is not operating a code switch by appealing to any immediately recognizable indexes of fuṣḥā, such as authority, nor to ideologically constructed negative meanings of it (see Bassiouney 2014). Rather he may be using the terms ’aṣdiqā’ (male friends) and ṣadīqāt (female friends) to distance himself from his critics, implying that they are not actually friends. One could also translate it as “there are so-called friends”. The abrupt departure from the vernacular fī to these bivalent forms frames the tone of the update as sarcastic. The sarcastic tone is confirmed in line (5), in which the very same words are inverted and creatively modified into ṣadīqiyyāti and ’aṣdiqiyyā’i, through the insertion of the consonant – iyy in the plural morphology. By modifying the plural noun morphology, he sarcastically belittles the friends he addressed in line (1). This creative form is also consistent with the sarcastic and exasperated tone of the post, cued, for example, through expression u-lak ya ḫayy (“c’mon dude”) in line (9). Another humorous element is the presence, in line (4), of the pun on the word ’asmā’, which simultaneously means “names” and the first name of Bashar al-Asad’s wife. In line (8), the word ’uwāṣ is a marked vernacular word meaning “shooting”. The word follows abruptly a series of bivalent words, to add emphasis and pathos. Its markedness is perceived in contrast with the surrounding bivalent cotext. Additionally, in line (9), Maher addresses his political opponent with exasperation through the expression saddi’nī (“believe me”). This word reflects orthographically a Damascene pronunciation through the nonemphatic sibilant s and the glottal stop. The glottal stop is a salient marker of more prestigious (cf. Ibrahim 1986) Levantine urban vernaculars, as opposed to the voiceless uvular qāf (see Behnstedt 1997, Map 9: 18–19 and Habib 2010), which can be found in rural vernaculars, including the province of Latakia, Bashar al-Asad’s home region. In his discussion about the relationship between place and identity, Blommaert (2005: 23) argued that “the use of specific varieties ‘sets’ people in a particular social and/or physical place, so to speak, and confers the attributive qualities of that place to what they say”. Through the word saddi’nī, Maher not only indexed a local, authentic Damascene identity, but he also positioned himself politically by evoking a contrast (cf. Irvine and Gal 2000; Koven and Simões Marques 2015) between an urban, positively valued pronunciation and a rural one, associated indexically with the Asad’s regional dialect and the intimidating language of his apparatus.7 At the same time, through this contrast, he implicitly assigned an identity of pro-Asad supporter to his interlocutor. Throughout the text, Maher alternates bivalent, vernacular and creative forms to set in contrast his own and the dissidents’ voices with the pro-government ones. For example, in line 2, the phrase “ ‘am yṭālibu bi-taḫfīf ḥiddat al-ḥadīṯ” (who are demanding a softening of the tone) is introduced by the phrase in marked vernacular syntax, “ ‘am yṭālibu” (“who are demanding”) and followed immediately

82  Hybridity and dissident identities by the bivalent three-noun phrase bi-taḫfīf ḥiddat al-ḥadīṯ, attributed to his critics through “constructed dialogue” (Tannen 2007). Although in this example I decided to focus on the strategy of code alternation (as a type of linguistic hybridity), Maher uses other linguistic strategies to emphasize the presence of distinct voices. In line (11), for example, through the verbs y’tulūna (“they kill us”) and nfaḍḍiḥon (“we shame them”), he used pronouns and verb morphology to emphasize a we vs. them distinction, whereby the former indexes the collective identity of dissidents and the latter the regime. We encountered this same strategy in the long description section (Figure 4.6, Example 3). Throughout the text, alternation conveys sarcasm and is used by Maher as a persuasive strategy to position himself and his critics politically through language.

6 Nawar’s post-uprising repertoire The following example, drawn from Nawar’s post-uprising repertoire, is illustrative of the shift in hybridity on Nawar’s post-2011 Facebook page. Akin to Maher’s post-uprising practices, Nawar’s posts and comments are characterized by the absence of global, Western symbols and multimodal resources and by the exclusive presence of local linguistic and discursive features, including the Syrian vernacular rendered through standard and nonstandard orthography and idioms. For Nawar, the Syrian vernacular represents the most instinctive resource to fight oppression, as he explained to me in these terms: Imagine that you trip on something while you are walking down the street. How do you react, in English? No, you’re Italian, so you’ll probably yell something in Italian. Likewise, when the revolution started, people used the vernacular to vomit out all they had inside.8 The hybridity deriving from the implementation of vernacular orthography in a written genre is enhanced by the entextualization of the intrinsically oral genre of popular idioms. In the status update, Nawar reconfigures the idiom ymši l-ḥēṭ l-ḥēṭ w-yqūl ya rabb is-sutra (“walk alongside the wall, invoking God’s protection”), whereby the “wall” symbolized deference to power, in the light of the 2011 uprising. In this new sociopolitical context, the “wall” by which Nawar is inspired is the school wall of the city of Daraa, where a group of teenagers were allegedly arrested and tortured in February 2011 for painting anti-Asad graffiti: I’m talking about how we took to the streets. Our parents used to tell us: shhh, what we talked about during our family conversation last night, keep it for yourself, don’t share it with your friends in school. Only say bir-rūḥ, bid-damm, nafdīk ya Hafiz (“we sacrifice our spirit and our blood for you, Hafiz”).9 The proverb ’ana bmši ḥēt l-ḥēt (“I walk alongside the wall”), is a sign of fear and abjectness. The wall I talk about is that of Daraa, where the teenagers wrote the slogans against the regime. It is for the new generation [. . .] to write about their revolution.10

Hybridity and dissident identities  83 I will show how, through the hybridity of the script and the entextualization of this popular idiom, Nawar metaliguistically juxtaposes two voices, or “social languages” (Bakhtin 1981: 358) representing two generations of Syrians. The gloss consists of three lines. The first line is the original in Arabic. The second line is a transcripteration, namely a rendering of the text based on my understanding of its social meaning and on the identities it purports to engender. The third line is a translation. I underlined the vernacular syntactic, lexical and orthographic choices in order to facilitate their identification. Through this example, I further propose a vision of hybridity as the expression of emerging political identities. Rather than focusing on the mere linguistic product, it is useful to investigate the social function of these choices in the light of the sociopolitical context. The three-line status update consists of a metaphor depicting a change in Syrian society, from submissive to rebellious. This change is indexed through the entextualization of an idiom and through linguistic hybridity. Hybridity presents itself as the co-presence of vernacular and standard orthographic choices, whose ambiguity is due to the lack of short vowels (Eid 2002; Mejdell 2014). Example 5, November 21, 2012, Nawar Bulbul

Figure 4.8 Screenshot of Nawar’s November 21, 2012 post

Post Line 1 . . . ‫كان يمشي الحيط الحيط ويقول يارب السترة‬ . . . ‫الجيل القديم‬ al-ğīl al-qadīm . . . kān ymši l-ḥēṭ l-ḥēṭ w-yqūl ya rabb is-sutra. . . the old generation used to walk alongside the wall, invoking God’s protection Post Line 2 . . . ‫مايمشي ّإل بنص الشارع‬ . . . ‫قرر‬ . . . ‫الجيل الجديد‬ al-ğīl al-ğadīd qarrar. . . ma ymši ’illa bi-nuṣṣ iš-šāriʻ . . . the new generation decided to not walk anywhere else other than the middle of the street . . . Post Line 3 ‫وبس‬ . . . ‫والحيط تركو للكتابه‬ u-l-ḥēṭ taraku li-l-kitābe.. u-bass And they left the wall for writing.. that’s all

84  Hybridity and dissident identities Vernacular orhographic, syntactic and lexical features cluster particularly in the second part of the status update, in which the idiom is recontextualized and associated with the new generation of rebellious teenagers. The last line of the status update is interdiscursively related to the genre of graffiti and protest slogans. Nawar explained that the action of writing on the wall celebrates the events that symbolically triggered the Syrian uprising, namely a group of teenagers who wrote protest slogans on a school wall in the city of Daraa. The expression u-bass (“that’s all”, line 3) evokes the pro-Asad slogan ’aḷḷāh, sūriya, bašar u-bass (“God, Syria, Bashar, that’s all”) and its reconfiguration through the protest slogan, chanted during the 2011 uprising, ’aḷḷāh, sūriya, ḥurriye u-bass (“Allah, Syria‫ و‬and freedom, that’s all”). Through a reconfiguration of his repertoire, as well as through the entextualization of standard and nonstandard orthography, protest slogans and the Syrian vernacular, Nawar turned his personal Facebook wall into a subversive act of resistance. For an interesting analysis of the performative character of protest slogans and their sociopolitical function, see Colla (2012; 2013). Through the simultaneous (Woolard 1999) presence of bivalent and vernacular features, the entextualization and reconfiguration of an idiom, as well as through the intertextual reference to protest slogans, Nawar puts into dialogue two distinct sociopolitical voices, that of his parents’ generation and the post-uprising dissidents’ one, thus contributing to the hybrid and “polyphonic” (Bakhtin 1981) character of this text.

7 Conclusion In this chapter, I analyzed the shift in topics, genres, linguistic and discursive strategies in Maher’s and Nawar’s post-uprising repertoires. Whereas the entextualization of global forms was predominant before 2011, linguistic and multimodal local forms, including the Syrian vernacular, fuṣḥā, idioms and satirical cartoons prevailed in the post-uprising phase. This hybrid mixture is at the core of a metalinguistic reflection that permeates Maher’s and Nawar’s repertoires, and through which Maher and Nawar positioned themselves as dissidents at the beginning of the uprising. I analyzed this type of hybridity through the notions of “code alternation” (Auer 1995; Georgakopoulou 2011) and “simultaneity” (Woolard 1999). The “integration” (Eid 2002) of the Syrian vernacular and fuṣḥā underlies the emergence of a collective identity of dissidents as real Syrians, in rejection of Bashar al-Asad’s allegations that protestors were foreign infiltrators. The pervasive presence of “simultaneous” (Woolard 1999) forms is also to be interpreted in reaction to the Ba‘athist prior policy of code separation (cf. Miller 2003). Maher’s and Nawar’s post-uprising social media practices challenge such a separation in a similar fashion in which bilingual individuals in autonomous Catalonia indexed multiple identities through “virtual simultaneity” (Woolard 1999).11 In example 1, I showed how Maher compared agentive parts of fuṣḥā grammar terminology to the despotic government and nonagentive parts to the oppressed people. Whereas the text appears to be entirely in fuṣḥā, the metaphorical meaning is rendered through puns and creative forms imbued in the local Syrian context. The relationship between this text and al-Jabartī’s commentary, discussed by Suleiman (2013a) as an example of “symbolic” usage of language, further

Hybridity and dissident identities 85 helped envisage this text as an act of linguistic reappropriation. By virtue of this intertextual relationship, one can see an equation between the French invader’s use of Arabic to ingratiate and conquer the Egyptian people, with the pretext of liberating it from the Ottoman rule, and the Syrian government’s policy of Arabization (cf. Miller 2003; Suleiman 2003) as an instrument to free the Syrian people from Western colonization. In example 2, the use of fuṣḥā reinforces the intertextual reference to Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, in which a Palestinian man stands up against an Israeli officer affirming his Arab identity. Through this reference, Maher reiterates the association between the Syrian government and an oppressive foreign invader and legitimizes his political position. In examples 4, through an alternation between the Syrian vernacular, fuṣḥā and creative forms, Maher addresses his critics sarcastically. Finally I showed how linguistic hybridity is a practice common in other dissidents’ practices, such as Nawar’s. In example 5, it was shown how Nawar put into dialogue two generations of Syrians, valorizing the identity of the young Syrian protestors who started and led the uprising. He did so through the entextualization of a popular idiom in a vernacular environment and the hybrid co-presence of nonstandard and standard orthography. What renders these texts hybrid is the symbolic use that Maher and Nawar make of linguistic resources. By simultaneously deploying and alternating fuṣḥā and Damascene vernacular features, they did not simply index ethnic or geographic identities, such as Arab and Syrian Damascene ones. Rather, they used symbolic fragments of registers and varieties in order to index a dissident political identity with reference to broader discourses, such as social oppression and upheaval. Their hybrid linguistic choices reinforce Auer’s (2005) argument that linguistic hybridity does not automatically index a mixture of pre-existing social identities, as well as Otsuji and Pennycook’s (2010) claim about the need to envisage hybrid language with reference to the political boundaries of the registers and varieties from which symbolic forms are accessed. Whereas in this chapter I emphasized a shift in hybridity, reflected in the multivoiced character of Maher’s and Nawar’s texts, in the next chapter I will further explore the dynamic nature of hybridity, examining how hybrid texts facilitated the emergence of different voices among their Facebook friends, animating a dialogue among individuals with different political views.

Notes 1 Examples 1 and 5 also appeared in Sinatora (2019), in which their analysis served to illustrate the link between chronotopes and entextualization. Here, I analyze them to shed light on hybridity as simultaneity (Woolard 1999) in Maher’s and Nawar’s postuprising practices. 2 I thank Nazir Harb for suggesting the inclusion of a metaphoric line in the gloss and for his assistance in the creative English adaptation of Arabic grammatical terms. 3 Bassiouney (2014) argued that fuṣḥā is negatively associated with the social domain of school and with the social persona of a narrow-minded, low-class teacher. Although, according to her analysis, this indexical association derives from Egyptian movies, it

86  Hybridity and dissident identities



4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

is likely that it gained ground outside of Egypt, due to the wide circulation of Egyptian film production. See Ghadbian (2001) and above. Translation found in www.barghouti.com/poets/darwish/bitaqa.asp Interview with Maher, September 2015. Also see Bassiouney’s (2018) discussion on dialects and identity performance. Interview with Nawar, 13 August 2015. This is a slogan that was used during demonstrations in support of Hafiz al-Assad. In more recent slogans, Hafiz was replaced by Bashar. See Bandak (2014). Interview with Nawar, 13 August 2015. See chapter 2 for Woolard’s (1999) discussion of the shift from “sequential” to “virtual simultaneity”, triggered by the sociopolitical event of Catalonian autonomy.

5 Hybridity and participation

In the previous chapter, I showed how a focus on linguistic hybridity allowed to understand how Maher and Nawar repositioned themselves politically toward the context of the Syrian uprising. Hybridity no longer served the purpose of projecting desirable cosmopolitan identities, as it did in the pre-uprising phase, but it was finalized at the construction of dissident identities. This repositioning occurred through the simultaneous display of local linguistic and multimodal forms, such as the Syrian vernacular, fuṣḥā, popular idiomatic expressions and visual texts associated with local resistance. The symbolic meanings associated with these forms constituted a new “order of indexicality”, namely a set of “systemically reproduced, stratified meanings often called ‘norms’ or ‘rules’ of language” (Blommaert 2005: 73). In chapter 2, I suggested that this can be paraphrased as a ‘social symbolic grammar’. This grammar is “polycentric”, in the sense that it does not stem from a prescriptive standardized variety, but from multiple prestigious centers (Blommaert 2005; Blommaert and Varis 2011). These centers, as explained by Blommaert, are authoritative and underlie dynamics of “inclusion and exclusion” (2005: 38). In this chapter, I explore the way this ‘social symbolic grammar’ contributes to the emergence of political identities analyzing the interaction among the commenters of the ad-dōmari page in reaction to a post of 2012, a time of euphoria, in which there was still hope for political change. The post consists of a humorous political metaphor about the sensitive issue of ṭā’ifiye (“sectarianism”), used by the Syrian government as a bugbear to warn against the catastrophic consequences of a political alternative. In the post, Maher ironizes about the fact that, in reality, it is the government and the army that are sectarian. Although at first sight the comments may appear messy, like a playful, chaotic big circus, I will shed light on how these are actually organized and will suggest that hybridity as the mobilization of indexical, symbolic “bits” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Blommaert 2011) or “fragments” (Agha 2005) of linguistic varieties and registers is central to make sense of these comments in relation to the emergence of political identities. Such an analysis is consistent with Blommaert an Rampton’s (2011) vision of conducting research in “superdiverse” contexts. Hybrid and creative forms, they argued, “allow us to observe linguistic norms being manufactured, interrogated or altered, or to see

88  Hybridity and participation norms that have changed and are new/different in the social networks being studied. We can see, in short, the emergence of structure out of agency” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 9). I will show how, through such a mobilization, commenters to the post created new norms to position themselves politically toward the Syrian conflict. I use the help of three approaches in order to identify indexical rules and patterns, namely Tannen’s (2007) repetition, Agha’s (2005) voice and De Fina’s (2016) analysis of the interaction among social media commenters. I will outline these frameworks below and then introduce the data and the analysis.

1 Participation as “interpersonal involvement” and voicing Tannen (1984, 2005, 2007) proposed a framework for the analysis of participation in interaction through the term “interpersonal involvement” (2007: 17). This notion, she explained, is grounded in two theoretical strands, namely “intertextuality” (Kristeva 1974) and “coherence” (Becker 1982), (both cited in Tannen 2007: 28), which she operationalized through the notion of “repetition”. Building on Becker (1995), she argued that repetition is the “grammar” underlying “the construction of identity in interaction” (Tannen 2007: 15). Tannen explained that repetition can be “synchronic” and “diachronic” (2007: 9). The former refers to the repetition of linguistic and discursive features within the same text. The latter describes repetition across texts. Among other functions, Tannen linked synchronic repetition to “humor and play, savoring and showing appreciation of a good line or a good joke, persuasion, [. . .]” (2007: 61). In addition to linguistic repetition, she identified “the forces of music (rhythm and sound)” (2007: 134) as well as “imagery and details” (2007: 32) as key strategies, through which the speaker/writer “involves” the listener/ reader in the creation of meaning. Tannen (2007) explained diachronic repetition through the term “dialogue”, which is the way people bring other voices into their discourse. In my analysis, I also refer to what Agha (2005) calls “entextualized voices”, namely voices that are stereotypically associated with widely recognized registers. These voices are not full-fledged registers or varieties, but they are “fragments” (Agha 2005: 47) of these, which are just “enough” (Blommaert and Varis 2015) for commenters to make their (political) position emerge in discourse. According to Agha (2005), voices can have “congruent” and “noncongruent” effects. The entextualization of a voice has a noncongruent effect when it “clashes” with the co-text. He defines this use as “tropic”. A person can make a noncongruent use of a register when they are talking like someone else, thus conducting a “parallel” activity to than the one observable. He cites Hoyle’s (1993) example of two children who, while playing ping-pong, talk to each other as if they were professional sport reporters. The voice of sport reporters is noncongruent with that of the children and therefore signals the presence of another activity. Additionally, he shows that the entextualization of this voice can follow “patterns of role ­alignment” (Agha 2005: 49), depending on whether the kids reply to each other with the same voice or not.

Hybridity and participation 89 The voices present in the post and comments analyzed below are related to three registers or varieties, namely Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the Alawite register and the Damascene Arabic vernacular. MSA and the Alawite vernacular are indexically associated with Bashar al-Asad’s government. MSA is the official language and a symbol of the Ba‘athist policy of Arabization. The Alawite register is a set of stereotypical forms indexically associated with Syrian coast vernaculars. The Alawites, the religious minority to which the Asad family belongs, hail from the coastal region of Syria, characterized by the presence of a distinctive dialectal group (see Behnstedt 2000). An indexical feature of these dialects is the pronunciation of the voiceless uvular plosive q, represented by the Arabic alphabetical letter qāf. The qāf is also a “third-order indexical” (Johnstone et al. 2006), as explained further below. This sound, also present in Modern Standard Arabic, is replaced in Damascene Arabic, with the exception of a few words, by a glottal stop, represented in the Arabic alphabet through the consonant hamza. I will show in the analysis how the ad-dōmari post author, Maher, and the commenters entextualized words, idioms and onomatopoeic forms based on the symbolic meaning of the qāf and the hamza to position themselves politically.

2 Participation in social media narrative Drawing on Goffman’s (1981) participation framework, De Fina (2016: 482) designed an innovative system to code comments to an online blog story, ­analyzing comments according to the categories of “thread to which the comment belonged, participant name, interactional dynamics, frame focus of the comment, medium and tone” (De Fina 2016: 482). The category of interactional dynamics is the most relevant to the present analysis, which she further subdivided into:

Interactional dynamics subcategories a. b. c. d.

INITIATING THREAD COMMENT: Comments that start a new thread RESPONSE TO INITIATING THREAD COMMENT: Comments that are direct responses to the first comment in a thread RESPONSE TO PREVIOUS COMMENT: Comments that respond to the comment directly preceding them in the thread RESPONSE TO A COMMENT: Comments that respond to another comment in the thread that does not directly precede them or initiates the thread

Figure 5.1 Interactional dynamics. Source: De Fina (2016: 482).

For each comment, she identified a different frame focus, namely what aspects of the story or the narration event commenters oriented to in reacting to the main post. She concluded that most comments were in response to some other (not previous) comments, positing the absence of “sustained dialogues” and reinforcing a claim previously made by Herring (2013) that “participants are not really

90  Hybridity and participation focused on the content and informational components of online communication, but rather on other aspects of it, and therefore they don’t feel particularly obliged to stay on point” (De Fina 2016: 486). De Fina interpreted her results in the light of the “enhanced reflexivity that online environments afford”, suggesting that “the fact that comments are posted and written paradoxically allows for greater permanence of opinions and therefore for less spontaneous reactions to a story or to other participants’ contributions. On the other hand, the participatory culture and online environments encourage performance as a central act of self-presentation” (493). Rather than asking to what extent commenters engage in “sustained dialogues”, what is interesting in this post is how interactional dynamics are sustained through several linguistic and extra-linguistic resources.

3 The post This post is a satirical metaphor addressing the issue of ṭā’ifiye (“sectarianism”). Syria is a mosaic of ethnicities and religious groups. Once a socioeconomically marginalized and oppressed religious minority, under Hafiz al-Asad (1971–2000) the Alawites gained control of the political and economic domains, which were until then prerogative of a Sunni urban elite (Hinnebusch 2001; Salamandra 2004). Religion and internal politics were taboo topics in Syrian public discourse under much of Hafiz al-Asad’s tenure and only became more openly discussed in the 1990s (Salamandra 2004). Religious and confessional distinctions, as noted by Wedeen (2013), were celebrated under Bashar al-Asad through a rhetoric of “multicultural accommodation” (843), whereby “experiences of difference among Syrians, such as those produced by sectarian organizations or by distinct regional practices, were rendered cultural and thereby unthreatening in the official discourse” (843, note 6). The word ṭā’ifiye had a negative connotation in public discourse before the uprising and was used as a weapon to quell dissent. It was also used in 2011 by Bashar al-Asad to delegitimize protestors as radical extremists. In this post, Maher repoliticized the discourse on ṭā’ifiye through a plethora of linguistic and discursive strategies, including the Syrian vernacular, humor and idioms. He starts with a rhetorical question, asking why all the army officers interviewed by pro-government television station Al-Dunya, regardless what part of Syria they are from, pronounce the qāf. Through this rhetorical question, he alludes to the Alawite sectarian composition of the army. In the post, the action of pronouncing the qāf is creatively described through the onomatopoeic verb yqāqū. The verb yqāqū is a vernacular realization of the imperfect yaqūq or yaqīq, which literally means “to cluck”. In Syria, the verb yqāqū has another indexical meaning, namely being an Asad supporter. This verb is also contained in the Levantine idiom byqāqū u-ma bylāqū (literally “they cluck but don’t achieve anything”), entextualized at the end of the post. The entextualization of this idiom has an important metaphorical implication. 2012 was a time in which the official Syrian army was losing control of the territory. The idiom can therefore be understood as “the official Syrian army officers can cluck as much as they want, but they’ll lose the war”.

Hybridity and participation 91 In this post, representative of the linguistic resources present in the ad-dōmari page, Maher is able to conduct multiple semiotic or metadiscursive activities (Agha 2005). The first activity is enabled by his role as the “animator” of the page (Goffman 1981). Impersonating the domāri – at the same time the folkloric figure of the city gatekeeper and lamplighter and the symbol of dissidence in connection with Ali Ferzat’s publication – Maher uses the Damascene vernacular to conduct the activity of narration. Through the Damascene vernacular, enriched by the indexes of urban authenticity, Maher creates a playful environment through “synchronic repetition” patterns (Tannen 2007) that evoke the genre of a nursery rhyme. This playful environment is “disturbed” by a “voicing effect” (Agha 2005), the entextualization of the Alawite register, cacophonically indexed through the qāf, contained in the verb byqāqū and in the idiom byqāqū u-ma bylāqū and attributed to yet another ominous presence, namely that of army officers. The playful and ominous effects overlap in the onomatopoeic word byqāqū, which can mean “to cluck”, but is also related to the word qāq (“raven”). According to Agha (2005), “any semiotic activity that implements a voicing effect is always subject to uptake and potential ratification in a subsequent semiotic act that may itself index features of speaker persona and, to this extent, may itself implement a voicing effect”. The double metadiscursive activity conducted by Maher, I will suggest, accounts for the way comments are organized. After describing these two activities of the post author in detail, I will show how different “patterns of role alignment” (Agha 2005) underlie the emergence of different political identities. The status update is followed by a multiple-line gloss. The first line is the original text in Arabic. The second line is a trascripteration. Given the clear intention of the author to write the status update in the Damascene vernacular, bivalent words, namely words that can be read both in fuṣḥā and in the vernacular (Mejdell 2014), have also been rendered in the Damascene vernacular. The third line contains the literal translation. In the gloss, I have decided to maintain the punctuation present in the status update, in which two dots are found at the end of each line and question and exclamation marks are used to amplify the playful effect. This post contains several linguistic and discursive features, including sound and lexical repetition, rhythm, images, details, idioms and voicing. These features contribute to the persuasive character of the text and “activate” the “imagination” (Tannen 2007: 42) of the commenters, thus enhancing participation. In lines 1–3, the repetition of the words ta‘tabira and ‘әtabira, alternated by biddak at the beginning of the line and ṭā’ifiye/fitna in the middle, confers a regular, dynamic rhythm echoing the sound of a nursery rhyme, which frames the status update as playful or irreverent. In line 3, the order is reversed, with biddak concluding the verse. This marks the end of the incipit. The swinging rhythm of this first section is also emphasized by the word ’aḫī (“my brother”), used sarcastically, whose upbeat position sets the whole section in motion. In lines 4–6 stands out the repetition of the fricative /š/ in the words lēš, šu and ğēš, as well as the rhymed alternation of lēš and ğēš. The expression lēš ya‘nī in line 5 introduces a new section, which is concluded in line 10 by the same expression, lēš ya‘nī. In this section, besides the repetition of the sound qāf in byqāqū, the author lists a series

Figure 5.2 Screenshot of ad-dōmari’s July 25, 2012 post

1) ..‫اخي بدك تعتبرها طائفية عتبرها‬ ’aḫī biddak ta‘tabira ṭā’ifiye ‘әtabira look brother, you wanna call it sectarianim? Go ahead and call it that.. 2) ..‫بدك تعتبرها فتنة عتبرها‬ biddak ta‘tabira fitne ‘әtabira you wanna call it strife? Call it that.. 3) ..‫عتبرها شو مابدك‬ ‘әtabira šu ma biddak call it whatever you like.. 4) !!‫ ؟؟‬..‫بدي افهم ليش كل الجيش الي بيطلعوا عالدنيا بيقاقوا‬ biddi ifham lēš kull il-ğēš ’yilli byṭla‘o ‘a-d-dunya byqāqū..??!! I wanna know why all the army officers in the Dunya channel sound like clucking chickens..? 5) !!‫ ؟؟‬..‫لك ليش يعني‬ lak lēš ya‘nī.. ??!! why.. ??!!

6) ..‫الجيش الي بيعملوا معون مقابلة بحمص بيقاقوا‬ l-ğēš ’yilli by‘amlo ma‘on m’ābale b-Homṣ byqāqū those interviewed in Homs cluck like chickens.. 7) ..‫بحلب بيقاقوا‬ b-ḥalab byqāqū in Aleppo they cluck.. 8) ..‫بادلب بيقاقوا‬ b-’idlib byqāqū.. In Idlib they cluck.. 9) !!..‫لك حتى بالشام بيقاقوا‬ lak ḥatta bi-š- šām byqāqū..!! Look, even in Damascus they’re clucking.. !! 10) !!‫ ؟؟‬..‫ليش يعني‬ lēš ya‘nī.. ??!! I mean, why.. ??!! 11) !!..‫شكال االصة صار بدا فتوة من بوطي‬ šakla l-’iṣṣa ṣār bidda fatwe mn Būṭī..!!1 maybe the issue requires an edict (fatwa) from al-Būṭī to get to the bottom of it..!! 12) !!..‫أي من بوطي ازا مو طائفي هالنظام‬ ’ē mn Būṭī iza mu ṭā’ifi ha-n-niẓām yes, we need to ask Būṭī whether this regime is sectarian or not.. !!2 13) ‫ال بس شوبدك بالحكي خيي‬.. la bass šu biddak b-l-ḥakī ḫay.. no, but anyways, what are we talking about here?.. 14) ..‫عم يقاقوا‬ ‘am yqāqū.. they’re all just clucking.. they’re all just talk.. 15) !!..‫عم يقاقوا و ماعم يالقوا‬ ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am ylāqū.. They’re clucking but not achieving anything

94  Hybridity and participation of cities in which these army soldiers are interviewed to show that army officers from all places are Alawites, even in Damascus, as he emphasizes in line 9 with two exclamation marks. The last line contains an entextualization of the old Syrian idiom ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am bylāqū. “The idiom evokes a concrete and easily imageable scene, which is taken as emblematic of the situation which it is used to refer to” (Taylor 2002: 552). The concrete scene is that of clucking hens wandering aimlessly. The sound of clucking hens in Arabic is expressed through the onomatopoeic word qāqa, which happens to contain two qāf sounds, indexically associated with the Alawite government. The “metaphorical entailments” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) are that the government is losing the war and that its language is no longer fearsome, just like the aimless clucking of hens. It should be noted that the idiomatic expressions byqāqū and ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am bylāqū do not ‘belong’ to the Alawite dialect. The idiom, in fact, is used in different Levantine varieties, with different pronunciations, to describe someone who is all talk and no action. In order to understand how it became associated with the Alawite register and therefore how it acquired political meaning, it is necessary to think about the indexical evolution of the qāf. The qāf is a local dialectal feature, a “first-order” indexical (Johnstone et al. 2006) of many coastal varieties (see Behnstedt 2000). It is possible that it became a “second-order indexical”, namely a local form which “become available for social work” (Johnstone et al. 2006: 82), before Asad went to power in 1971. The Alawite composition of the army under French mandate may have contributed to this shift. Under Hafiz al-Asad, when many Alawites relocated to Damascus and other parts of Syria to occupy administrative and political positions and therefore changing their status from a socioeconomically marginalized group to an urban middle-class elite (see Salamandra 2004), the qāf consolidated its “stereotypical” or “third-order indexical” meaning and became the object of “more reflexive identity work” (Johnstone et al. 2006: 78). With the idiomatic expressions byqāqū and ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am bylāqū, Maher entextualized the Alawite register through a symbol. By giving this symbol a written fixation, in a sense, he standardized it, making it available for further reflexive work. The military officers’ pronunciation of the qāf evokes the intimidating voice of the notorious intelligence services and is associated with what Pearlman (2016) called a “politics of fear”, which characterized control through coercive force, particularly under Hafiz al-Asad. Voicing the officers and comparing them to clucking hens is a strategy of “surmounted fear” (Pearlman 2016: 26).3 Since the qāf is also associated with Modern Standard Arabic, mocking it inevitably denigrates elements of Modern Standard Arabic, a tenet of the Ba‘athist policy of Arabization.4

4 The comments The status update triggered 110 comments (see appendix) written by 105 Facebook friends. Most comments were published within fifteen hours after the original status update. When the comments were retrieved and saved on a Word file in February 2016, Facebook indicated that the number of the comments was 137, which means that 27 comments had been deleted between July 2012 and February 2016.5 In the analysis, I refer to the comments through the corresponding

Hybridity and participation 95 number in the appendix. I divided them into two main groups. On the one hand, those that continue the “conversation” with the post author. On the other, commenters who 1) initiate new conversations by not directly addressing the post content 2) initiate new conversations by triggering another commenter’s reply 3) reply to other commenters either individually by mentioning their name or collectively by addressing an unidentified group of people (see De Fina 2016). The majority of comments utilize exclusively written text. Two comments include links to other Facebook pages siding with the Syrian revolution. Very few posts display an aggressive tone. These are those who disagree with ad-dōmari and those who criticize other commenters for offending religions. Most of the other comments are humorous. Two types of interactional dynamics were observed. 1) Most commenters engaged and aligned with or against the post author by continuing his story, creating second stories and other metaphorical scenarios. 2) Less than one fourth of the commenters initiated or participated in new conversations. In order to obtain a closer insight in the type of communication between the commenters and the post author, I returned to De Fina’s (2016) coding system (Figure 5.3). De Fina divided comments into frame foci, namely categories that describe the type of activity the commenter is doing in relation with the main post. I will focus here on three subcategories in particular, namely the storyrealm and the taleworld (Young 1987, cited in De Fina 2016) and second stories (De Fina 2016). Storyrealm relates to the process of narration, whereas taleworld and second stories concern the engagement of the commenters with the story narrated by the animator. Second stories are “narratives (and narrative components) that presented alternative developments to the ones offered by the teller and co-teller and follow ups on them” (490). In accordance with De Fina’s (2016) methodology, I categorized comments according to their main focus. Frame focus of comments

Subfocus

Storyrealm

Comment on participants Comment on tellability Comment on aspects of the activity at hand Meta-comment Comment on the teller as a teller Comment on the co-teller Comment on some other aspect of the story world Comment on the character Comment on action Unrelated comment Comment on a character as a person in the world Loosely related comment Comment on the teller as a person in the world Initiation of second story Comment on the action of the second story

Taleworld Outside world

Second story

Figure 5.3 Frame foci. Source: De Fina (2016: 482), Table 1

96  Hybridity and participation Unlike De Fina’s (2016) findings, in which most comments belonged to the storyrealm, most comments in my data belonged to the categories of storyworld and second stories. This means that commenters engaged with the satirical anecdote contained in the post, building on it or repeating parts of it. Building on Bauman’s (2010) insight that online engagement is about “being seen” and on Miller’s (2008) argument about the phatic character of digital environments, De Fina (2016) interpreted the lack of “sustained dialogues” and the commenters’ engagement with aspects that lie outside the narrated story in relation with the “enhanced reflexivity” afforded by the permanence of written texts (2016: 492). Given the permanence of such texts, she argued, commenters have the tendency to not engage with the content of previous posts but prefer initiating new threads on new topics and discuss aspects that are not relevant to the narration itself. On the contrary, I believe that the political content of Maher’s post and the entextualization of registers through the written fixation of stereotypical indexicals account for the commenters’ higher engagement with the post anecdote and its political implications. In sum, from the analysis of the comments, it emerged that most commenters are engaged in the same topic launched by the post author. However, most commenters do not interact with each other through “sustained dialogues” (De Fina 2016). Nevertheless, they communicate, and their communication is organic. And for communication to be possible, there needs to be a grammar or a mutually agreed set of rules. Where does this grammar come from? And what are the rules of it? I believe that the answer comes from three hybrid places: the double metadiscursive activity (Agha 2005) – playful in Damascene and ominous in the Alawite register – conducted by Maher, the commenters’ patterns of alignment (Agha 2005) with the author’s activities through “repetition” (Tannen 2007) and the commenters’ entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of symbolic “fragments” (Agha 2005) of the Damascene and the Alawite register. This hybridity, enabled by the political metaphor proposed by Maher and by the written fixation of the idiomatic expressions ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am bylāqū, underlies the emergence of different political identities. In the next section, I will illustrate through some example how commenters aligned toward the post and therefore positioned themselves politically by entextualizing the Alawite register, the Damascene vernacular and MSA. I will show how commenters built on ad-dōmari’s metaphor and idiomatic expressions and chose symbols, or fragments, that evoke these registers, embedding them in hybrid contexts.

Aligning with the post The author of comment (3) ‫انتها مفعوال‬ . . . ‫قرد وال قرد وال‬ qird-u-la qird-u-la . . . intaha maf‛ōla ‘qird-u-la’ lost its effect entextualizes the Alawite register through the repetition of the protest slogan qird-ula qird-u-la . . . intaha maf‛ōla, chanted in 2012 anti-Asad demonstrations.6 The

Hybridity and participation 97 form qird-u-la is a creative adaptation of the expression qird-u-lo, modified to rhyme with the word maf‛ōla (‘its effect’). It is indexically related to the expression qird-u-lo, which is a “first-order indexical” (Johnstone et al. 2006), namely a regional feature of coastal dialects used as an interjection, and could be roughly translated as “no way”, “get out” or “c’mon”. Similar to the idiomatic expression byqāqū, qird-u-lo is a stereotype that acquired “third-order indexical” political meaning in association with Asad’s coercive power. The word qird also contains a comical effect, as it means “monkey” in MSA and in dialectal varieties. The slogan qird-u-la qird-u-la . . . intaha maf‛ōla meant that the Syrian government, for which the stereotypical Alawite expression metonymically stands, lost its political and intimidating effect. Similar to the entailment of the idiomatic expression ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am ylāqū contained in the post, it suggests that the Syrian government has lost power. The rhyme, enhanced by the visual repetition of the letter alif (“a”) evokes the nursery rhyme pattern of the post. In other words, the commenter conducts a similar metadiscursive activity (Agha 2005) as Maher, entextualizing the Alawite register through a symbol in a playful context. Commenter (19) ‫ بس وحياة عينك يا دومري بدهون يقاقو ما يالقو‬,‫نحنا منئائي وهنن بقاقو‬ naḥna mn’ā’ī u-hinnen byqāqū, bass u-ḥyāt ‘ēnak ya dōmari biddon yqāqū ma ylāqū We luk and they cluck, but I tell you, Domary, I promise, they can cluck as much as they want but they’ll lose soon repeats the verb yqāqū from the post and puts it in contrast with the word mn’ā’ī, conjugating the verb yqāqū in the first-person plural through the vernacular aspectual marker – m and the plural prefix – n. In addition, s/he replaces the qāf with a hamza, to provide a Damascene phonetic representation. The word mn’ā’ī is creative, hence the creative translation “luk”. It only acquires meaning in contrast with byqāqū. In other words, s/he is creating a new meaning from a stereotypical indexical association, entextualizing both fragments (Agha 2005) of the Alawite and the Damascene registers in order to cue their anti-Asad political stance. Another example of how political identity is cued symbolically through hybridity is given by commenter (25): ‫قائفية‬ qā’ifiye Qāftarianism [pun on qāf sound] The commenter makes a pun combining the two initial letters of the qāf and the final part of the word ṭā’ifiye (“sectarianism”). These are two heavily loaded symbols, the former by virtue of being a “third-order indexical” (Johnstone et al. 2006) of the Alawite register, the latter for its connotation in Syrian political discourse. Through this pun, the author agrees with ad-dōmari about the Alawite composition of the army and discloses an identity as anti-Asad dissident. Similarly, commenter (61), through the expression qaḫī ‘Alī (“oh my brother, Ali”)

98  Hybridity and participation creatively replaces the initial hamza in the word ’aḫī (“my brother”) with a qāf. Additionally, s/he uses the stereotypical Shiite name ‘Alī and marks the use of the qāf in the expression šu biddi qillak (“I wanted to tell you”), followed by the letter qāf repeated four times. Whereas the previous commenters entextualized the Alawite register and the Damascene vernacular, commenter (84) ironically suggests that the officers are using the qāf as an educated person (implying someone who speaks fuṣḥā) would do: ‫انتو مالكن فهمانين شي‬ . . . . ‫كل الي عم يحكو مثقفيييييين‬ ’intu mālkon fahmānīn šī . . . You didn’t get it . . . kill ’yilli ‘am yḥku muṯaqqafīīīīīn all those people talking are ed-u-ca-ted people Through the word muṯaqqafīīīīīn (“ed-u-ca-ted”), the commenter ironically suggests that the army officers interviewed on national television are not pronouncing the qāf by virtue of its indexical association with the Alawite register, but because of its association with Modern Standard Arabic. As such, they are “educated” people. They are simply pronouncing the qāf as a sound of Modern Standard Arabic. Whereas, throughout the comment, the author accurately represents the Syrian vernacular through orthographic and syntactic features, the word muṯaqqafīīīīīn is written with a ṯ and the qāf to reflect and emphasize the MSA pronunciation, hence my decision not to transcripterate it according to the Damascene pronunciation. The elongation of the letter ī highlights the ironic tone with which the author employed this word.

Aligning against the post The following comment (37) entextualized the Damascene vernacular to align against the post. The commenter argues that the army also includes officers that speak other dialectal varieties other than the Alawite register: ‫نشاهلل بتآئي مابتالئي هدول شفتن بس بالميدان العسكري عبيحكي حلبي ماشفتو واللي عم يحكي حوراني‬ ‫؟؟؟ تشوفك حية تاكلك وتخراك‬ . . . ‫مت شفتوواللي عبيحكي حوووومصي ما شفتو‬ nšaḷḷa btā’i u-ma btlā’i hadōl šufton bass bi-l-mīdān l-‘askari ‘abyḥki ḥalabi ma šufto u’yilli ‘am yḥkī ḥōrānī ma šufto u’yilli ‘abyḥki ḥōōōōōōmṣī mā šufto. . .??? Tšūfak ḥaya taklak u-taḫrāk I hope you luck and lose. You saw those, but didn’t you see those in the army who talk with an Aleppo accent? And those who talk with an Hawrani accent?????? And those who talk with a Homsiiiiiiiiiiii accent??????May a snake see you, eat you and shit you out Similar to comment (19) above, this commenter entextualizes the Damascene vernacular by replacing the qāf with a hamza in the post idiomatic expression ‘am

Hybridity and participation 99 yqāqū u-ma ‘am bylāqū. However, s/he uses it to disagree with the post writer. In addition, Homs is a stronghold of anti-Asad dissidence. Through the repetition of the letter ō in the word ḥōōōōōōmṣī, s/he emphasizes the paradox that there are even people from Homs recruited in the army. Finally, an interesting example of how the written fixation of the idiom led the commenters to pay attention to the form in which they crafted their comments is constituted by comments (79) and (80), composed by the same author: ‫انا رأيت جندي مسكين على التلفزيون السوري سني وقال بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم وهومهذب وسلم‬ ‫وانا ما عندي مشكلة بقاقي وبانتخب‬ . . . ‫ !!موكلهم بيقاقو دومري‬. . . . . ‫على والديه ولم يقاقي‬ ‫مسيحي وبحكي كردي بس خلوا الوالدنا وطن نفخر به بال ما يدعوا علينا كلنا اللي بيقاقي واللي‬ !‫بيأي‬ ’ana ra’ēt ğәndī mәskīn ‘ala t-tilvizyōn s-sūrī sәnnī wa-qāl b-ismi l-lāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm wa huwa muhaḏḏab wa-sallam ‘alā wālidayhi wa-lam yuqāqī . . . . .!! mu kullon byqāqū ya dōmari . . . wa ’ana ma ‘andi mәškile byqāqī u-bntaḫib masīḥī u-baḥki kәrdi bass ḫallu la-wlādna waṭan nifḫar bih bala ma yad‘ū ‘alēnā kәlna ’yilli byqāqī u-’yilli by’āyy! I saw a soldier on Syrian TV. He was Sunni and also well mannered. He said “b-ismi l-lāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm” He greeted his parents and he didn’t pronounce the qāf.....!! Not everyone pronounces the letter qāf, Domary. I have no problem pronouncing the qāf, voting for a Christian and speaking Kurdish, but please leave our children a country we can be proud of without dividing us into those who cluck and those who luck In comment (79) above, the author accuses ad-dōmari of dividing (through a written linguistic form) the country between those who byqāqī (“cluck”) and those who by’āyy (“luck”). Throughout the comment, the author mixes the Syrian vernacular and fuṣḥā. Particularly interesting is the expression lam yuqāqī (“he didn’t pronounce the qāf”) in which the fuṣḥā negative particle lam is followed by the verb yuqāqī, a repetition of the verb byqāqū, which Maher, in turn, repeated several times in the status update in order to emphasize its symbolic association with the stereotypical qāf sound. The commenter’s use of the fuṣḥā negative particle may have two explanations. On the one hand, fuṣḥā indexes authority (Bassiouney 2014). By interspersing vernacular forms with fuṣḥā lexical items throughout the comment, the author legitimizes his political position. On the other, the use of this particle allows her/him to maintain the verb yuqāqī in the same form and tense in which it has been employed by the post author, maintaining a pattern of visual and sound repetition. Had he used the vernacular negative particle ma, in fact, he would have had to conjugate the verb yuqāqī in the past tense through the perfect form qāqa. Doing so, he would have lost the symbolic effect characterized by the verb yuqāqī. Moreover, lam yuqāqī contravenes another fuṣḥā rule, according to which the author would have had to elide the ī and replace it with a short vowel i, as the particle lam requires the verb to be inflected in the jussive mood. If s/he had done so, however, it would have looked very different from the verb yqāqī used by the post author, and the result would have been again a loss in symbolic meaning. Lam yuqāqī is, in fact, a hybrid. Its hybrid character derives from the combination

100  Hybridity and participation of a symbol associated with the Alawite register and the fuṣḥā negative particle lam. Lam yuqāqī, however, is neither fuṣḥā nor vernacular, but it could be considered as a case of “interference” (Woolard 1999). This hybrid form contributes to the overall critical character of the comment. The author’s focus on the symbolic meaning of form is confirmed in the next comment. 80) [same person who wrote comment 79] ‫ والرجاء حذف تعليق من يسب الذات اإللهية موقتها يزيد هللا علينا‬. . . . . . ‫بيأأي‬ . . . ‫عفوا‬ !‫بدنا اذا استشهدنا نروح عالجنة موعالنار‬ . . . ‫العذاب‬ ‘afwan . . . by’ā’ī . . . u-r-rağā’ ḥaḏf ta‘līq man yasәbb aḏ-ḏāt al-’ilāhiyya mawaqetha yazīd ’Aḷḷāh ‘alaynā l-‘aḏāb . . . bidna iza stašhadna nrūḥ ‘al-ğanne mu ‘ān-nār! Sorry . . . biy’ā’yy . . . and I also urge the deletion of the comments of those who insult the divinity and its flames, lest God increase our affliction. If we die, we want to go to heaven, not to hell In this comment, the author corrects the spelling of the word by’āyy into by’ā’ī.7 The word by’āyy is not codified; therefore there is no “proper” way to spell it. However, the author corrected herself/himself, apologizing for not having written the word by’ā’ī properly. The “norm” to which the author of the comment refers is the formal shape in which the words byqāqū and byqāqī were written by the author of the status update and by previous commenters, in which the word byqāqū was used symbolically to voice Alawite soldiers. In other words, the commenter built on the repetition of a symbolic form in order cue her/his political identity.

5 Conclusion In this chapter, I analyzed a post and the comments published by Maher on the ad-dōmari page on July 25, 2012, a phase in the Syrian conflict in which there was hope for a downfall of the regime. The post addresses the issue of ṭā’ifiye (“sectarianism”) through a political metaphor in which Maher rhetorically asks why army officers speak using the qāf. In order to describe their action of pronouncing the qāf, a sound stereotypically associated with the Alawite register, he uses the verb byqāqū, an onomatopoeic word that can be translated as “clucking”, and concludes the post with the Levantine idiomatic expression ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am ylāqū to allude that their “clucking” is no longer fearsome now that they are losing the war. The post is characterized by sound and rhythmic repetition, which confers to it a playful and irreverent character, in contrast with the ominous image of the soldiers, or perhaps enhancing the mocking tone of their clucking. Although the indexical association between the word byqāqū and the Alawite register precedes this post, by entextualizing it in this post and by reconfiguring the expression ‘am yqāqū u-ma ‘am ylāqū politically, Maher provided a written fixation for this symbol.

Hybridity and participation 101 I showed how Maher’s metadiscursive activity (Agha 2005) in the post, consisting of the symbolic entextualization of the Alawite register, as well as the codification of a symbol, is productive, inasmuch as it led to further indexical work among the commenters, who carefully built on this now-established form to make their distinct political voices emerge. The decision of how to write their comments was not influenced by one normative system, but it was “polycentrically” (Blommaert 2005) governed by several symbolic constraints. For example, it was shown how a commenter who aligned against the post author did so through a hybrid comment, in which s/he referred to the symbolic meaning of fuṣḥā as well as to the symbolic meaning of the word byqāqū. It is this symbolically socially ordered system of indexical constraints – or “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005) – that allowed the post author and the commenters to make their political identities visible.

Notes 1 Muḥammad Sa‘īd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī was an Islamic scholar who aligned with President Bashar al-Asad during the uprising. 2 The word Būṭī can be read in the Syrian vernacular as bōṭi (“my shoes”), hence the metaphorical translation “my ass”. The line can also be interpreted as “yeah right, my ass the regime’s not sectarian”. 3 Kraidy (2016) discussed the attribution of zoomorphic features to political leaders as a hybrid strategy of “creative insurgency”. 4 I thank Nazir Harb for pointing out this aspect to me in personal communication. 5 On public Facebook pages, comments can be deleted by the page administrator, by the author of the comment or by Facebook itself, when comments are not pursuant to the “Facebook Community Standards”. This can happen following other commenters’ reports. Maher maintained that he did not delete any comments. 6 This is the YouTube video of a 2012 anti-Asad demonstration in which this slogan was chanted. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFpKVE2jufU 7 I thank Manuela E. B. Giolfo for directing my attention to this comment.

6 Hybridity, secular identities and radical Islamic discourse

In the previous chapters, I explored how hybridity underlay the emergence of new political identities on Facebook and how it changed shape before and after the uprising in concomitance with a shift in the broader sociopolitical context. In chapter 5, it emerged that conscious language choices were made by the commenters to the dōmari’s Facebook page in order to position themselves politically toward the Syrian uprising. These choices consisted in the entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of stereotypical parts of registers and varieties through repetition and voicing (Agha 2005; Tannen 2007). In this chapter, I analyze hybridity in the light of a new sociopolitical setting, different from the phase of euphoria that characterized the 2011–2012 historical period. This new sociopolitical context (2012–2015) is marked by the advancement of radical Islamic groups, such as Jabhat an-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam and ISIS (see Lister 2015), and the rise of divergences among the community of dissidents, some of whom began to assume positions in favor of Jabhat an-Nusra.1 I explore how Layla, a female dissident journalist from Damascus, managed to articulate and perform two different aspects of her dissident identity through hybrid linguistic practices on two different platforms, the radio and her personal Facebook page. On the radio, she humorously voices the Islamic leader Zahran Alloush, a combatant who, after fighting against the US troops in Iraq, returned to Syria and was first arrested and then released in 2011 as part of a general amnesty. By mocking the Islamic leader through the entextualization of religious expressions in fuṣḥā, she affirmed her secular identity and rejected Asad’s narrative, according to which his political opponents are Islamic extremists. At the same time, she used her Facebook page to express her political alignment with another Islamic leader, namely Jabhat an-Nusra combatant al-Jolani. Her two positions were criticized by some of her male Facebook friends, who deemed them contradictory. I attempt to explain the way Layla sees her positions consistently with her secular identity and how her critics see them as paradoxical, through Blommaert’s (2005) notion of “synchronization”, introduced in chapter 2 and further developed in chapter 7. This notion, as explained by Blommaert, refers to the way individuals are incapable to comprehend the broader historical dimension of segments of discourse due to their peculiar position in their “experiential present” (136), the personal “here-and-now” (134). As a consequence of

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse  103 this, their message may result coherent, or produce “continuity”, to those situated within the same historical position, or it may result in “discontinuity” with other synchronized voices (Blommaert 2005). Whereas Layla “speaks from” (126) her “experiential present”, characterized by the 2015 sociopolitical context, in which radical Islamic groups are the only force capable to defeat Bashar al-Asad, her critics speak from a different “point in history” (Ibid.), namely the 2011 time and space of the secular resistance, which characterized the initial years of the Syrian uprising. I show how Layla articulates her “synchronized” voice (Blommaert 2005) through language choice (Bassiouney 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014; Eid 2002). The symbolic entextualization of fuṣḥā and of the Syrian vernacular allows her to justify her position, in “discontinuity” (Blommaert 2005) with that of her Facebook friends.

1 Hybridity, language choice and gender In articulating her two apparently paradoxical political positions, Layla interacts predominantly with men. In the radio show, she voices a male Islamic leader to reject Bashar al-Asad’s (also male) delegitimizing narrative. On Facebook, she expresses her alignment with another male Islamic leader and diverges with several male friends on it. In her hybrid practices, Layla intersperses her texts with fuṣḥā. Eid (2002) emphasized the link between the Arabic diglossic code separation and an issue of gender, arguing that diglossia is “a sociolinguistic institution [that] can be said to promote the predominant discourse of linguistic authority which the male establishment has vested in itself” (205). She showed how the “conscious” mixing of vernacular and fuṣḥā operated by a group of Egyptian female writers disrupted the “standard-as-written” equation imbued in and reinforced by male dominance discourses (225). In other words, Eid explained that, instead of focusing on how women asserted their difference through the vernacular, as proposed by previous studies on Arabic and gender in oral contexts, her aim was to approach gender variation “from the perspective of integration, rather than separation” (Ibid.). In a similar vein, Bassiouney (2010) analyzed Egyptian women’s use of Modern Standard Arabic in talk shows, concluding that women exploit the indexes of Modern Standard Arabic to project authority and expertise, thus rejecting previous assumptions that women tend to favor the use of the vernacular. Bassiouney (2012, 2014) further examined code choice and identity, demonstrating that the correlation between code-switching and the indexes of different varieties underlies the process of stance taking and identity formation in public discourse. “When women are in the public sphere, [. . .] especially on the media, they use the opportunity to establish their status and identity, and Modern Standard Arabic is one of the tools used by them to define and clarify their status and identity” (Bassiouney 2012: 134). As affirmed by Blommaert with reference to his notion of complexity, “Thick diacritics such as race, gender, class or ethnicity are not absent, but they are performed in different and sometimes surprising ways and thus in need of a more delicate balancing with a wide range of other, ‘light’ forms of identity” (2017: 6).

104  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse Throughout the analysis, I will put forward the hypothesis that an issue of gender lurks behind Layla’s hybrid practices. In her interaction with men, Layla entextualizes symbolic “fragments” (Agha 2005) of fuṣḥā in order to make her voice emerge. Gender, however, interacts with Layla’s and the other dissidents’ distinct chronotopic political positionings.

2 Data and context Layla is a young female dissident with a strong and energetic temperament who defines herself as an atheist. She joined the Syrian uprising since the very beginning and participated in the initial demonstrations in Damascus in March 2011. She later volunteered as a nurse for the Free Syrian Army hospital in the Eastern Ghouta and was arrested for her subversive activity. Her brother Jihad was also arrested in 2013 and is still in prison. In 2013, she escaped to Amman, Jordan, where she collaborated with the dissident radio Radio Orient and with other Syrian dissidents, including Nawar and Dina. In August 2015, she moved to France, where she currently resides and continues her dissident activity. Layla engaged with a plethora of media platforms and technologies between 2011 and 2017, including Facebook, Radio Orient, soundcloud (a music and podcast streaming platform), Twitter and her mobile phone. She used these to position herself as an anti-Asad dissident and to interact with other dissidents on several topics related to the Syrian conflict, including the role of radical Islamic groups, the role of regional and world powers, the ṭā’ifiye (“sectarianism”) and, more recently, an alleged collusion between the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain and the Syrian government (see chapter 7). In France, she also took part in anti-Asad sit-ins and street performances and uploaded the photos of these performances to her Facebook page. Layla’s Facebook page is a multimodal mosaic. Besides the post updates, through which her friends show alignments by ­clicking like or commenting, she posted links of her radio show episodes ­previously uploaded on soundcloud, as well as videos recorded through her mobile phone. The page is also interesting from a visual standpoint. The profile picture, the wall picture and the photos, drawn from her photo albums and displayed by Facebook on the main page photo section, all narrate different aspects of her dissident identity. Since 2013, she has used a photo or a drawing of her brother Jihad as her profile picture. This picture is intertextually related with a major theme of the Syrian revolution, namely the release of political prisoners. Her most recent wall photos include those of street performances against the chemical attacks purportedly perpetrated by the Asad government and a photo of the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in the suburbs of Damascus, destroyed by the war. In the “photos” section on the left side of the “Timeline” page, one can see pictures of her street performances and sit-ins in France. The three-star flag used by the Syrian revolutionaries appears in many of the photos and is the symbol through which she can be immediately identified as an anti-Asad dissident. The first example analyzed below is drawn from a radio show which Layla ­co-wrote and co-presented with Syrian actress and activist Dina. The biweekly show, hosted by the Amman-based Syrian dissident radio Radio Orient, aired two

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 105 times a week between May and October 2015. In each recorded episode, Layla and Dina discuss different political and historical aspects of the Syrian uprising. Some of the themes are the civil resistance in Syria, the official opposition, religious minorities and the impact of radical Islamic groups. Language choice plays a central role in the show. The Damascene vernacular is the predominant variety. Layla explained that her choice of this variety is motivated by her desire to align with her audience in Syria: What we use [in the show] is a luġa ša‘biye (‘the people’s language’) [. . .]. You can’t address the people in a language similar to that of a political leader. You have to show that you’re not a leader. To do so you need a language that belittles the leaders. Humor is an excellent way to do that. [. . .] Sometimes Dina and I have different opinions on how to write. [. . .] I want to use more mundane language. I try to use a language for the Syrians. My audience is the Syrian people. Layla’s description of her language choice is noteworthy. Whereas, as it will be shown further below, she predominantly entextualizes fuṣḥā in the interaction with her critics, she describes a relationship of “continuity” (Blommaert 2005) with her audience through the use of the Syrian vernacular. The description of the language she uses on the radio as “the people’s language” is based on an indexical association of the vernacular being the authentic language of the people.2 Through the Syrian vernacular index of local authenticity, she projects a secular, dissident identity, in continuity with the identity of dissidents as ‘real’ Syrians that emerged in discourse at the beginning of the 2011 uprising. Additionally, from her statement it emerges that her use of the vernacular is deliberate and not motivated by natural or external social factors, as alluded to in previous studies on gender variation in Arabic cited in Bassiouney (2010) and Eid (2002). The radio show, an exclusively oral environment, is structured in the form of a dialogue between Dina and Layla.

3 Example 1, Zahran Alloush, the guardian of Ghouta and its surroundings The radio show In this example, I analyze three excerpts of a radio show episode aired on June 28, 2015, in which Layla and Dina discuss the controversial figure of Syrian Islamist Zahran Alloush, the leader of the al-Qaeda–affiliated Salafi group, Jaysh al-Islam. They use language symbolically to reject the radical Islamic identity assigned to them and to all dissidents by Bashar al-Asad and to suggest that Zahran Alloush is in fact a pawn, used by the Syrian government to corroborate the narrative that his political opponents are radical extremists. Layla and Dina accomplish this by including audio segments of Zahran Alloush and by comparing his highly formal language to the Syrian President’s use of fuṣḥā. Additionally, they affirm their secular identity by entextualizing religious expressions through which they mimic the Islamic leader.

106  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse By 2015, the region of Eastern Ghouta, northeast of Damascus, had been under the control of radical Islamic groups and under the siege of the Syrian government for three years. When the Iraq war broke out in 2003, the Syrian government let radical Islamic fighters pass through Syria and set up training camps for jihadis to fight against the US troops in Iraq (Abouzeid 2018; Lister 2015). This allowed to “identify and rid the Syrian regime of potential threats from homegrown Islamists, while at the same time keeping the Americans busy in Iraq” (Abouzeid 2018: 26). When the Syrian conflict started, these radicalized traveling combatants, also known as muhāğirīn, inverted the route and continued their Jihadi fight in Syria (Lister 2015).3 One of the muhāğirīn is Zahran Alloush, a Syrian Islamist leader who studied šarī‘a (“Islamic Law”) at the University of Damascus and in Medina, the second holiest city in Saudi Arabia, where the Prophet Muhammad completed his pilgrimage. In 2009, he was arrested by the Syrian government for his Salafi subversive activities and was released in May 2011, as part of a general amnesty granted to all political prisoners by President Bashar al-Asad (Lister 2015). Fuṣḥā, and particularly Quranic Arabic expressions, have been used symbolically by these fighters to project their Islamic identity. A young Syrian man I encountered during my fieldwork in Amman told me an anecdote, according to which one of his friends spent a period of time in an al-Qaeda training camp in the countryside of Raqqa. When he returned back home, he was struck by his friend’s use of fuṣḥā and Quranic Arabic expressions, used even in informal conversation. I will show how Layla also uses fuṣḥā symbolically to subvert Asad’s narrative outlined above. At the beginning of the episode, Layla and Dina ridicule the leader by playing with the meaning of his first name, Zahran, which can be translated as “splendid” or “radiant”. It derives from the word zahra (“flower”) and shares the root with the verb izdahara (“to blossom”, “to thrive”). All these meanings are played with in the initial episode lines:

Excerpt 1 1) Dina: 2) Layla: 3) Dina: 4) Dina:

5) Layla:

halla’ bidna naḥki l-yōm ‘an mawḍū‘ ḥāmīn [not clear]. zahrān ‘allūš today we would like to discuss a heated topic, Zahran Alloush Uff Wow ḥāmī l-ġūṭa u-ḍawāḥīha The guardian of Ghouta and its surroundings. l-ġūṭa, ’yilli zahharet b-’uğūdu, ya‘nī ’azdī, naḥna halla’ lēla fitna bi-ṣ-ṣayf u-ṣ-ṣayf bi-l-ġūṭa zahhar, u-mā-btzahhir il-ġūṭa. . . The Ghouta, which thrived with his presence, I mean, Layla we just entered in the summer, and the Ghouta in the summer is in bloom, and the Ghouta does not blossom/thrive bala zahrān Without Zahran

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 107 In the segment above, Layla and Dina introduce the role of the Islamic fighter Zahran Alloush in the Ghouta region. They play with the meaning of his first name as well as with the literal and the figurative meaning of the word zahara (“to blossom”, “to thrive”). The former, “to blossom”, is referred to the natural environment of the Ghouta region. The latter, “to thrive”, ironically and figuratively refers to how the region “thrived” under Alloush’s control. This introduction is followed by a short audio segment (excerpt 2) featuring the children’s song zahratī yā zahratī (“oh my flower”; “oh my splendid”). The word zahratī (“oh my flower”) repeated in the refrain evokes Alloush’s first name, Zahran. The choice of including this children’s song emphasizes the playful and irreverent tone with which Layla and Dina have begun discussing Zahran Alloush and his religious educational background in Saudi Arabia. The song is followed by a humorous exchange between Layla and Dina about Zahran Alloush’s religious education in the city of Medina, also referred to as al-madīna l-munawwara (“the enlightened city”), in which they rhetorically ask each other the question “where and what did Zahran Alloush study?” The discussion about his educational background in Saudi Arabia indirectly calls into question Alloush’s identity as a ‘real’ Syrian. The brief exchange between Layla and Dina is followed by an audio segment of the Islamic leader extolling the virtues and the primacy of the Arabic language. The fuṣḥā register used by the Zahran Alloush is compared ironically by Dina to the linguistic register used by Bashar al-Asad. Zahran Alloush’s segment in fuṣḥā is bolded.

Excerpt 2 1) Dina:

‘ala sīrati l-madīna al-munawwara iš-šēḫ zahrān wēn daras? speaking of the enlightened city of Medina, where did shaykh Zahran study? 2) Layla: b-ğam‘at al-madīna l-munawwara bi-s-sa‘ūdiye. at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia šu daras? 3)  Dina: what did he study? 4)  Layla: šu biddu ydrus ya‘nī? ’akīd mū . . . what do you think he studied? Of course not . . . 5) Dina: iš-šēḫ zahrān daras . . . ya‘ni šu daras? shaykh Zahran studied . . . what did he study? 6)  Layla: šarī‘a! Islamic Law! [duh!] 7) Dina: ya‘ni zalame dāris therefore, he’s an educated man! 8) Zahran Audio segment: Alloush: ’uḥibb ’an u‘āriğ ‘alā al-mas’ala ’ann al-luġa l-‘arabiyya yā aḫwānī bi-ḏāt ’awalan hiya ’ummu l-luġāt. Ṯāniyan hiya ḫulāṣat taṭawwur luġāt ’ahl al-’arḍ w-a‘ẓam luġa hiya al-luġa l-‘arabiyya wa-lā yūğad luġa mitl al-luġa l-‘arabiyya [. . .] . . .

108  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse

 9) Layla: 10) Dina: 11) Layla: 12) Dina:

I would like to turn to the fact that the Arabic language, my brothers, is first and foremost the mother of all tongues. Secondly it is the essence of the development of all world languages. The most magnificent language is the Arabic language, and there’s no other language like Arabic [. . .] . . . šu huwe dāris šarī‘a walla ’adab? what did he study, Islamic law or literature? lā, halla’ ’yilli bydrus šarī‘a bydrus ’adab bass ’ana ḥāsse ka-’anno well, those who study Islamic law study literature, but I feel as if ah ya‘ni hinnen ma byta‘āraḍu oh ok, they are not in contradiction ka-’anno sam‘āne hal-luġa min ḥada tāni ya lēla. Bashar al-Asad ma kān yḥki ktīr bi-l-luġa al-‘arabiyya? I feel as if I heard this language from someone else, Layla. Wasn’t Bashar al-Asad using fuṣḥā a lot?

In excerpt 2, the humorous exchange between Layla and Dina in the ­Damascus vernacular, in which they rhetorically ask each other about the educational background of Zahran Alloush, is intermitted by an audio segment of Zahran Alloush who, in fuṣḥā, argues for the primacy of Arabic over all other languages.4 In line (9), Layla humorously asks why Zahran Alloush, whose education is in Islamic law, would go on about a linguistic issue that rather belongs to other disciplines, like literature. Her question is answered by Dina in line (10), who claims that Islamic scholars are also literature scholars. In fact, the two disciplines of Islamic law and literature heavily rely on the symbolic role of fuṣḥā. The former is concerned with the association of fuṣḥā with religious texts. Not only is fuṣḥā the language in which the Qur’ān was revealed, but it is also the language that symbolically unifies the Islamic community, or ’umma. The latter is concerned with fuṣḥā as the language of literature. It is this variety that was chosen by Arab nationalists as the unifying language of the al-waṭan al-‘arabyy (“the Arab nation”) and has been the backbone of the Baath party policy of Arabization. Fuṣḥā, in other words, entails a religious and an ethnic identity component, which, in Layla’s words, are not in contradiction, meaning that the symbolic use of fuṣḥā by the Islamists and by the Ba‘ath party are two sides of the same coin. This is reiterated in line (12), in which Dina ironically hints at the fact that she heard someone else use fuṣḥā all the time, namely Bashar al-Asad. In sum, through this humorous exchange of rhetorical questions and answers, Layla and Dina allude to a collaboration between Bashar al-Asad and the radical Islamists by emphasizing their shared symbolic use of fuṣḥā. At the beginning of excerpt 3 below, Layla and Dina engage with Bashar alAsad’s narrative that March 2011 demonstrators were mundassūn (“infiltrators”) guided by sectarian and seditious intents and ironically subvert it, explaining that radical Islamists, like Zahran Alloush, were in prison at that time. Highly formal vocalized fuṣḥā is underlined, and the Quranic expressions are bolded.

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 109

Excerpt 3 1 Layla:

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3 4

5 6

il-muhimm ’innu šēḫ Zahran kān ma‘ s-sawra mn ’awwal yōm most importantly, Shaykh Zahran sided with the revolution since day one Dina: lak šu ’awwal yōm huwe kān bi-s-sğūn lamma ballašet әs-sawra, šu bakī Layla?! wait, what do you mean since day one, he was in prison when the revolution started, what’s the matter with you, Layla?! Layla: ṣaḥ ṣaḥ bass huwe /al-ḥamdulillāh/ ṭila‘ right, right, praise be to God, he got out! right, right, thank God, he got out! Zahran Alloush: Audio segment: ṯumma inṭalaqtu ba‘da l-ḫurūği min as-siğn ’ilā l-‘amali al-ğihādyy al-‘askaryy ’as’ālu -ḷḷāh tabāraka wa-ta‘ālā ’an yataqabbaluhu minnā After leaving prison I started the Jihadi and military work, may God the Blessed and the Sublime accept it Layla: wa-na‘ma bi-l-llāh ya ’aḫī by the grace of God, my brother! Dina: wa-na‘ma bi-l-llāh ‘an ğadd by the grace of God, indeed!

In the first three lines of excerpt 3, Layla and Dina use the Damascene vernacular, consistently with the main linguistic choice adopted throughout the program, to ironize about the fact that Zahran Alloush was in prison when the revolution started and was therefore not involved in the March 2011 demonstrations. In line 3, Layla makes brief pauses before and after the expression al-ḥamdulillāh (“praise be to Allah”) to emphasize that the term is used ironically. This term is a Quranic expression that can be found, for example, at the beginning of the second verse of the first Quranic sūra (“chapter”). However, it is also commonly used as a formula in daily conversation to mean “thankfully”. By using it ironically in this context, Layla, on the one hand, disapproves of the Islamic leader’s release from prison and implicitly alludes that it is Bashar al-Asad himself who released him, thus subverting his narrative that the Syrian uprising was stirred by Islamic leaders from the beginning. Line 4 is an audio segment in which Zahran Alloush, in a very formal, fully vocalized variety of Arabic, narrates that he resumed his Jihadi activity after being released from prison. The segment contains the Quranic invocation ’as’ālu -ḷḷāh tabāraka wa-ta‘ālā (“may God the Blessed and the Sublime accept it”), through which he further emphasizes his Islamic identity. In line 5, Layla once again voices him through the religious expression wa-na‘ma bi-l-llāh (“by

110  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse the grace of God”), followed by the expression ya ’aḫī (“my brother”), used ironically and repeated by Dina in the next line. By “voicing” the Islamic leader through a religious expression, Layla temporarily “borrows” his identity (Tannen 2010), assuming features associated with Islamist discourse.5 In so doing, she mocks this register and the Islamic leader, thus positioning herself as a secular dissident. In the excerpts above, I showed how Dina and Layla performed a secular, anti-Asad identity through humor, voicing (Tannen 2007) and code alternation (Auer 1995, 2005; Georgakopoulou 2011). Through these strategies and the Syrian vernacular, Layla positioned herself as a ʻreal’ Syrian, unlike the Islamic leaders and Bashar al-Asad. Interestingly, however, she does not quote Quranic phrases but uses expressions that are also found in conversation and stereotypically associated with Islamic discourse. In other words, instead of entextualizing a register, she alludes to it in a way that is “enough” (Blommaert and Varis 2015) to meet her discursive goals. Through the entextualization of these forms, she shows assertiveness (Bassiouney 2010), demonstrating that she can stand against a powerful leader who uses Quranic Arabic to legitimize his religious and political authority. Instead of switching from one identity to the other, Layla remains firmly in the position where she is, making her secular voice stand out even more through, or perhaps comparing it with a little touch of incongruous dissonance (Agha 2005). In another episode of her radio show, Layla used “constructed dialogue” (Tannen 2007) to articulate another voice: One of my friends wrote on Facebook: Between the Islamic groups and the regime, we side with the Islamic groups. And between the Islamic groups and the civil, secular dissidents, we side with the civil, secular dissidents. However, should the Islamic groups replace the regime, that could work, because our strategic goal is to get rid of the Assad regime. Whereas the secular position outlined through the radio show is “synchronized” (Blommaert 2005) within the 2011–2012 dimension of the Syrian uprising, her other position is embedded in a complex sociopolitical context, characterized by the advancement of several radical Islamic groups competing for territory against each other and against the Syrian government. In the following example, drawn from Layla’s personal Facebook page, I show how this second position is “synchronized” (Blommaert 2005) with the 2015 dimension of the conflict. I will argue that this position is in “discontinuity” with the 2011 historical dimension in which her male Facebook friends are situated and from which they are speaking. Through a symbolic use of the Syrian vernacular, Layla establishes a “continuity” between the goals of the Syrian uprising and her 2015 “synchronized” position. At the same time, I will show how she uses fuṣḥā in situations of “discontinuity” to defend her position from her friends’ criticism and to distance herself from statements that are at odds with her values and those of the civic resistance.

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 111

4 Facebook post 1, May 28, 2015 Layla wrote the following post on her personal Facebook page in May 2015, after the pan-Arab satellite television Al Jazeera broadcast an interview with Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the leader of Jabhat an-Nusra (The Nusra Front), a Salafist Islamic group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, which fought against the Asad regime and other Islamic groups for the control of Syrian territory.6 In 2015, the Nusra Front was one of the rebel groups that gained significant victories against the Asad regime. In the post, Layla outlines four arguments in support of her alignment with al-Jolani. All the arguments are centered around the perceived “Syrianness” of the Islamic group and its leader. The Syrian specificity of an-Nusra had been emphasized earlier on by its leader al-Jolani, who rebuked a fusion of al-Qaeda with ISIS in 2013 (cf. Lister 2015).

Figure 6.1 Screenshot of Layla’s May 28, 2015 post

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..‫الجوالني كان البس اللبس التقليدي ألي بلدة ريفية سورية‬ al-ğūlānī kān lābis al-labs at-ta’līdi li-’ay balde rifiye sūriye.. Al-Jolani was wearing the traditional clothing typical of any Syrian country town.. (‫وما كان البس خواتم عقيق شائعة االنتشار بأصابع الشيوخ و(األمراء‬ wa-ma kān lābis ḫawātim ‘a’ī’ šā’i‘et al-intišār bi-’aṣābi‘ iš-šuyyūḫ u-(l-’umra) he wasn’t wearing agate rings, which usually shine on the fingers of Shaykhs and “princes” .‫جبهة النصرة سمعتها منيحة بأماكن تواجدها (عدا درعا) وخاصة بظل النزاع الدائم بين الفصائل‬ ğabhet an-nuṣra sam‘ēta mnīḥa bi-’amākin tuwāğidha (‘ada dara‘ā) wa ḫaṣṣatan bi-ẓill in-nizā‘ ad-dā’im bēn al-faṣā’il the Nusra Front has a good reputation in the places which encountered it (except for Daraa), particularly in light of the endless struggle among the factions

112  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 4

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‫ وهي مشكلة‬.‫ وال مرة تسجلت حالة خالف على تقاسم غنائم‬..‫كان إلها الفضل بتحرير كتير مناطق‬ kān ’ila l-faḍl bi-taḥrīr ktīr manāṭi’.. wa-la-marra tasağğalet ḥālet ḫilāf ‘ala taqāsum ġanā’im. U-hiye mškile it had the merit of liberating many areas.. and it never reported a dispute over the booty. This is a big problem ‫بسبب عدم االتفاق على‬ . . . ‫ وفي كتير معارك توقفت أو ما بلشت‬..‫كبيرة بتعاني منها كل الفصائل‬ kbīre bta‘āni minna kill al-faṣā’il.. u-fi ktīr ma‘ārik twa’’afet ’aw ma ballašet . . . bi-sabab ‘adam al-ittifā’ ‘ala of which all factions suffer.. in fact it interrupted or did not begin many battles . . . due to the lack of agreement .‫موضوع الغنائم‬ mawḍū‘ l-ġanā’im over the issue of the booty ..‫ إما بعمليات استشهادية أو نوعية‬..‫شباب النصرة غالبا ً هنن يلي بيفتتحوا المعارك‬ šabāb in-nuṣra ġāliban hinnen ’yilli byftatḥu l-ma‘ārik.. ’imma bi-‘amaliyāt istišhādiye ’aw nawa‘iye.. the Nusra guys are those who most often start the battles.. either through martyrdom or exemplary operations.. ..‫ قادة المجموعات بجبهة النصرة كلهن سوريين‬:‫حسب علمي‬ ḥasab ‘ilmī: qādet al-mağmū‘āt bi-ğabhet in-nuṣra kullon suriyīn.. to my knowledge, the Nusra Front group leaders are all Syrians .‫ أنا ضد أي إيديولوجيا بعيدة عن الوطنية‬..ً‫أخيرا‬ ’aḫīran.. ’ana ḍidd ’ay ’idyūlūĝyā ba‘īde ‘an il-waṭaniye and finally.. I’m against any ideology that is far from nationalism

In this post, Layla “resemiotized” (Iedema 2003; Leppänen et al. 2014) the television interview with al-Jolani. This resemiotization could be understood as a multimodal strategy described by Kress (2010: 125) as “transduction”, namely “a full recasting of what that image means, though in a spoken ‘story’ or recount”. Through this resemiotization, she establishes a link between the Syrianness of alJolani and her position. She starts by explaining how the leader’s clothing during the Al Jazeera interview resembles the traditional Syrian countryside one. Secondly, she argues that the Nusra front has a good reputation in the villages where they fought. They liberated many areas and never argued over the booty. Thirdly, she affirms that its leaders are all Syrian. And finally she states her positioning against all ideologies other than the waṭaniye, a term used to refer to local Syrian nationalism, as opposed to the pan-Arab ideology, often referred to as qawmiye. In this context, she also uses the word waṭaniye to affirm the Syrian identity of Nusra fighters, as opposed to the presence of foreign fighters in other factions. The post is characterized by the presence of several Syrian lexical and syntactic features, such as the words mnīḥa (“good”, line 3) and the verb bta‘āni (“suffer”, line 5), preceded by the vernacular aspectual particle – b. Through these features, Layla conferred the text an overall vernacular character. The choice of the vernacular is motivated by its connection with the index of local Syrian authenticity, and it is in harmony with Layla’s argument that al-Jolani is a

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse  113 ‘real’ Syrian. The Syrian vernacular features, however, are embedded in a hybrid environment, also surrounded by bivalent and fuṣḥā forms, such as the sentence ’imma bi-‘amaliyāt istišhādiye ’aw nawa‘iye (“either through martyrdom or exemplary operations”) (line 7). The vernacular also has a way to indicate the “either. . . . or”, which is ya . . .  ya. Why is Layla expressing this sentence in fuṣḥā? I suggest that the sentence either through martyrdom or exemplary operations is strident. It undermines the “continuity” between the Syrian vernacular and the values of the civic resistance, which she has not abandoned. Expressing this sentence in fuṣḥā allows her to distance herself from it. In other words, whereas the Syrian vernacular and fuṣḥā, in the radio excerpts above, were used symbolically by Layla to index simultaneous multiple identities (Woolard 1999), that of the secular resistance on the one hand and the religious/ethnic component on the other, here fuṣḥā simply indicates a change of footing (Goffman 1981). Given the hybrid character of this text and the nonsymbolic function of the entextualized fuṣḥā and bivalent expressions, I decided to transcripterate these, including the bivalent (Mejdell 2014) forms, in Layla’s Damascene vernacular. Through the vernacular, Layla additionally reinforces a link between the Syrianness of al-Jolani and that of 2011 anti-Asad resistance. Like dissidents, who were the ‘real’ Syrians standing against Asad, in her view, al-Jolani is also a ‘real’ Syrian, as he is succeeding in what secular dissidents and the Free Syrian Army failed in 2011–2012. This equation is the expression of Layla’s 2015 “synchronized” voice and does not travel (Blommaert 2005) well among some of her male Syrian Facebook friends, who, from a 2011–2012 historical dimension, accuse Layla of having betrayed the principles of the revolution. In response, I show how Layla entextualizes fuṣḥā symbolically in order to articulate the peculiar position where she is speaking from (Blommaert 2005). One of her male commenters provokes Layla by repeating the last statement of the Facebook status update, namely “I’m against any ideology that is far from nationalism”:

‫وهل النصرة من دون أيديولوجيا وهل هي وطنية؟؟؟؟‬ Figure 6.2 Comment 1 to Layla’s May 25, 2015, post

wa-hal an-nuṣra min dūn ’idyūlūĝiyyā wa-hal hiya waṭaniyya ???? is Nusra free of ideology and is it for state nationalism ????

This commenter emphasizes what he perceives to be a paradoxical position through the repetition of four question marks, used here to cue sarcasm.7 In fact, the use of the word waṭaniye in her status update is ambiguous. Layla uses it to frame a post in which she affirms the Syrian authenticity of the an-Nusra. However, the fact

114  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse that she is not speaking within the same “synchronized” voice of the Nusra front, but is perhaps simply entextualizing it, is not transparent to her followers. Layla replied to what she perceived as a threatening comment accusing him of treason and of being involved in the arrest of her brother Jihad.

Figure 6.3 Layla’s reply to comment 1

waḷḷāhi ya [name of the commenter] ’inte ’yilli ‘alēk ’išārāt istifhām ktīīīīīre.. u-ḫaṣṣatan ba‘d ḫurūğak mn is-sәğn u-t-tālī l-i‘ti’ālāt u-minhum Ğihād.. wa-lamyattahimak ’aḥad bi-zikr ’asmā’ ’aw ma‘lūmāt.. li-ḏalik iḥfaẓ lisānak By God, [name of the commenter], you’re the one with maaaaany question marks.. particularly after you left prison and the all the arrests that ensued including Jihad’s.. no one accused you of making names or leaking information.. therefore watch your tongue

Layla starts the comment through the interjection waḷḷāhi (“By God”), used in this context to express annoyance. She continues attacking the commenter with a sarcastic tone, exacerbated by the repetition of the vowel ī in the word ktīīīīīre (“maaaany”), represented in the vernacular through the letter t instead of the interdental ṯ. The first part of the sentence, characterized by the presence of several vernacular features, is suddenly followed by the sentence wa-lam-yattahimak ’aḥad bi-zikr ’asmā’ ’aw ma‘lūmāt (“no one accused you”), in fuṣḥā. Unlike the entextualization of fuṣḥā in the status update, which occurred in a text where Layla’s voice was in “continuity” al-Jolani’s voice, fuṣḥā here is symbolically used here to mark “discontinuity” (Blommaert 2005) between hers and the commenter’s voice. Through fuṣḥā, Layla adopts an authoritative stance (Bassiouney 2014), which amplifies her accusatory tone toward the male commenter. In other words, if in the Facebook status update Layla used fuṣḥā to mitigate an uncomfortable statement and assume a defensive stance, here it amplifies the comment’s aggressive tone. In the following example, another male commenter aligns against Layla, arguing that in the city of Saraqib, under an-Nusra’s control, there are activists who have been arrested. He further claims that her positioning is at odds with the initial values of the Syrian revolution, namely dignity and freedom from oppression.

Figure 6.4 Comment 2 to Layla’s May 25, 2015 post

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 115 lēla bass tazkuri ’innu sarāqib bi-yad in-nuṣra u-šabāb al-‘amal al-madani u-lyasāri mu‘ta’ilīn ‘andon u-fī-taḍī’ istibdādi ‘ala kull nāšiṭī l-manāṭiq ’yilli taḥt sayṭarton. Bi-rā’i nḫalli l-bawṣala ‘ala sәmt as-sawra l-’asāsi: al-ḥurriyya ’ay al-qaḍā’ ‘alā l-istibdād ’ay stibdād, wa-l karāma ’ay ‘adam ’ihānat ’aḥad ’aw al-ḥaṭṭ min ša’nih. Hēk ṣaff as-sawra mu l-ğinsiye wa-la s-sum‘a Layla, just remember that Saraqib is in the hands of al-Nusra and the young civil and leftist workers are detained by them, and there is a tyranny-like oppression on all the activists of the areas under their control. In my opinion, we should orient toward the main theme of the revolution: freedom, as in eradicating tyranny, any [form of] tyranny, and dignity, as in refraining from insulting someone or from disparaging them. That [should be] the defining line of the revolution, not nationality or reputation.

In Figure 6.4, her Facebook friend aligns against Layla, emphasizing that the position she articulated in her status update is not that of the initial Syrian uprising. Unlike the interaction with the commenter of Figure 6.3, characterized by “discontinuity”, commenter 6.4 produces a text that Layla accesses in “continuity” with her identity as a secular dissident.

Figure 6.5 Layla’s reply to comment 2

[Name of the commenter].. iš-šī ’yilli katabto lahu ʿilāqa b-šaġaltēn: al-ʾūla.. al-’išāra ’innu l-ǧabha ʿam yṣīr ’ila qāʿide šaʿbiye ḥa’ī’iye la-ʾinnu sulukha l-ʿāmm ǧayyid mʿa n-nās.. It-tānye: ’ana bt‘āraḍ ma‘ha bi-šakl ad-dawle l-qādim.. bass ma bt‘āriḍ ma‘ha bi-ṭarī’et muḥārabatha li-n-niẓām u-’wēta u-’әdrēta ‘alā ḥasm al-ma‘ārik li-ṣāliḥ as-suwwār wa-hiya minhum.. wa-m‘aẓẓam ’afrādiha suriyīn. ’ammā sulūkuha tiğāh an-nāšiṭīn fa-huwa laysat al-waḥīda bi-hazā s-sulūk.. wa-ṭab‘an hād la ya‘nī ’inni ‘am barrir.. [Name of the commenter], the thing I wrote is related to two things: first, there’s evidence that al-Jabha [Nusra] is becoming increasingly popular because of their overall positive interaction with the people.. Second, I disagree with it on the form of the future country.. But I don’t disagree with it in the way it fights against the regime and its strength and ability to determine the

116  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse outcome of the battles in favor of the revolutionaries, and it is one of them. On top of that, most of its members are Syrian. As for its behavior toward the activists, it is not the only one with this behavior.. This is of course does not mean that I am justifying..

Layla’s reply is characterized by vernacular syntax, lexicon and orthography, and it is interspersed with bivalent forms. One particular sentence in fuṣḥā is worth noting, namely ’ammā sulūkuha tiğāh an-nāšiṭīn fa-huwa laysat al-waḥīda bi-hazā as-sulūk (“as for its behavior toward the activists, it is not the only one with this behavior..”). The activists Layla is referring to are anti-Asad secular dissidents who aminated the initial spirit of the revolution and with whom she identifies. The effect generated by the entextualization of this fuṣḥā fragment is very different from the one discussed in Figure 6.3 and more similar to the sentence analyzed in Figure 6.1, in which, through fuṣḥā, Layla distanced herself from a fact which was not in “continuity” with her secular voice.

5 May 28, 2015, post 2 On the very same day, Layla posted another status update in which she reiterated her alignment with the Nusra Front. Interestingly, this status update is (almost) entirely in fuṣḥā:

Post 2

Figure 6.6 Layla’s May 28, 2015 post

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 117 ‘iddet šaġlāt ḥabbe ’iḥkīon ‘āl-‘āmm li-ğamī‘ l-’aṣdiqā‘ l-wāqi‘yīn wa-l-iftirāḍiyīn: ’awalan: ğabhet in-nuṣra bi-rā’i ’aktar tamāsukan min ’ay faṣīl ’ākhar mawğūd ‘alā l-’arḍ as-sūriye wa-yu‘ādilha fī zalik l-ğabha l-ğanūbiye fi dara‘ā. tānyan: al-fikr allaḏi taḥmiluhu n-nuṣra lam wa-lan yatawāfaq ma‘ fikrī l-ḫāṣ al-ḥālim bi-binā’ dawle madaniye li-ğamī‘ s-sūriyīn, wa-lakinna s-sāḥa l-’ān li-l-’islāmiyīn.. wa-llazi yurīd ’an yarfuḍ haḏihi l-ḥaqīqa fa-tafkīruhu qāṣir wa-munfaṣil ‘an al-wāqi‘.. wa-’anā ’arā ’anna sulūk al-ğabha ’aqall salbiyyatan min bā’ī l-faṣā’il al-’islāmiye.. ‘alā-l-’aqall bi-ṭarī’et at-ta‘āṭī ma‘ l-madaniyīn wa-mumtalākātihim wa-ḥayātihim il-yawmiye. talitan, wa-hya ’ilā ’ašḫāṣ muḥaddadīn: ittihāmukum lī bi-’annī ġayyart mawqifī ba‘da ‘amali fi orient.. yusammā danā’a wa-qillet ḥīla fī n-niqāš wa-maḥdūdiyet tafkīr.. wa-tattabi‘ūn ’uslūb an-niẓām b-“t-taham al-ğāhize.” ’Aḫīran ’anā lastu Ğihād.. wa-lā ’anwī ’an ’akūn nusḫa ‘anhu. li-zalik lā tattabi‘ū ma‘ī hāza l-’uslūb al-’abawyy l-muqīt wa-šukran.8 There are a few things I’d like to tell publicly to all the friends, both the real and the purported ones. First, the Nusra Front is, in my opinion, the most solid faction on Syrian soil at the moment; the southern Front in Daraa is equally strong. ­Secondly, what Nusra claims has not and will not reflect my personal ­thinking and aspiration for the establishment of a secular country for all ­Syrians. ­However, the ball is in the Islamists’ court now. And those who refute this truth have limited thinking, detached from reality. I think that the behavior of an-Nusra is less negative than the other Islamic factions.. at least the way they treat the civilian population, their properties and their daily life. Third, and this is directed to specific people, your accusations that I changed my mind after I started working for [radio] Orient are vile and denote lack of argumentative skills and limited thinking.. you’re perpetuating the same type of “ready-made insinuations” the regime makes. Finally, I’m not Jihad, and I do not intend to be his copy. Therefore, don’t continue treating me with these disgusting paternalistic manners.

In the first line, Layla addresses the friends who previously criticized her for her positioning. Starting in the vernacular (‘iddet šaġlāt ḥabbe ’iḥkīon, “There are a few things I’d like to tell publicly”), she finishes the sentence with the bivalent words li-ğamī‘ l-’aṣdiqā‘ l-wāqi‘yīn wa-l-iftirāḍiyīn: (“to all the friends, both the real and the purported ones”) in order to display a sarcastic tone.9 The rest of the status update is in fuṣḥā. It is noteworthy to observe the presence of the tanwīn al-fatḥ (“nunation”) diacritics indicating final vocalization on top of the word salbiyyatan (“negative”), as vocalization is not usually marked in Modern Standard Arabic texts, such as newspapers and books. Interestingly, however, she departs from fuṣḥā in several other instances. Whereas the vernacular spelling in the word tānyan (“secondly”) could be considered as a typo, in the same line she uses the expression lam wa-lan yatawāfaq (“has not reflect and will not reflect”). The fuṣḥā negation particles lam and lan preceding the verb yatawāfaq inflect the verb respectively in the jussive and in the accusative. As such, according to the rules of fuṣḥā, they cannot

118  Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse precede the same verb, which needs to be reiterated with the appropriate inflection, as in lam yatawāfaq wa-lan yatawāfaqa.10 My decision to not conjugate the English verb “reflect” in the past tense emphasizes this incongruence. Moreover, the particle ’anna (“that”) lacks the šadda (a sign in Arabic that indicates the doubling of a consonant) on top of that final letter, despite the fact that the šadda is accurately marked in other words in the text. Finally, in fuṣḥā, the particle lastu, which negates a nominal sentence, inflects the predicate in the accusative. Therefore, ’anā lastu Ğihād (“I am not Jihad”), according to the rules of fuṣḥā, should have been written ’anā lastu Ğihādan.11 Layla’s choice to emphasize some grammatical features orthographically and her departures from fuṣḥā in other instances are interesting because they shed light on Layla’s use of fuṣḥā as a productive symbolic resource. This resource helps her convey an authoritative stance (Bassiouney 2014). This stance allows to justify a pragmatic position that is in contrast with her 2011 secular voice, but which she sees as inevitable given the new sociopolitical context.

6 Conclusion In this chapter, I analyzed hybridity through the multimedia practices of Layla, a secular dissident who in 2015 aligned with a radical Islamic group that was obtaining significant victories over the official Syrian army. I analyzed these practices in the light of Blommaert’s (2005) notion of “synchronization”. I argued that, whereas Layla’s voice was “synchronized” with the 2015 sociopolitical context, through linguistic hybridity, she attempted to reconciliate her “experiential present” (Blommaert 2005: 126) voice with her secular identity. I analyzed Layla’s linguistic choices in the light of Eid’s (2002) and Bassiouney’s (2010, 2012) argument that women mix and exploit the indexes of fuṣḥā and the vernacular in order to affirm their identities. It was shown how Layla used fuṣḥā and the Syrian vernacular symbolically on her radio and Facebook practices in order to articulate her voice in a changed sociopolitical context, characterized by the advancement of radical Islamic groups, which appeared to be the only military forces capable to defeat the Asad government. She used the Syrian vernacular on the radio in order to connect with the Syrian people and to narrate the 2011 civil resistance. At the same time, she entextualized fuṣḥā symbolically in order to affirm the secular character of the resistance and reject Bashar al-Asad’s delegitimization of the uprising as an Islamic insurgency. Whereas, on the radio, Layla’s voice was “synchronized” with that of the 2011–2012 uprising, on her Facebook page she articulated a different voice, embedded in the 2015 sociopolitical context. Exploiting the symbolic index of authenticity of the Syrian vernacular, she established a link between the goals of the secular civic resistance and those of the Islamic group. At the same time, she used fuṣḥā to distance herself from positions that were at odds with her secular values and to address her male friends’ criticism, appealing to the index of fuṣḥā as authoritative. The use of final vowels in Figure 6.6 is particularly interesting. Final vowels are only indicated in two types of authoritative texts, namely religious texts and school textbooks. By entextualizing these symbolic fragments (Agha 2005) of fuṣḥā, she projected an authoritative identity,

Hybridity, secular identities, radical Islamic discourse 119 capable to stand against, in her own words, her friends’ “paternalistic” stance. The way the indexes of the Syrian vernacular and of fuṣḥā are mobilized in this new sociopolitical context attests the “agency” of language choice (Eid 2002), the importance to focus on the symbolic use of language as well as the historical dimension of hybridity. Through her hybrid choices, Layla performed different “chronotopic identities” (Blommaert 2015a; Blommaert and De Fina 2017) simultaneously, that of a 2011 secular dissident and a pragmatic dissident identity embedded in the 2015 sociopolitical context.

Notes 1 For the name of these radical Islamic groups, in this chapter I maintained the transliteration commonly found in the media to facilitate recognizability. 2 Bassiouney (2014) explained that the indexical association of the vernacular with authenticity is also present in the Egyptian sociolinguistic context. 3 The term muhāğirīn (“migrants”) is used with reference to those who converted to Islam and performed the hiğra (pilgrimage from Mecca to Medina) with the Prophet Muhammad. 4 In the audio segment in fuṣḥā (line 8), Zahran Alloush replaces the interdental ṯ with a Syrian vernacular t in the word mitl (“as”). Such a pronunciation can be compared to Eid’s (2007: 411) treatment of the pronunciation of the ğ as g in Egypt, which is accepted as fuṣḥā in a spoken formal style. 5 Tannen (2010: 307) explained how through “ventriloquizing [.  .  .] speakers  borrow others’ identities and thereby temporarily assign to themselves characteristics associated with those whose voices they borrow”. 6 See Lister (2015). 7 See Tannen (2013) for the use of repeated punctuation in social media as an “enthusiasm constraint”. 8 Although the text is predominantly in fuṣḥā, I decided to maintain some vernacular features in the transcripteration, such as the feminine nisba ending e and the realization of the word ‘thirdly’ as talitan, rather than ṯāliṯan. I treat these features similar to Eid’s (2007) perspective on the Egyptian g in spoken formal style. In accordance with Eid (2007), these features do not compromise the overall perception of the text as fuṣḥā. 9 I showed in chapter  4, example 4, how Maher used the bivalent word ’aṣdiqā’ (“friends”) also sarcastically, departing from a vernacular co-text. 10 I thank Manuela E. B. Giolfo for pointing out this grammatical aspect to me. 11 When in final position, the accusative marker is not reproduced orally. Her choice not to write it may reflect an oral representation of it.

7 Hybridity and erasure

Whereas in the previous chapters I focused on how linguistic hybridity underlay the emergence of dissident identities, in this final chapter I take up the example of a YouTube commercial launched during the month of Ramadan 2017 by the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain to show how hybridity led to the erasure of the Syrian dissidents’ position from the discourse on the Syrian crisis. Six years after the initial uprising, the Syrian conflict appeared more and more as a proxy war involving regional and international actors. Backed by Russia and with the help of a US-led coalition against ISIS and the Nusra Front, the Syrian government reconquered a significant part of territory held under control of ISIS and other factions.1 This restored its credibility and international validation, as demonstrated by the US administration’s statements in March 2017, according to which overthrowing the Asad’s government was no longer a priority.2 These geopolitical dynamics further reinforced Asad’s narrative that radical Islamic terrorism is responsible for the war and destruction in Syria. Such a narrative is consistent with the message foregrounded by the 2017 Zain commercial, in which fragments (Agha 2005) of linguistic and multimodal resources, including Quranic Arabic, and images of individuals injured in terrorist attacks in Arab and Muslim countries are entextualized (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) in order to exhort Muslims to embrace a progressive vision of Islam. One of the images is that of Omran Daqneesh, a Syrian child whose photo of him sitting in an ambulance covered in dust and blood went viral on social media in 2016, after an alleged Russian airstrike hit his house in a rebel-held neighborhood of Aleppo. The commercial was followed by an interview on a Russian TV station, in which Omran Daqneesh’s father condemned terrorism for the sufferance caused to his family. The use of the Syrian child in the commercial and the following interview with his father led Syrian dissidents to engage in acts of protests across social media, including a satirical song and a petition on the global campaign network Avaaz. In the petition, they accused the telecommunication company of “distorting the truth” about the Syrian conflict by portraying Omran as a victim of Islamic terrorism. The leading questions in this final analysis chapter are “why did the Syrian activists’ campaign fail? What made their voices inaudible? How can we account for the erasure of Syrian dissidents’ identities despite their uninterrupted presence on social media?”.

Hybridity and erasure 121 A growing body of social science literature has emphasized the role of technology in the silencing of political dissent. For example, Tufekci (2015) coined the term “computational agency” to explain how computer algorithms can lead to the marginalization of social movements. In this chapter, I build on sociolinguistic studies that investigated the intersection between language, identity and technology (e.g., Al Zidjaly 2010, 2011, 2012; Al Zidjaly and Gordon 2012; Androutsopoulos 2013; Graham 2005, 2007) as well as language and political activism (Al Zidjaly 2014, 2017, 2019a, 2019b; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016) and propose a linguistic explanation for the erasure of Syrian dissidents’ identities through the notions of layered simultaneity and synchronicity (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005) as well as chronotopes and scales (Blommaert 2015a). Blommaert (2005: 69) conceptualized voice as “the capacity of semiotic mobility”, and marginalization as the incapacity to mobilize indexes adequately across different contexts. I will argue that the message of the Zain commercial is synchronized with the 2015–2017 sociopolitical context. The commercial linguistic and multimodal resources are situated on a global scale, through which the producers are able to access a wider international audience. The dissidents’ reactions across media, on the other hand, are synchronized with the 2011 local conflict of the Syrian uprising. The local linguistic resources and discursive strategies which helped them emerge and become visible as dissidents in 2011, including humor and a hybrid mixture of vernacular and fuṣḥā, lost indexical value in the 2017 sociopolitical context.

1 Theoretical background The YouTube video under scrutiny is a commercial, namely a particular genre of “media discourse” (Bassiouney 2014: 18). Williamson (1978: 12, quoted in Davidson 1992: 3) posited that “ads are message systems designed to organize perceptions and create structures of meaning.” Davidson (1992: 2) defined advertising as “a commercial tool, a social language, a genre of spectator/reader experience, a technique of persuasion”. Looking at advertising as a “prominent discourse type”, Cook (1992: 199) advocated for an approach to advertising that includes an analysis of how different modes interact with the surrounding context. Additionally, he argued that selling is only one among many functions of advertising, which “draws upon, and thus shares features with, many other genres, including political propaganda, conversation, song, film, myth, poetry, fairy tales, soap operas, sitcoms, novels, graffiti, jokes and cartoons” (12). Concerning the function and genre of advertising, Cook further stated that “ads may not always be obliged to refer to a product, but they are still obliged to refer, however obliquely, to a change of behavior” (224). The ad released by Zain during Ramadan 2017 carries a predominantly sociopolitical message. I suggest that the multiple meanings, genres and functions underlying the persuasive “power behind” (KhosraviNik 2014) this commercial, as well as the Syrian dissidents’ reactions to it, can be understood through the notions of “layered simultaneity” and “synchronicity” (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005).3

122  Hybridity and erasure Blommaert developed the notion of layered simultaneity on the premises that “meanings [are] simultaneously produced, but not all of them consciously nor similarly accessible to agency” (2005: 126). He described meaning as a complex historical event, whose (re)construction depends on the different historical levels, or “layers of historicity to which people can orient, and from which they can speak” (131). These “layers of historicity” are related to the Bakhtinian notion of chronotopes, which Blommaert defined as “invokable tropic chunks of history” within which communication occurs at different scales (2005, 2015a: 112). In other words, when people produce and receive a text, they do so depending on the historical time to which they “orient” in discourse (Blommaert 2005). People’s voices, as explained by Blommaert, are in “continuity” with those sharing the same position and orientation in discourse. Blommaert exemplified the unique and relative way individuals perceive texts and discursive events through the notion of “synchronisation”. Whereas layered simultaneity emphasizes the complexity of discourse, Blommaert (2005: 136) contends that synchronization is a “tactic of power” (2005: 136) that erases other voices. Al Zidjaly (2012) expanded the notions of layered simultaneity and synchronization within the frameworks of multimodality and mediated discourse analysis. She proposed a “dynamic approach to multimodality” (190) that locates the synchronicity of discourse through an analysis of visual texts across time. Al Zidjaly (2012: 190) argued that, through synchronicity, images can “unintentionally harm social causes”. Longitudinal multimodal synchronization, she explained, is at the core of the production of synchronized identities, namely identities that are detached from the complexity of the local context and whose analysis is necessary to shed light on how broader discourses evolve (Al Zidjaly 2012). Layered simultaneity and synchronicity in connection with power and agency in advertising evoke Fairclough’s (1989) concept of “synthetic personalization”, a strategy that involves different levels of language, through which viewers are made to believe that they are included in the discourse and that they have a margin of control over the message. In my analysis, I will show how the Zain commercial, through a hybrid mixture that capitalizes on symbolic fragments (Agha 2005) of multimodal texts, synchronizes (Blommaert 2005) the discourse about the Syrian conflict within a dominant international discourse of Islamic terrorism, orienting toward (Blommaert 2005) the 2015–2017 historical time. In this historical time, the 2011 Syrian dissident identities are no longer present or visible. Conversely, in their acts of protests, Syrian dissidents orient toward (Blommaert 2005) a different historical time, that of the 2011 uprisings, in which their voices emerged. In the analysis of the written texts, I will refer to the notions of “entextualization”, which is the reconfiguration of texts from one context to another (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014), and “resemiotization”, namely the process of meaning change occurring when a text is transported from a mode into another (Iedema 2003; Leppänen et al. 2014). I will then turn to show how Syrian dissidents, speaking from the

Hybridity and erasure  123 perspective of the Syrian uprising, counter-synchronize the discourse. In other words, I will argue that the Zain commercial and the dissidents’ reactions produce two different, mutually invisible, coherent (Blommaert 2005) narratives. Both dimensions are pieces that contribute to a reconstruction of the broader complex communicative event.

2 The Zain commercial The Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain, present in several Gulf Arab countries, the Middle East and Africa, is known for its creative, politically and socially committed ads. The commercial analyzed in this chapter was launched in 2017, during the holy month of Ramadan. Among other communal activities, during Ramadan, families gather around the TV to watch soap operas produced for this occasion. Della Ratta (2015) analyzed the sociopolitical impact of these soap operas, of which Syria has been a major producer and exporter. Coining the term “whisper strategy”, she explained how these are the expression of a mutual modernizing intent between a class of “enlightened” producers and the Syrian government, which put modern and cosmopolitan symbols at the center of its cultural and political agenda (Della Ratta 2015). A similar modernizing vision is shared by the producers of this Zain commercial. The period of Ramadan also constitutes prime time for advertising. The 2017 commercial was uploaded on the Zain YouTube channel on May 26, 2017, accompanied by English subtitles, which made the message accessible to non-Arabic speaking viewers around the world. The producers’ promotion of a moderate religious identity is encapsulated in the song performed in the commercial by Emirati singer Hussein al-Jasmi and reported on the YouTube page under the Zain logo:

ً ‫حبا ً ال رعبا‬..‫اعبد ربك‬.. ً ‫سهال ال صعبا‬..‫دينك‬ ً ‫ كن في‬.. ً ‫سلما ً ال حربا‬..‫خالف ندك‬.. ..ً ‫لينا ً ال غصبا‬..‫اقنع غيرك‬ Figure 7.1 Zain’s YouTube channel caption

Worship your Lord with love, not terror Be tender in your faith, not harsh Confront your enemy with peace, not war Persuade others with leniency, not forcefully4

124  Hybridity and erasure As of June 2018, the YouTube video was liked by 148,000 viewers, disliked by 16,000 and received 14,317 comments. Before discussing the way the commercial promoted a moderate Islamic identity through hybridity, I explain the different sequences in the commercial, including the overlapping modes constituting them. 2.1 The multimodal sequences First sequence The first sequence contrasts two images, the dark one of a man preparing a bomb in a dingy basement, immediately followed by the bright one of happy children playing football in a street, accompanied by the colorful Zain logo. Subsequently, the initial image of the terrorist is overlapped by the voice of a child uttering the sentence sa-’uḫbiru -ḷḷāh bi-kulli-šayy’ (“I will tell God everything”).5 The sentence, pronounced with full vocalization, is in a very formal variety of fuṣḥā. The written short vowels in the Arabic captions evoke the language of religious texts. In addition to the indexes of authority and authenticity associated with this variety (Bassiouney 2012, 2014; Suleiman 2013a), the child’s voice, immediately following the image of cheerful children in the first sequence, indexes innocence and purity. In the following sequence, the child continues his narration in fuṣḥā with the sentences bi-’annakum malā’tum al-maqārib bi-’aṭfālinā wa-karāsi l-madāris fāriġa (“that you filled the cemeteries with children and emptied our school desks”) wa-ša‘altum al-fitan wanasaytum maṣābīḥ šawāri‘nā muṭfa’a (“that you’ve sparked unrest and turned our streets to darkness”). The use of the personal suffix pronoun – kum (“you pl.”) in the word bi-’annakum (“that you”) and the possessive – nā (“our”) in ’aṭfālinā (“our children”) demarcates the us vs. them (‘real’ vs. ‘non-real’ Muslims and terrorists) distinction. The first-person plural pronoun can be understood as an example of “synthetic personalization” (Fairclough 1989), used in the language of advertising to include the viewer. In this case, it is used to help Arab and Muslim viewers identify themselves with the progressive stance promoted by the producers. In this first sequence, the child’s narration overlaps with images of purity and innocence, such as those of a smiling baby in the lap of a grandparent and those of a wedding couple. Second sequence In the second sequence, the continuing child’s narration, condemning the terrorists’ lies, is accompanied by the image of the terrorist leaving the dingy basement and stepping on a bombed bus full of injured children and adults. The scene continues with the terrorist uttering the first two verses of the Islamic call to prayer ’ašhadu ’an lā ’ilāha ’illā -ḷḷāh (“I bear witness that there is no God but Allah”) and ’ašhadu ’anna Muḥammadan ‘abduhu wa-rasūlu -ḷḷāh (“I bear witness that Muhammad is Allah’s Prophet”).6 As he recites the first verse, the soundtrack is interrupted. The first verse is followed by a fully vocalized fuṣḥā sentence uttered by an injured elderly man on the bus bearing a child. His sentence, which addresses the terrorist as yā qādimun li-lmawt wa-huwa ḫāliqu l-ḥayāh (“you who comes in the name of death, He is the creator of life”), condemns the terrorist’s appropriation of the religious text. The elderly

Hybridity and erasure 125 man’s condemnation of the terrorist’s act is emphasized by the resumed soundtrack. The second verse is replied by a child impersonating Omran Daqneesh, the Syrian boy injured in 2016, holding an issue of the Time magazine displaying the image of the Omran on the cover. The elderly man’s and the child’s replies to the terrorist are in tune with the instrumental soundtrack and reconfigure the religious texts in a modernist vision of religion. The interplay between Islamic texts uttered by the terrorist without music on the one hand and reconfigured Islamic texts and instrumental music on the other evokes another discourse between a more “progressive” and a more radical view of Islam, the former considering instrumental music as permissible. Third sequence The alternation between the terrorist’s recitation of Islamic texts and their reconfiguration by ordinary people continues with the terrorist’s uttering of ’Aḷḷāhu ’akbar (“God is greatest”) and culminates with the appearance of famous Emirati singer Hussein al-Jasmi, who starts a mellow song by repeating the expression ’Aḷḷāhu ’akbar (“God is greatest”). His exultant declamation of ’Aḷḷāhu ’akbar is alternated with real images of terrorist attacks that caused destruction in the Arab world and by the images of Muslim individuals allegedly injured in these attacks, with a caption of their names and the location in which they were injured. Fourth and fifth sequences In the last sequences, the terrorist is confronted in the street by a large group of people, including adults and children, led by singer Hussein al-Jasmi, who turns the mellow tune into a joyful catchy song.7 The final sequence starts with the image of a multitude of Arabs and Muslims confronting the terrorist attacker in the street with peaceful signs, followed by that of the terrorist, who, kneeling down in the middle of the street and ready to detonate the bomb, is interrupted by the burst of festive fireworks evoking the joyful month of Ramadan. The image of fireworks is followed by a sequence of cheerful images, including that of the happy wedding couple introduced at the beginning of the commercial, that of a smiling woman who, as explained in the Arabic and English captions, survived an attack during her own wedding, that of a grandfather holding a baby, symbolizing hope for the future, as well as the bright image of happy children singing along the following verses with Hussein al-Jasmi: li-nufağğir al-‘unfa rifqan (“let’s bomb violence with mercy”), li-nufağğir aḍ-ḍalāla ḥaqqan (“let’s bomb delusion with the truth”), li-nufağğir al-kurha ‘išqan (“let’s bomb hate with love”) and li-nufağğir at-ta‘aṣṣuba narqā (“let’s bomb extremism for a better life”).

3 Synchronicity as symbolic juxtaposition The sequences are composed of several overlapping modes. For the purpose of this study, I will focus on the three foregrounded ones (Iedema 2003; Kress 2010), namely oral and written texts, music and images. The written texts consist of an Arabic transcription and an English translation of the oral texts. It will be shown how the

126  Hybridity and erasure synchronization of the message (Blommaert 2005) is obtained through the hybrid juxtaposition of symbolic multimodal fragments. The oral texts are uttered, in chronological order, by a child at the beginning, the terrorist, impersonators of civilians injured in terrorist attacks, and sung by Emirati singer Hussein al-Jasmi. The initial texts uttered by the child immediately evoke a very elevated register of fuṣḥā. Although they do not correspond to actual religious texts, they resemble them by virtue of the lexical choices, such as sa-’uḫbiru-ḷḷāh bi-kullišayy’ (“I will tell God everything”) and fitan (plural of fitna). The latter, as explained by Tayob (1993), is a Quranic term that, in Sunni Islam, is reminiscent of the never fully resolved discord that arose among the prophets’ companions after his death. The entextualization of this term is interesting for two reasons. First, it represents a reappropriation of religious scriptural texts from terrorists. Second, it has been used by Bashar al-Asad since the very beginning of the uprising to delegitimize protestors as seditious (Heydemann and Leenders 2014). In addition to the lexical items, the texts uttered by the child are fully vocalized. In written form, full vocalization is indicated in school textbooks (note that it is the child who initiates the narration) and religious texts. In oral contexts, it is present in religious texts, poetry and news broadcasting. The oral text, resemiotized (Iedema 2003; Leppänen et al. 2014) in the Arabic captions, carries internal and final vowels in order to further reinforce the relation between these and religious texts. Through lexical choices and oral and written declension, these texts, which are not religious texts, are authenticated (Blommaert and Varis 2011; Bucholtz 2003) as such. In the second sequence, religious language is reappropriated through the alternation between Quranic expressions, uttered by the terrorist, such as the šahāda (“proclamation of faith”):’ašhadu ’an lā ’ilāha ’illā -ḷḷāh (“I bear witness that there is no God but Allah”) and ’ašhadu ’anna Muḥammadan ‘abduhu wa-rasūlu -ḷḷāh (“I bear witness that Muhammad is Allah’s Prophet”), and texts, uttered by injured individuals, authenticated in a similar way to the ones present in the first sequence. Additionally, the expression ’Aḷḷāhu ’akbar (“God is greatest”) carries particular symbolic value. It is a Quranic word used as an exclamation in several contexts and to express several feelings, such as exultance and dismay. This expression, however, has been increasingly associated by an international audience uniquely with terrorism. The term acquires a newly positive connotation when Emirati singer Hussein al-Jasmi reappropriates it from the terrorist and entextualizes it in a mellow song. Its resemiotization (Iedema 2003; Leppänen et al. 2014) into a song lyric is also noteworthy. Instrumental music is prohibited by some radical Islamic groups (see Pieslak 2015), which renders the multimodal juxtaposition of instrumental music and a religious text particularly symbolic. This symbolic use of language was accessed and criticized by some commenters, as shown in the following example (Figure 7.2): ‫سبحان هللا‬ ‫يقول هللا اكبر ووراه صوت موسيقى‬ ‫كل شي الزم موسيقى‬ ‫حتى بذكر هللا الي حرم الموسيقى‬ Figure 7.2 Commenter’s reaction to Zain’s use of instrumental music

Hybridity and erasure 127 Glory be to God! He pronounces the words “’Aḷḷāhu ’akbar” over instrumental music Does everything need to be accompanied by music Even the when mentioning God, who forbade music?

In the last sequences, the music turns from a mellow to a joyful tune, as to emphasize the positive outcome of the terrorist’s surrendering and the victory of moderate over radical Islam. The positive outcome is enhanced by the lexical choices. The verb narqā, for example, in the verse li-nufağğir at-ta‘aṣṣuba narqā (“let’s bomb extremism for a better life”) can be literally translated as “we advance”, “we progress”. These meanings evoke the progressive Islamic stance promoted by the commercial producers. In addition to language and music, the commercial producers synchronized their message through images (Al Zidjaly 2012). In the second sequence, one of the impersonators of victims of terrorist attacks is Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel laureate Pakistani girl who, through her activism for female education and her opposition against the Talibans, became a symbol of progress and peaceful resistance promoting female education. The inclusion of Malala, who in the commercial appears in a school setting in traditional Pakistani clothes, is successfully synchronized, as confirmed by the following comment:

I’m a Muslim and a Pakistani. and that Malala part really had me crying, God bless you whoever is behind this video.. Things will get better InshAllah Figure 7.3 Commenter’s reaction to Zain’s image of Malala Yousafzai

The images of individuals injured in terrorist attacks in the third sequence is also significant inasmuch as it approaches the discourse of terrorism from a personal perspective, or a “humanitarian frame”, instead of the “official frames”, predominantly adopted by Western and Arab news outlets to report terrorist attacks (Zeng et al. 2014).8 The texts, music and images featured in the commercial all have a global resonance. They are designed to reach a wide international audience. In other words, they synchronize the message promoting a “progressive” Islamic identity on a global scale. This message is anchored to the current sociopolitical context, in which ISIS is portrayed as the major threat in the region, and evokes other dominant (Western) discourses, such as the one that Muslims around the world need to actively reject terrorism. Whereas the comment in Figure 7.3 was in “continuity” with the commercial’s synchronous message, the one in Figure 7.2 presented a “discontinuity”

128  Hybridity and erasure (Blommaert 2005). “Discontinuity” also occurred between the comment in Figure 7.5 and the image of Omran Daqneesh, impersonated in the second sequence by a child holding an issue of what appears to be an international magazine displaying his face on the cover (Figure 7.4). I suggest that the “discontinuity” emerging from the reaction to the image of the Syrian child arises from a time-space, or chronotopic (Blommaert 2005, 2015a), discrepancy between the commenter in Figure 7.5 and the Zain producers. The commenter speaks from and orients toward a historical dimension (Blommaert 2005: 131), that of the 2011 civil uprising, which is different or in “discontinuity” with that of the ad producers and in “continuity” with that of a group of Syrian activists, as explained further below.

Figure 7.4 Omran Daqneesh impersonated in the Zain commercial

They used the victims of attacks not perpetrated by ISIS, such as that of the child Omran. I’m shocked by how they’re making it seem that the chaos has been caused only by ISIS

‫ ولكن أستغرب أنهم جعلوا البالء‬،‫استخدمو ضحايا غير داعش كالطفل عمران على أنه ضحية لداعش‬ ‫مربوط بداعش فقط‬ Figure 7.5 Reaction to Zain’s image of Omran Daqneesh

Hybridity and erasure 129

The Zain telecommunication company: Zain distorts the truth Original photo of Omran Daqneesh

7149 people signed. Help us reach 1.000.000 Why this is important

Figure 7.6 Screenshot of the Avaaz petition

4 The Syrian dissidents’ position A few days after the Zain commercial was broadcast, a group of Syrian dissidents launched a petition on the US-based activism platform Avaaz. The platform allows activists to collect electronic signatures for specific social causes. The layout of the petition includes the space for a title, an image, the prompt “Why this is important”, followed by a section describing the petition. Petitioners can choose the language. The Syrian activists chose to write the petition in Arabic and entitled it zain tušawwih al-ḥaqīqa (“Zain distorts the truth”), after a hashtag, also in Arabic, previously launched on Twitter. The petition was subsequently translated into English, German, Turkish and French. The “semiotic power” of the Arabic text, however, does not travel well (Blommaert 2005) across languages. The petition aimed at obtaining a million signatures to ask Zain to suspend the commercial. Layla and other Syrian dissidents participated in the campaign, sharing the link on their Facebook pages. Translation of the petition The telecommunications company Zain continues to exploit the Syrian conflict as an advertising tool to increase its capital and whitewash the image of the children murderer Bashar al-Asad. In the commercial it appeared the expression “I will tell God everything”,9 uttered by a Syrian child who was injured by an airstrike of the Asad regime, as well as the photo of Omran, which Asad himself

130  Hybridity and erasure alleged that it was fake. Zain testified the truth of these two incidents after it denied the involvement of the Russian and the Syrian air forces, attributing them to the violence of internationally funded terrorism, which doesn’t own a single aircraft! Therefore, several customers have boycotted the company to protest against the vile truth distortion and against the exploitation of the tragedy of an entire people for political and economic interests, and also considering how this company has used the tragedy of other Arab peoples for the same reasons. Why would have otherwise the Syrian media invited Omran’s father to appear on television to say that his son had been a victim of radical [Islamic] terrorism at this precise time!!? We invite those who are still Zain customers to stand with truth and justice by boycotting this company that distorts the truth and by signing a petition to suspend this commercial, which on the surface fights religious extremism but tacitly supports state crimes. We also invite all those with a sense of humanity to sign this petition in order to reach one million signatures before the end of the holy month of Ramadan. We also ask the company Zain to suspend the commercial and to apologize to the Syrian people for distorting and falsifying the truth. #zain_distorts_thetruth In the petition, Syrian dissidents resemiotized (Iedema 2003; Leppänen et al. 2014) the image of Omran Daqneesh (entextualized in the Zain commercial) from the visual to the written mode. Through this resemiotization, they changed the meaning of the image, as it had been synchronized (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005) by the commercial producers. In the ad, the image of the child was presented in sequence with the images of other individuals injured in terrorist attacks. Appearing in sequence with these images contributed to the identification of Omran, too, as a victim of radical Islamic terrorism. His identification as a victim of terrorism is also confirmed by the bus scene in which he reappropriates religious discourse by responding to the terrorist’s Islamic proclamation of faith. Conversely, the petitioners identified Omran as the victim of a Syrian and Russian airstrike and alluded to a collaboration between the telecommunication company and the Syrian government, which, as they suggested, subsequently broadcast an interview with Omran Daqneesh’s father, who confirmed the narrative that the attack to their house had been perpetrated by Islamic terrorists. The petition is composed in MSA, whose index of authority (Bassiouney 2014) befits the official and authoritative topic and situation. Some visual and syntactic choices are worth particular attention. The expression wa-’illā in “Why would have otherwise the Syrian media invited Omran’s father to appear on television to say that his son had been a victim of radical [Islamic] terrorism at this precise time!!?” and the punctuation marks at the end of the sentence arguably enhance the ironic and rhetorical character of the question.10 Another interesting aspect is the use of vowel diacritics to mark final declension in very few words, which I underlined in Figure 7.7 for clarity. Full vocalization, as explained above, is

Hybridity and erasure  131

‫تستمر شركة زين لالتصاالت باستخدام القضية السورية وسيلةً إعالنيةً لزيادة رأسمالها وتلميع صورة‬ ‫ (سأخبر هللا بكل شيء) التي قالها طفل سوري تعرض‬:‫إذ ظهر في إعالنها عبارة‬.‫قاتل األطفال بشار األسد‬ ‫حيث أكدت (زين) حقيقة‬.‫ وصورة عمران التي ادعى بشار األسد أنها مزورة‬،‫لقصف طيران نظام األسد‬ ‫الحادثتين بعد أن نفت مسؤولية الطيران الروسي والسوري عنهما وألبستهما عنوة لإلرهاب الممول‬ ‫عالميا ً الذي ال يملك طيرانا!!لذلك قام العديد من زبائنها بمقاطعتها احتجاجا ً على التشويه الفاضح وعلى‬ ‫ وتحسبا ً من إمكانية هذه الشركة استخدام‬،‫استغالل مآساة شعب بأكمله ُكرمى لمصالح مالية وسياسية‬ ‫وإال ما الذي يدعو اإلعالم السوري لتصوير والد الطفل عمران‬.‫مأساة شعوب عربية أخرى لذات األسباب‬ ‫ليقول أن ابنه ضحية اإلرهاب المتشدد في هذا الوقت بالذات؟!!اآلن ندعو من تبقى من زبائن لـ (زين) أن‬ ‫ وأن يشاركوا بتوقيع العريضة‬،‫يقفوا وقفة حق وإيمان بالعدل وأن يقاطعوا هذه الشركة المزورة للحقيقة‬ ‫وندعو أخوتنا في‬.ً ‫ ويدعم إجرام الدولة ضمنا‬،ً ‫إليقاف هذا اإلعالن الذي يحارب اإلرهاب الديني ظاهريا‬ ‫ونطالب‬.‫اإلنسانية إلى توقيع العريضة والعمل على جمع مليون توقيع قبل نهاية شهر رمضان المبارك‬ ‫شركة زين بإيقاف اإلعالن واالعتذار صراحةً للشعب السوري على ما ارتكبته من تشوي ٍه وتزوير‬ Figure 7.7 Avaaz petition text with declension underlined

typically found in school textbooks, religious texts and news broadcasting, and its presence enhances the formality and the overall authoritative character of these texts. However, in the petition, vocalization is not homogeneously marked on all words, as it would be expected in a religious text or a school textbook, and its very selective use does not have the function of disambiguating the meaning of these words in the text.11 The choice of the authors to indicate the final endings in only some words, I suggest, is highly symbolic, inasmuch as it visually adds a layer of authority to the text. In the following example, I show how Layla and a group of friends resemiotized (Iedema 2003; Leppänen et al. 2014) the image of Omran Daqneesh through a humorous song, which was video-recorded through a mobile phone and uploaded on Layla’s personal Facebook page. I translated and transcribed the song below.

Line 1 Chorus: ya zēn, ya zēn, ya zēn, ya zēn ya zēn Oh Zain, oh Zain, oh Zain, oh Zain oh Zain

Line 2 Layla: bēni u-bēnak fī ṣūra u-šlo nansāk Between me and you there is a photo, how could we forget you

132  Hybridity and erasure

Line 3 Chorus: ya zēn Oh Zain

Line 4 Layla: ğamāhirak by’aydūni law gāṭa‘tak Your people would support me if I boycotted you

Line 5 Chorus: ya zēn Oh Zain

Line 6 Layla: tikzib, tšawwih, timsaḥā raḥ nib’a warāk You lie, you distort, erase it and we’ll stand with you

Line 7 ’yilli ‘am ydammir sūryā ’abūhā la-zēn [showing a photo of Bashar al-Asad and his family] The one who’s destroying Syria is Zain’s father

Line 8 Chorus: ya zēn Oh Zain

Line 9 Layla [showing a photo of Bashar al-Asad and his family]: ’abūhā la-zēn Zain’s father

Hybridity and erasure  133

Line 10 Chorus: ya zēn Oh Zain

Line 11 Layla [showing a photo of Bashar al-Asad and his family] ’abūhā la-zēn Zain’s father

Line 12 Chorus: ya zēn Oh Zain

Line 13 Layla and chorus: ya zēn, ya zēn, ya zēn, ya zēn ya zēn Oh Zain, oh Zain, oh Zain, oh Zain oh Zain In the song, Layla deconstructs the synchronized (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005) meaning of the image of Omran Daqneesh through humor and through language and visual modes. Although the song is performed in the Syrian vernacular, in line 4, Layla voices the Kuwaiti dialect through the uvular sound g in the word gāṭa‘tak (“I boycotted”). This sound is stereotypically associated with Gulf dialects, and it is symbolically used here to mock the telecommunication company.12 The word zēn, repeated several times in the song and corresponding to the vernacular pronunciation of the company name, is also a word stereotypically associated with Gulf dialects.13 Layla further mocks the commercial and rearticulates the synchronized meaning of Omran’s photo by waving a picture of Bashar al-Asad, edited with two fire flames on his head that resemble the devil’s horn in lines 7, 9 and 11, in order to emphasize their argument that Zain is a puppet of Bashar al-Asad. Following the failure of the Avaaz petition, Layla uploaded a video on her Facebook page, recorded with her mobile phone. In the video, she addresses her audience of Syrian dissident Facebook friends by re-affirming that there was a previous collaboration between Zain and the Syrian government, and by taking stock of the lost battle. She attributes the failure of the campaign to the use of suḫriye (‘humor’, ‘satire’) as an ineffective subversive strategy. Interestingly, as

134  Hybridity and erasure shown in the previous chapters, humor was a prominent discursive strategy in Syrian dissidents’ post-uprising discourse. Layla’s metadiscursive reflection can also be construed as an exhortation to re-define the linguistic and indexical norms in the light of the new socio-political context. The “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005), namely the local symbolic norms which helped dissidents emerge as ‘real’ Syrians in the Syrian political discourse at the beginning of the uprising seem to have lost their power and led to their marginalization in the light of the current globalization of the Syrian conflict.

5 Conclusion In this chapter, I investigated how hybridity can lead to the erasure to identities in discourse through the case study of a progressive commercial, launched by the telecommunication company Zain and the Syrian dissidents’ reactions to it in the light of an increasingly complex sociopolitical context, characterized by the escalation of the Syrian war and by a reconsolidation of Asad’s power. I applied the notions of “layered simultaneity” and “synchronicity” (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005) to show how the commercial producers simplified the discourse about the Syrian conflict accusing radical Islamic terrorism of the destruction of Arab and Islamic countries and urging Arabs and Muslims around the world to embrace moderate Islam. In synchronizing their message, the commercial producers recurred to hybrid linguistic and multimodal texts. These texts are obtained through the entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of symbolic features, or fragments, of language varieties, registers and modes (Agha 2005), through which the producers were able to access different international audiences. These linguistic and multimodal resources have a global resonance and are linked with global discourses, embedded in the 2015–2017 sociopolitical context. I demonstrated how the Syrian dissidents’ reactions (the Avaaz petition and Layla’s song) also consisted of hybrid texts, through which the authors synchronized the discursive event capitalizing on symbolic linguistic and multimodal elements. These resources, which consist of a mixture of Damascene, fuṣḥā and humor, however, are located on a local scale (Blommaert 2005) and are reminiscent of the resources utilized by the Syrian dissidents at the beginning of the 2011 uprising. The “discontinuity” between the ad producers and the Syrian dissidents can be explained by the different historical dimensions, or “experiential present” to which the two parties orient (Blommaert 2005: 131–136). Whereas the ad producers’ modernizing vision is grounded in the current 2015–2017 sociopolitical context characterized by an escalation of radical religious violence, the latter “speak” from the historical context of the 2011 Syrian uprising. Despite the Syrian dissidents’ effort to make their voice heard across media and genres, their position failed to emerge. The Syrian dissidents’ erasure from discourse, I suggest, is the result of their difficulty to make their symbolic resources travel across chronotopes (Blommaert 2005). Their voices, as a consequence, are lost in their “present time”. A discourse analysis of their social media practices helps adding a piece to the complexity of the Syrian conflict.

Hybridity and erasure  135

Notes 1 See www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/02/13/after-7-years-of-war-assadhas-won-in-syria-whats-next-for-washington/ 2 See www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39450570 3 I thank Najma Al Zidjaly for pointing out to me the notions of “synchronicity” and “layered simultaneity” for the analysis of the example at hand. I am also indebted to Najma al Zidjaly and Sage Graham for helping me think about the connection between “synchronicity” and identity erasure through their panel “Digital marginalization, inclusion and invisibility”, 2019 International Pragmatics Conference, Hong Kong. 4 I reported the English translation displayed in the commercial subtitles. 5 Throughout this section, I maintained the English translation displayed in the commercial subtitles. These translations contain some inacurracies. However, I will not discuss them here. 6 The full correct translation, not reported in the captions, is “I bear witness that Muhammad is Allah’s Servant and Messenger”. 7 I am grateful to Najma Al Zidjaly for pointing out the name of this popular Emirati singer to me and for bringing to my attention the link between the shift to a joyful tune in the last part of the commercial and the appearance of Hussein al-Jasmi, whose music evokes positive emotions, particularly among an Arab Gulf audience. 8 Zeng et al. (2014) explained that when the media covers terrorist attacks through “official frames”, they corroborate the official government’s viewpoints instead of focusing, for example, on the victims. 9 The child uttering the sentence “I  will tell God everything” at the beginning of the commercial is not represented through an image in the commercial. The sentence uttered by Omran Daqneesh in response to the terrorist’s appropriation of the Islamic proclamation of faith in the second sequence is different. 10 Also see Giolfo (2012) for a discussion on the rhetorical meaning of Classical Arabic constructions containing the expression ’illā and introduced by the negative particle mā. 11 One could argue that, even in textbooks and religious texts, the use of case endings is highly symbolic. As posited by Corriente (1971), case endings in Arabic are redundant devices, unnecessary for meaning disambiguation. 12 See Bassiouney (2018) for the performance of identity through local dialects and Holes (2006) for an in-depth analysis of the vernacular uvular sound g. 13 See Holes (2006).

8 Conclusions

In this book, I contributed to the research of language and identity in the Arab world through a longitudinal case study of Syrian dissidents’ linguistic practices across social media platforms between 2009 and 2017. The aim of my work was to account for how identities emerge and are erased in discourse. How did Syrian dissidents make their position visible through language and social media at the beginning of the 2011 uprising? How can language account for the erasure of their position from the political discourse on the Syrian uprising in 2017? I showed how their texts are characterized by a constant mixing of linguistic and multimodal forms, associated with several different varieties and registers. I approached mixing through the notion of linguistic hybridity (Bakhtin 1981) and showed how case study participants “mixed” language differently and consequently projected different identities before and after the uprising. They did so through a symbolic use of language (Suleiman 2013a). In this conclusive chapter, I reiterate my understanding of linguistic hybridity in connection with the symbolic use of language, I summarize the findings, and I conclude with a discussion about the role of the researcher in approaching and representing hybridity. Introduced by Bakhtin (1981) to account for the social potential of mixed forms of language and identified by him as the engine of language change, linguistic hybridity, as observed by Hall and Nilep (2015), was later embraced by studies in bilingual communication and linguistic anthropology, which challenged an idea of languages as bounded systems and proposed going beyond an understanding of code-switching (Blom and Gumperz 1972) as the practice of moving from one bounded system to another (Auer 1995; Gardner-Chloros 1995; Rampton 1995; Woolard 1999). Woolard (1999) showed how, through translingual simultaneity, individuals cued different identities within the historical framework of autonomous Catalonia. Similarly, Auer (2005) argued that, through code alternation, individuals do not necessarily cue hybrid ethnolinguistic identities, but he envisaged language mixing as an act of local identity performance, whose function needs to be studied in relation with discourse and context. Building on Rampton’s (1995) notion of crossing, he showed, for example, how bilingual speakers utilize and mix linguistic features that are not associated with their ethnolinguistic identities.

Conclusions  137 The recent trend of globalization and the onset of social media has led to an increase of scholarly research focused on hybridity and to different ways of conceptualizing it (Blommaert 2017; Hall and Nilep 2015). Otsuji and Pennycook (2010, 2014) envisioned hybridity through the notion of metrolingualism. The “fluidity” of translingual phenomena, they argued, cannot be captured outside the political dimension that led to a conceptualization of code separation in the first place. “While we may wish to focus on a multiple, hybrid and complex world, we need both to avoid turning hybridity into a fixed category of pluralisation, and to find ways to acknowledge that fixed categories are also mobilised as an aspect of hybridity” (2010: 244). According to Otsuji and Pennycook (2014), hybridity as metrolingualism is “the impossibility to understand itself outside the political and ideological forces that constitute the categories of binarity” (97). Saraceni (2014) came to similar conclusions, describing hybridity as a process by which individuals’ selection of language forms from a common repertoire is complementary with a perception of languages as bounded. In the Arabic context, Brustad (2017) and Hachimi (2017) showed how hybrid practices on Arabic social media occur in concomitance with ideological views of language purity. Otsuji and Pennycook’s (2010, 2014) argument for a political and ideologically grounded investigation of hybridity is consistent with a call for a shift of the study of society and language through the lens of “complexity” (Al Zidjaly 2019a; Blommaert 2016, 2017, 2019; Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Blommaert and Varis 2011; Blommaert et al. 2015) and with a Bakhtinian focus on the historical dimension of language (Blommaert 2005; Woolard 1999). Blommaert (2005, 2015a) and Woolard (2013) further articulated this historical dimension situating linguistic practices in history through the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope. Through this notion, sociolinguists have demonstrated that the identities and discourses engendered through language are embedded in dynamic timespace configurations (Bakhtin 1981; Blommaert 2015a; Blommaert and De Fina 2017; Sinatora 2019; Woolard 2013). These time-space configurations not only determine which identities are relevant in discourse and what linguistic resources are most appropriate to cue these identities, but as emphasized by Blommaert (2005) and Woolard (2013), they also function as lenses through which individuals position themselves toward language and society. Blommaert (2015a) further explained that speakers “invoke” different historical frameworks in order to make their voices heard and their identities visible. The anchoring of people’s voices in different historical angles accounts for both the emergence and the erasure of identities in discourse (Blommaert 2005). Individuals invoke chronotopes and act within them (Blommaert 2015a) by entextualizing (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) symbolic fragments of language in discourse (Agha 2005; Blommaert and Varis 2011). These symbolic fragments, or “chronotopically relevant indexicals” (Blommaert and De Fina 2017: 3), are organized in “orders of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005, 2010), which I understood, in line with Tannen’s (2007), Ochs’s (1990) and Langacker’s (2017) vision of grammar as an interactional, social and symbolic process, as a ‘social symbolic grammar’, or a way individuals generate order and create

138  Conclusions identities through their translingual practices (Blommaert and Rampton 2011). It is this type of ‘social symbolic grammar’ that underlies the emergence of identities and therefore makes communication possible within specific time-space configurations. The adoption of hybridity as an analytical tool has raised questions that are still at the center of a debate in studies of language, communication and culture. As explained by Kraidy (2002, 2005) and Rubdy and Alsagoff (2014), critics have adduced several reasons for the inadequacy of this notion, including its association with colonialist and neoliberal discourses, which made this fuzzy term particularly apt for ideological manipulation. Nevertheless, Rubdy and Alsagoff affirmed that through hybridity one can attend to how language practices, particularly in a time of globalization, surpass ideological dichotomous categories. Through this book, I argued that Arabic constitutes a privileged standpoint for the study of hybridity, due to the peculiar sociolinguistic situation of diglossia. Hybridity was applied to the Arabic context with relation to identity, literature and nonparticipatory media discourse (Al-Batal 2002; Eid 2002, 2007; Mejdell 2014), and it was conceptualized as the mixing or integration (Eid 2002) of fuṣḥā and the vernaculars. Although mixing in Arabic, as explained by Mejdell (2017), has existed throughout history and has surfaced particularly during cyclical phases of “destandardisation”, the mixing practices we are witnessing in this current time of globalization, she posited, constitute an irreversible trend of “destandardisation”. Whereas, before the onset of digital communication, mixing was only observed as practiced by elites, such as writers and journalists, hybrid practices are all the more visible with the emergence of social media discourse in a time of globalization. Recent Arabic sociolinguistic scholarship has conceptualized diglossia as “stylistic performance” (Brustad 2017), emphasizing the role of processes such as indexicality and stance (Bassiouney 2014, 2017). Building on this scholarship, in the present study I showed how, through hybridity, social media participants cue identities in order to position themselves politically. In my analysis, I expanded the investigation of hybridity in Arabic from the mixing of linguistic varieties to the mobilization of symbolic meanings associated with linguistic varieties, registers and other modes, including visual and audio. I showed how the indexical meanings of these modes, deriving from “ideologies and attitudes” (Bassiouney 2014: 108), constitute a dimension of “fixity” (Otsuiji and Pennycook 2010, 2014) and are mobilized by social media participants in order to invoke and orient toward different chronotopes, thus animating identities that are relevant within these chronotopes (Blommaert 2015a; Blommaert and De Fina 2017) and thereby have an impact on broader sociopolitical discourses. In line with Otsuji and Pennycook (2010, 2014), I argued for the importance of studying the fluidity of translingual practices in connection with a dimension of fixity. Such a fixity was located in two places, namely indexicality and chronotopes. Both these fixed dimensions are not absolutely fixed, but they contemplate a certain degree of mobility in the sense that they can be manipulated and controlled by individuals in discourse (Blommaert 2015a).

Conclusions  139 According to Rubdy and Alsagoff (2014), the hybridity observed in multilingual environments is connected with in-between identities emerging in a context of globalization. “Hybridized identities”, they contended, are “constructed at the intersection of global and local languages and cultures that are also embedded within broader discoursal and social practices” (2014: 3). What I should like to emphasize from their view and what emerged from my data is the interaction between hybridity and broader local and global discourses (such as the discourse about the Syrian conflict and terrorism). This link, which had been previously emphasized by Blommaert (2005), has become increasingly relevant in a sociolinguistics of complexity (Al Zidjaly 2019a, 2019b; Blommaert 2016, 2017, 2019). Hybridity is not only influenced by the sociopolitical context, but it constitutes a means for individuals and groups to interact with it through the bottom-up construction of new contentious identities. Through a longitudinal study of Syrian dissidents’ hybrid practices, I showed how hybridity constantly changes guise inasmuch as it is instrumental to the construction of identities, contingent on relevant sociopolitical discourses and contexts. In other words, I see historically situated hybrid language practices as the empirical manifestation of such discourses and as the capacity of individuals to manipulate the symbolic resources shared between them and their audiences to make certain identities visible, thereby promoting certain discourses and identities over others. A focus on hybridity should inform our understanding of how discourses evolve and how individuals and groups engage with them through their social media language practices. I explained how hybrid practices interact with broader discourses through cases studies that highlighted different phases of dissidents’ social media practices between 2009 and 2017. These practices are “regulated” indexically, “organised in a repertoire” (Blommaert 2005: 207), and related to distinct chronotopes. The identification of distinct historical phases facilitated the selection of texts and the analysis of how the symbolic meanings of language are constantly appropriated and redefined in order to make discourse-relevant identities emerge.1 Such identities are connected with an idea of “authenticity”, meaning that the use of determined symbolic resources makes certain identities more “real” and visible in determined sociopolitical contexts (Blommaert and Varis 2011; Varis and Wang 2011). In chapter 3, I showed how Maher and Nawar projected cosmopolitan identities through the entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of local and global linguistic and multimodal forms. These identities reflected a public discourse characterized by an ostentation of symbols of modernity and cosmopolitanism, underlying a politics of “neo-liberal autocracy” (Wedeen 2013). At the same time, Maher’s and Nawar’s writing practices were at odds with previous Ba‘athist Arabization policy, which envisaged fuṣḥā as a vehicle of modernization through the construction of an anti-colonial Syrian and Arab identity. Through their pre-uprising repertoire, Maher and Nawar made their individual cosmopolitan identities visible, at a time where, as a young Syrian man suggested, the only visible faces in public spaces were those of Bashar al-Asad and his family, whose posters could be seen everywhere. What made Maher’s and Nawar’s identities

140  Conclusions truly cosmopolitan was the symbolic entextualization of “bits” (Blommaert 2011; Blommaert and Rampton 2011) of English forms in their Facebook status updates, while using local prestigious forms of youth language such as arabizi (GonzalezQuijano 2014), in the interactions with friends through comments. In chapter 4, I showed how Maher and Nawar rapidly reorganized their repertoires when the uprising sparked in the spring of 2011. The new repertoires emerged in response to Bashar al-Asad’s delegitimization of protestors with foreign infiltrators and radical Islamists. Through a redefinition of their social media practices and through a reconfiguration of the symbolic meanings attributed to linguistic features and varieties, Maher and Nawar repositioned themselves politically. The shift from cosmopolitan to dissident identities was enabled by and led to the creation of a new ‘social symbolic grammar’, or “order of indexicality” (Blommaert 2005, 2010). This new grammar is characterized by the simultaneity and alternation (Georgakopoulou 2011; Woolard 1999) of local, Damascene vernacular, fuṣḥā and creative linguistic and multimodal forms.2 Through intertextuality and linguistic hybridity, Maher and Nawar denounced political oppression and depicted the government as a foreign invader. In so doing, they constructed an identity of dissidents as ‘real’ Syrians, close to the Syrian people and who could legitimately engage with political discourse. In chapter 5, I investigated how the interaction among the commenters to a 2012 post published on Maher’s ad-dōmari public Facebook page contributed to the negotiation and definition of what form new symbols should have. I conducted the analysis through the lens of Tannen’s (2007) framework of “repetition as intertextuality” and voicing, De Fina’s (2016) framework of participation in social media narrative and through Agha’s (2005) notions of voice and register. It was shown how the commenters’ practices in reaction to the post led to the emergence of new “grammar rules”, which determine what is acceptable and what is not. A focus on commenters’ in-the-making hybrid practices allowed to see the emergence of political identities. These rules did not arise from one single linguistic variety, but from the entextualization of symbolic “fragments” of different registers (Agha 2005). In other words, they were engendered by the presence of multiple norms, or centers (Blommaert 2005; Blommaert and Varis 2011). These “polycentric” (Blommaert 2005) symbolic fragments attest the presence of another dimension of fixity. It was shown, for example, how the repetition of the word qāqī and the indexical meaning of authority underlying the fuṣḥā negative particle lam justified the acceptability of the form lam yuqāqī, a form that does not comply either with the prescriptive norms of fuṣḥā or the vernacular, and yet it is central to the commenter’s articulation of his political alignment against the post author. In chapter 6, I showed how hybridity was used by a female dissident, Layla, across media platforms in May 2015 in order to articulate different aspects of her dissident identity in a complex sociopolitical context, characterized by the advancement of radical Islamic factions. I analyzed her practices through the notions of language choice in Arabic (Bassiouney 2010, 2012; Eid 2002) and “synchronicity” (Blommaert 2005). I illustrated how Layla used both the Syrian vernacular

Conclusions  141 and fuṣḥā to project a secular identity and to articulate a pragmatic political alignment with a radical Islamic group. On the radio, she entextualized forms symbolically associated with Quranic Arabic to mock radical Islamists’ discourse, thus affirming her secular identity and rejecting the government’s identity claims that dissidents were motivated by sectarian intents. At the same time, the Damascene vernacular was used to cue her closeness to the audience, imagined by Layla as “the Syrian people”. On her Facebook page, she used the Syrian vernacular – associated with authenticity, the Syrian people and their political struggle for freedom and dignity – to reinforce the purported Syrian authenticity of the Nusra radical Islamic leader al-Jolani in order to persuade her fellow dissidents that there was a continuity between the goals of the 2011 uprising and al-Jolani’s. At the same time, in the commentary section she used fuṣḥā to avoid engaging with the commenter’s criticism. Through the notion of “synchronicity” – theorized by Blommaert (2005) as the individuals’ impossibility of looking at communicative events beyond their “experiential present” (136) – I explained how Layla’s practices are embedded in the time-space dimension of the 2015 sociopolitical context, characterized by an advancement of radical Islamic groups prevailing over the official Syrian army. Conversely, her friends spoke from a different position (Blommaert 2005), that of the 2011 civil uprising. The indexical meaning of the Syrian vernacular as the language of the people and an index of fuṣḥā as authoritative (Bassiouney 2014) allowed Layla to articulate her political alignment and cope with her male friends’ criticism. The analysis of Layla’s practices corroborates previous findings on Arabic and gender (Bassiouney 2010, 2012; Eid 2002), according to which women use both fuṣḥā and the vernacular to project determined identities. Whereas in the previous chapters I focused on how hybridity underlies the emergence of identities in social media contexts, in chapter 7 I explored hybridity in connection with the erasure of identity through Blommaert’s (2005) notions of “layered simultaneity” and “synchronicity” and Al Zidjaly’s (2012) application of these to a multimodal context and in connection with broader contexts and discourses. I analyzed a progressive commercial uploaded on YouTube by the telecommunication company Zain in 2017 and the reactions of a group of Syrian dissidents to it across social media. The ad producers used a plethora of multimodal forms to symbolically reappropriate Islamic discourse and language from Islamic extremists, pointing the finger exclusively at Islamic terrorism for the misery in the Arab world. By using a photo of Omran Daqneesh, a child who was allegedly injured in a Russian airstrike, dissidents accused the company of acquitting the Syrian government of war crimes. I showed how a group of Syrian dissidents resorted to hybrid linguistic and multimodal strategies across social media platforms to denounce an erasure of their position from the discourse on the Syrian conflict. Whereas through the deployment of global linguistic and multimodal resources the ad producers oriented (Blommaert 2015a) toward the 2015–2017 sociopolitical context, characterized by an escalation of the conflict and by a simplification of the Syrian conflict to a discourse about Islamic terrorism, Syrian dissidents’ local hybrid linguistic practices were oriented to the 2011 dimension of

142  Conclusions the Syrian conflict, during which mixture, as explained in chapter 4, served as an instrument of legitimization. It is this different chronotopic orientation, I argued, that made dissidents’ voices inaudible. In sum, from this study it emerged how hybridity is a constantly evolving process through which groups and individuals project different identities and discourses in determined sociopolitical contexts. Despite the controversy surrounding its origins and definition, through my case studies I showed, in line with Rubdy and Alsagoff (2014), that hybridity is a productive tool to document identity formation on social media and to see how identities interact with discourse, particularly in a situation of sociopolitical turmoil. I see hybridity as a constant reappropriation and redefinition of social norms and values. It is through a focus on language as a constant hybrid process that we can attend to how these norms are redefined contextually and how these, in turn, shape discourse. Adopting hybridity as an analytical tool allows to capture the way individuals control and manipulate symbolic meanings of language resources simultaneously to make their identities visible across time, space and discourses. An analysis of hybridity as a process embedded in context-sensitive discourses underlying social change (Al Zidjaly 2019a; Blommaert 2016, 2017, 2019) poses significant challenges for research and reinforces the need, already advocated by previous scholars (Androutsopoulos 2008; Auer 2005; Blommaert and Rampton 2011; De Fina 2018) to further integrate the investigation of language and identity on social media with ethnographic tools. In addition to its theoretical contributions, this book illustrated how new methodological tools are needed to better understand and represent the phenomenon of hybridity in Arabic. An Arabic “sociolinguistics of hybridity” is a complex task that requires the researcher to be an ethnographer and a translator.3 Casas-Cortés et al. (2013: 200) see ethnography “not in terms of explanation or representation, but as translation and weaving, processes in which the ethnographer is one voice or participant in a crowded field of knowledge producers”. Additionally, they posited that “rather than speaking for, we are interested in the careful, though still difficult, task of crafting appropriate subtitles to enable the content to travel to other terrains and audiences” (Casas-Cortés et al. 2013: 220). Along similar lines, Pennycook (2007: 54), quoting Cronin (2003: 134), argued that while the responsibility of the translator is conventionally thought of in terms of giving a fair and accurate representation of a source text, such ‘textual scrupolousness’ addresses only part of the contemporary responsibility of the translator, since there must also be ‘an activist dimension to translation which involves an engagement with the cultural politics of society at national and international levels’. The “activist dimension” was also emphasized by Al Zidjaly (2019b) as a central component in digital sociolinguistic research. The powerful metaphors of the researcher as a translator and weaver of knowledge as well as an activist are

Conclusions  143 very relevant to the present study. The political content of the (often deliberately complex) texts analyzed is meaningful and relevant to the Syrian users as well as to other Arab and non-Western readers. Translating and conveying these texts was complicated by the more or less intentional presence of several uncodified vernacular and creative forms. How to represent bivalent and uncodified vernacular written texts? A similar question was raised by Eid (2002), with reference to Egyptian women writers’ hybrid practices. As it emerged from my study, such a question is all the more relevant in the analysis of social media hybrid practices in a context of sociopolitical upheaval. Reinforcing Otsuji and Pennycook’s (2014: 85) argument that hybridity should be seen “not so much as convergent multilingualism but rather as emerging difference”, the texts analyzed on Syrian activists’ social media are not simply the combination of preexisting convergent norms, and their divergent nature is at the essence of their social and political power. Rendering the complexity of the metaphors and the creative language was vital to show the “agency” (Al Zidjaly 2019a, 2019b; Eid 2002) of their users and to emphasize “the emergence of structure out of agency” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 7). Traditional methods of transliteration and transcription fail to capture the social function of these texts. Additionally, transcription is unviable due to the lack of oral records, hence my suggestion of transcripteration as a local and contextsensitive practice to translate hybridity. This practice requires an understanding of the positions of the speakers as well as what they are trying to do through their social media practices in order to make their voices and identities visible. The integration of ethnographic methods with “systematic observation” in the analysis of social media texts, as advocated by Androutsopoulos (2008), is vital for the contemporary Arabic sociolinguist in the effort to “reconstruct the writer’s intention” (Eid 2002: 212). In conclusion, this work contributed to an understanding of the relationship between language and identity in an Arabic social media context through the lens of hybridity. Hybridity was envisaged as a constantly dynamic process, tied to and regulated by the symbolic function of linguistic resources, anchored to sociopolitical contexts and discourses. An analysis of hybrid social media practices allowed to see how identities emerge, are redefined, and erased through language and constitutes an example of how contemporary sociolinguistic theories and concepts can be applied to navigate the complex dynamics of language and identity in an Arabic context. Such a contribution, however, is not unidirectional. While new analytical tools can inform Arabic sociolinguistic investigation, Arabic social media contexts also offer a privileged standpoint for the study of language and society. Despite the deterioration of the sociopolitical conditions in the Arab world and the increased digital control and repression of social movements, young Arabs’ engagement on social media in 2011 has shown that norms and behaviors that appeared to be very stable and irreversible can, in fact, be subverted. The Arab Springs and social media have represented a point of no return for researchers interested in language in the Arab world. It is the responsibility of scholars of language and society to embrace such a change in its complexity and explore new ways to yield visibility to it.

144  Conclusions

Notes 1 The identification of historical phases within longitudinal case studies has been previously emphasized by Al Zidjaly through the notion of cycles of discourse (Al Zidjaly 2015; Scollon 2001) and, in the context of digital activism, through the term chronotopic discourses (Al Zidjaly 2019b). 2 The use of the Syrian vernacular as a marker of collective dissident identities is consistent with a trend, documented in Bassiouney’s (2018) edited volume, in which dialects are used across different sociolinguistic landscapes as a resource of identity performance. 3 The term sociolinguistics of hybridity is inspired by Blommaert’s (2010) “sociolinguistics of globalization” and “sociolinguistics of mobility”.

Appendix

Comment 1 ‫هههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههههه‬ Hahahahahaha [Ha 110x] July 25, 2012 at 1:59pm · Like Comment 2 ‫ههههههههههه حلوة‬ hahahahaha ḥelwe hahahahaha beautiful July 25, 2012 at 2:00pm · Like Comment 3 ‫انتها مفعوال‬ . . . ‫قرد وال قرد وال‬ qird-u-la qird-u-la . . . intaha maf‛ōla ‘qird-u-la’ lost its effect July 25, 2012 at 2:00pm · Like Comment 4 ‫استنى شوي بتالقي البوطي صار يقاقي‬ istanna šway btlā’i l-Būṭī ṣār yqāqī 😊 Give it some time and you’ll hear al-Būṭī start clucking too July 25, 2012 at 2:00pm · Like Comment 5 ‫هيدون مقاقاتن مو طائفية هيدون مقاقاتن متل ماقلت تعيت اللي بقاقي ما يالقي‬ haydon muqāqāton mu ṭā’ifiye haydon muqāqāton mitl ma ’әlәt ta‘it ’yilli byqāqī ma ylāqī Their clucking is not sectarian. That’s the clucking of those who cluck without achieving (Or: They’re not trying to be sectarian, they’re just mindless hens) July 25, 2012 at 2:00pm · Like · 1

146  Appendix Comment 6 ‫نص سوريا بيقاقي‬. noṣṣ sūryā byqāqī Half of Syria is clucking July 25, 2012 at 2:01pm · Like · 1 Comment 7 ‫نشاهلل بكرا بدن يقاقو ما يالقو‬.. nšaḷḷa bukra biddon yqāqū ma ylāqū Hopefully soon they’ll cluck without achieving anything July 25, 2012 at 2:01pm · Like Comment 8 ‫ههههههههه وهللا لحتى يعوو كمان‬ hahahahaha waḷḷa la-ḥatta ya‘ōō kamān Let them [cluck] to exhaustion hahahaha July 25, 2012 at 2:02pm · Like Comment 9 (‫يبدولي ان البطه بيحب الجاج (بق بق بييييييييييق‬ yabdūlī ’anna l-baṭṭa byḥibb il-ğāğ biq biq bīīīīīīq it seems to me that the duck loves the chicken quack quack quaaaaack July 25, 2012 at 2:02pm · Like Comment 10 ً ‫ وبدهم يقاقو وما يالقو قريبا‬. . . . ‫عم يقاقو‬ ʻam yqāqū . . . . u-biddon yqāqū u-ma ylāqū qarīban They’re clucking . . . . Let them cluck, they’ll be defeated soon anyways July 25, 2012 at 2:02pm · Like Comment 11 ‫ههههههه واللي بضحك أكتر ترجمة البوست من بينغ‬ u-’yilli byḍaḥḥik ’aktar tarğmet al-bōst mn bing ha [x7] and what’s even funnier is the Bing’s translation of the post [laughter] [the commenter posts the following Bing translation, which is nonsense. She may do so to emphasize the satirical tone of the SU].1 My brother baddak atberha. regards it as sectarian. Baddak atberha . . . considers charm As with level atberha Xu. . . I’d like to understand why each army to bitalawa aldnia bikakwa. . . ??!! You meant Lech. . . ??!! Army to biamlwa aid bikakwa Homs interview. . . Aleppo bikakwa. . . In idleb bikakwa. . . You even sham bikakwa!!

Appendix  147 Lech mean. . . ??!! A form of futuwwa began are squeaky Poti.. !! Any of the halnzam Poti AZA Mo sectarian.. !! No BAS shobdk balhaki Xie. . . Uncle ykakwa. . . Uncle ykakwa, maam they meet Comment 12 ‫يقاقو عليهن الكالب انشاهلل‬ yqāqū ‘alēhon l-klāb inšaḷḷa I hope the dogs cluck at them2 July 25, 2012 at 2:02pm · Like · 1 Comment 13 ‫ تحدبداً بالميدان‬..‫شكلك ما انتبهت على شهود العيان اللي بتالقيهم بعد التفجير مباشارة بالشارع‬ šaklak ma ntabahәt ‘ala šuhūd al-‘ayān ’yilli btlā’īhon ba‘d t-tafğīr mubāšaratan b-š-šāra‘.. taḥdīdan b-l-mīdān It looks like you didn’t pay attention to the eyewitnesses you find on the street immediately after an explosion.. particularly in the Midan neighborhood of Damascus3 July 25, 2012 at 2:03pm · Like · 2 Comment 14 😊 July 25, 2012 at 2:04pm · Like Comment 15 ‫هيمقا قات الموت متل صحوة الموت‬ hay-muqāqāt l-mōt mitl ṣaḥwat l-mōt those are deathly clucks, like the wake of death July 25, 2012 at 2:04pm · Like Comment 16 ‫بدهم يبيضو‬ biddon ybayyḍo they’re gonna lay eggs soon July 25, 2012 at 2:05pm · Like Comment 17 ‫من جماااعتوووو‬ mn ğamāāā‘tōōōō they’re with him Comment 18 ‫قاقي قاقي وين ما رحتي الجيش الحر وراكي‬ qāqi qāqi wēn mā roḥti l-ğēš l-ḥorr warāki

148  Appendix cluck cluck, wherever you go, the Free Syrian Army is following you July 25, 2012 at 2:05pm · Like · 1 Comment 19 ‫ بس وحياة عينك يا دومري بدهون يقاقو ما يالقو‬,‫نحنا منئائي وهنن بقاقو‬ naḥna mn’ā’ī u-hinnen byqāqū, bass u-ḥyāt ‘ēnak yā dōmari biddon yqāqū ma ylāqū We luk and they cluck, but I tell you, Domary, I promise, they can cluck as much as they want but they’ll lose soon July 25, 2012 at 2:05pm · Like Comment 20 ‫بقاقوا حتى شهود العيان من االهالي‬ ḥatta šuhūd l-‘ayān mn l-ahāli byqāqū even neighborhood eyewitnesses are clucking along July 25, 2012 at 2:06pm · Like · 1 Comment 21 ‫عبيحكيو بالفصحى انت شو فهمك عدم المؤاخذة‬ ‘abyḥkū b-l-fuṣḥā šu fahmak ‘adam il-mu’āḫaḏa They’re just speaking standard Arabic. Why, what did you think it was? July 25, 2012 at 2:06pm · Like Comment 22 ‫ حتى بشار دجاجة بس متخفي بشكل بطة‬. . . . . . ‫يمكن النهم دجاج‬ yumkin li-’annon dağāğ . . . . . . . . . . .ḥatta bašār dağāğe bass mtaḫaffi b-šakl baṭṭa Maybe because they’re chickens . . .  Bashar’s chicken too, but dressed up like a duck July 25, 2012 at 2:06pm · Like Comment 23 www.facebook.com/Sham.Tanks Manage ‫مغسل ومشحم دمشق الدولي للدبابات‬ Organization ‎‫مغسل ومشحم دمشق الدولي للدبابات‬‎’s photo. ‫مغسل ومشحم دمشق الدولي للدبابات‬ Like Page 1,369 Likes Comment 24 Amera Ahmad www.facebook.com/Moonmwr ‫دعم اعجاب واليك و شير و مشاركة و اللي بدك‬ 😊 ? like ? like ? like

Appendix  149 Da‘am i‘ğāb u-lāyk u-šēr u-mušāraka u-’yilli biddak [smile emoticon] like ? like ? like? Support, like, lāyk, share, šēr, and whatever else you want [smile emoticon] ? like ? like ? like? Comment 25 ‫قائفية‬ qā’ifiye Qāftarianism [pun on qāf sound] July 25, 2012 at 2:09pm · Like · 4 Comment 26 ‫بتريد نحزف حرف القاف من األبجدية العربية ؟؟؟؟‬ btrīd naḥzif al-qāf min al-abğadiyya l-‘arabiyya ???? do you want us to delete the qāf from the Arabic alphabet ???? July 25, 2012 at 2:09pm · Like Comment 27 ‫ يلي‬%5 ‫ مو عيب تكون نص سورية بتقاقي؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟ بسورية‬. . . ‫بيقاقوا فقط‬ ‫مو عيب تكون نص سورية بتقاقي؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟؟ بسورية‬ . . . ‫ يلي بيقاقوا فقط‬%5 mū ‘īb tkūn noṣṣ sūrya btqāqī?????????????? bi-sūrya 5% yallī byqāqū faqaṭ How shameful to hear half of Syria clucking??????????????????? In all of Syria only 5% [genuinely] pronounces the letter qāf July 25, 2012 at 2:10pm · Like · 2 Comment 28 ‫و الحشا كالمك مدوزن‬ u-l-ḥašā kalāmak mudawzan What you wrote is exactly right July 25, 2012 at 2:10pm · Like Comment 29 ‫قررررررررررد مين ميقلك هالحكي ؟؟؟؟؟‬ qirrrrrrrrrd mīn miqillak ha-l-ḥakī ????? qirrrrrrrd who tells you that?????? July 25, 2012 at 2:11pm · Like Comment 30 ‫مشان تعرف انو الدنيا بخيـــــر‬ mšān t‘arif ’innu d-dunyā biḫayr So you know that the world is well So you know that Dunya TV is well July 25, 2012 at 2:13pm · Like

150  Appendix Comment 31 ‫ألن القانون يحمي المغفلين خيي‬ li-’anna l-qānūn yaḥmī l-muġaffilīn ḫayy because the law protects the gullible, brother July 25, 2012 at 2:13pm · Like Comment 32 ‫النظام طائفي ولكن هل تقبل أنت أن تكون طائفي؟؟النظام مجرم هل ترضى أن تكون أنت كجرم؟؟ النظام‬ ‫ظالم هل تقبل أن تكون أنت ظالم؟؟‬ an-niẓām ṭā’ifyy wa-lakin hal taqbal ’anta ’an takūn ṭā’ifyy?? An-niẓām muğrim hal tarḍā ’an takūn ’anta ka-muğrim?? An-niẓām ẓālim hal taqbal ’an takūn ’anta ẓālim?? The regime is sectarian. However, would you allow yourself to be sectarian?? The regime is criminal, would you be ok being a criminal?? The regime is oppressive, would you let yourself be oppressive?? July 25, 2012 at 2:14pm · Like Comment 33 ‫انا بقول حتى البوطي عم بقاقي‬ ’ana b’ūl ḥatta l-Būṭī ‘am byqāqī I say even al-Būtī is clucking now July 25, 2012 at 2:14pm · Like Comment 34 ‫قاقي يا بطة قاقي الجيش الحر وراكي‬ qāqi ya baṭṭa qāqi l-ğēš l-ḥorr warāki cluck, duck, cluck, the FSA is coming to get you July 25, 2012 at 2:16pm · Like Comment 35 ‫هللا يسامحك يا دومري ما رح يلحقوا يالقوا‬ ’aḷḷa ysāmḥak ya dōmari ma raḥ ylḥa’u ylā’u Bless you Domary, they won’t make it July 25, 2012 at 2:19pm · Like Comment 36 ‫😊بربي حكيك نظامي‬ bi-rabbī ḥakyak niẓāmī [grinning face emoticon] You are absolutely right July 25, 2012 at 2:19pm · Like Comment 37 ‫هدول شفتن بس بالميدان العسكري عبيحكي حلبي ماشفتو واللي عم يحكي حوراني ماشفتو مابتالئي نشاهلل بتآئي‬ ‫؟؟؟ ?واللي عبيحكي حوووومصي‬ . . . ‫ماشفتو‬ ‫وتخراك تشوفك حية تاكلك‬

Appendix 151 nšaḷḷa btā’i u-ma btlā’i hadōl šufton bass bi-l-mīdān l-‘askari ‘abyḥki ḥalabi ma šufto u-’yilli ‘am yḥkī ḥōrānī ma šufto u-’yilli ‘abyḥki ḥōōōōōōmṣī mā šufto. . .??? Tšūfak ḥaya taklak u-taḫrāk I hope you luck and lose. You saw those, but didn’t you see those in the army who talk with an Aleppo accent? And those who talk with an Hawrani accent?????? May a snake see you, eat you and shit you out July 25, 2012 at 2:21pm · Like · 1 Comment 38 ‫ههههههه اكلين قاق‬ hahahahaha ’aklīn qāq hahahaha they eat cluck July 25, 2012 at 2:24pm · Like Comment 39 ‫الحقيقة يا دومري ضبينا الشتوي وعن جد نحنا مقطوعين من المته‬ al-ḥa’ī’a ya dōmari ḍabbēna š-šitwyy u-‘an ğadd naḥna ma’ṭū‘īn mn l-matte The truth, Domary, is that winter is over and we’re out of matte July 25, 2012 at 2:24pm · Like Comment 40 ‫حتى مايصير‬ . . . ‫كل الموجودين حالياا في الجيش واالمن علوية اوووووو من الشوايااا من دير الزور‬ ‫ظلم نازحين‬ ‫لم يتركوا احدا قد ينشق عنهم ويطعنهم في الصميم‬ . . . ‫لم يتركوا سنية في الجيش‬ ‫ عسى هللا يخسفهم‬..‫كلهم بطانة بعض‬ kull l-mawğūdīn ḥāliyyan fī l-ğayš wa-l-’amn ‘alawiye ’awwww kam iš-šawāyā min dēr ez-Zōr. . . ḥatta ma yṣīr ẓulm nāziḥīn lam yatrukū sunniye fī-l- ğayš . . . lam yatrukū aḥadan qad yanqaš ‘anhum wa yaṭ‘anhum fī l-ṣamīm kulluhum biṭāna ba‘ḍ.. ‘asā aḷḷāh yaḫfashum All those currently in the army and the security are Alawites or some Shawāyā from Deir ez-Zōr . . . in order to avoid any supremacy of the Sunnis over they didn’t leave any Sunnis in the army. they didn’t allow anyone who could defect and stab them in the back; they’re all from the same group.. May God destroy them4 July 25, 2012 at 2:32pm · Like Comment 41 :‫صدق من غنى وقال‬ The one who wrote and sang this song was truthful www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW-2mOYILvI ‫طيب اذا منرجع بتوعدنا تسمعنا؟‬ ‫ياهلل اسمع هادي مطالبنا‬ . . . ‫ماشي‬ ‫بدنا اصابع نصر نرفعها فوق القصر‬ ‫بدنا الصبح والعصرتمرق وتفقدنا‬ ‫ويرجع نهر بردى‬..‫بدنا دم الشهداء‬

152  Appendix ‫ليش كنت تدبحنا‬..‫والقصة مع سردا‬ ‫ نزلت بكل جمعة‬..‫وتلم كل دمعة‬ ‫وكل اصبع بشمعة تضوي لوجهتنا‬ ..‫وبدلنا اللمزة‬ ..‫والقاف بالهمزة‬ ..‫وبدلنا اللمزة‬ ..‫والقاف بالهمزة‬ ‫ورجعلنا حمزة وهاجر واخوتنا‬ ‫حبل الصدق مدو‬..‫ومن كل بلد ردو‬ ‫ولسا الشعب بدو ترحل وتتركنا‬ ṭayyeb iza mnirğa‘ btw‘adna tisma‘na? Alright, if we return do you promise you will listen to us? māši . . . yaḷḷāh sma‘ hādi maṭālibna Okay, listen, these are our demands bidna nirfa‘ ’aṣābi‘ naṣәr nirfa‘ha fō’ il-aṣәr We want to make the sign of victory above the Presidential palace bidna ṣ-ṣobḥ u-l-‘aṣәr timru’ u-tif’idnā We want the morning and the evening to pass and miss us bidna damm iš-šuhadā’ u-yrğa‘ nahr baradā We want the martyrs’ blood and the river Barada to come back u-l-’iṣṣa ma‘ sirdā . . . lēš kinәt tidbaḥna And the story with the village of Sarda, why were you slaughtering us u-tlim kil dam‘a.. nizlet bikill-ğim‘a And you pick up every tear.. that was dropped every Friday kil aṣba‘ bi-šama‘ā tiḍwi la-wiğhetna And every finger a candle lighting our faces baddilna l-lamze Replace the backbiter5 u-l-qāf bi-l-hamze And the qaf with hamza (X2) rağği‘lna ḥamze u-Hajar u-’iḫūtna So return Hamza and ḥağar and our brothers to us6 u-mn kill balad riddō ḥabl iṣ-ṣada’ middō And from all parts they returned and outstretched the rope of truth u-lessa iš-ša‘b biddo tirḥal u-titrekna And the people still want you to depart and leave us ‫ اعتصام حمص اليوم الثالث أغنية أصابع النصر رائعة‬7–1–2012.7 July 25, 2012 at 2:32pm · Like · 1 Comment 42 ‫اصال اذا بدون يعملو مقابلة مارح يجيبو اال شبيح منون ومتلهون‬ ’aṣlan iza bәddon ya‘mlo mu’ābale ma raḥ yiğībo ’illa šabbīḥ minnon u-mitlon To begin with, if they pick someone to interview they won’t bring in someone who isn’t one of their own thugs July 25, 2012 at 2:36pm · Like

Appendix  153 Comment 43 ‫يقاقوا أد ما بدن بس ال يبيضوا مو ناقصنا زيادة عدد منهم‬ yqāqū ’add ma biddon bass la ybayyḍo mu na’iṣna zyāde ‘adad minnon They can cluck as much as they want, as long as they don’t lay any eggs. We don’t need any more of them July 25, 2012 at 2:37pm · Like · 1 Comment 44 ‫ انا شفت مقابلة مع واحد عم يحكي حلبي‬..‫مو صحيح‬ mu ṣaḥīḥ.. ana šәfәt m’ābale ma‘ wāḥed ‘am yḥki ḥalabi That’s not correct.. I saw an interview with one of them speaking Aleppan July 25, 2012 at 2:37pm · Like · 1 Comment 45 ‫القلب داعيلك‬،،،،،، ‫روح‬ . . . . . . . ‫ وايدين ما عد كتبت‬، ‫ خصوصا بوقت كتير أفواه ساكتة‬، ‫هللا يزيدك يا دومري‬ ’aḷḷa yzīdak ya dōmari, ḫuṣūṣan b-wa’әt ktīr afwāh sākte, u-īdēn ma‘ad katbet. . . . . . . . rūḥ,,,,,l-’elb da‘īlak May God grant you plenty Domary, especially at a time when many mouths are silent and hands aren’t writing, heartfelt prayers to you July 25, 2012 at 2:40pm · Like Comment 46 ‫قااق قااق قااق‬ qāāq qāāq qāāq quaack quaack quaack July 25, 2012 at 2:48pm · Like Comment 47 ‫بس بدون ظلم‬ ‫اللهجه تبعيتهم كتيييييييير حلوة‬ ‫يا اخي فيها جئاره كتير‬ ‫قول والك قر اعترف قرد رفقاتك تحت بالقبو قالوا وقروا واعترفوا‬ bass bidūn ẓulm l-lahğe taba‘ethum ktīīīīīr ḥelwe ya aḫī fīha ğa’ara ktīr qūl u-lāk qur a‘tarif qәrd rifqātak taḥt bil-qabū qālū u qarrū u-‘tarfū7 But to be fair Their accent is sooooo beautiful There’s so much effrontery in it, brother You! Tell the truth, your friends downstairs spilled the beans and confessed everything July 25, 2012 at 2:55pm · Like · 1 Comment 48 ‫ليش بس القصة عيلي بقاقو‬ : ‫عد معي على أصابيعك‬

‫‪154  Appendix‬‬ ‫‪ -١‬بتلف يمين بتلف شمال بتالقي إيران بوشك‬ ‫مننقتل بسالحن‬ ‫‪ -١‬حزب الالت مو ناوي يحل عنا ليقرضنا كلنا‬ ‫‪ -٣‬العراق يا أمة محمد ويلي حضنا أبناءها ‪ ٩‬سنين وعطيناهون عيونا كرمالن وما فتحنا تمنا بحرف ‪،،‬‬ ‫كمان سكروا حدودن بوشنا‬ ‫مين سكرها ؟؟ الحكومة يلي بتنفد ع إيران وحزب الالت “ فهمكن كفاية‪”:‬‬ ‫‪ -٤‬بتالقي ناس سوريين ومن نص حومص وقت اجتاح النظام حومص والناس اندبحت بالميات وهالناس‬ ‫عمتقول‬ ‫”تقبر قلبي يا ماهر على هالطلة ‪ ،‬ونطالب بدخول الجيش وسحق الناس بحومص والضرب بيد من‬ ‫حديد”‬ ‫وهدول الناس نفسن ها ويلي عاساس سوريين ها ما بتالقيهن االحيموتوا من البكي يا حرام كرمال البحرين‬ ‫وعلى سب وسب وسب ووين اإلنسانية وين منظمة حقوق اإلنسان “ وفهمكن كفاية ”‬ ‫‪ -٥‬بيطلعلك عراقي من هدول تبع إيران وحزب الالت “ كمان فهمكن كفاية “ وبيتهم اي واحد مع الثورة‬ ‫بالعمالة والخيانة لصالح أميركا ونسيان حبيب قلب الماما تبعو انو العراق اندبحت على يد اميركا‬ ‫بمساعدة من هيك شكيالت وانو هدول الشكيالت كانوا رح يسجدوا ألميركا اال شوي النو خلصتن من‬ ‫صدام هللا يرحمو ياااااااارب‬ ‫وشو بدي عد لعد بكفي هيك وال كمل ؟؟!!!!!‬ ‫ليش بس القصة عيلي بقاقو‬ ‫‪lēš bass l-qiṣṣa ‘ayialli byqāqū‬‬ ‫?‪But why only the story about them clucking‬‬ ‫‪ :‬عد معي على أصابيعك‬ ‫‪‘odd ma‘ī ‘alā ’aṣābī‘ak:‬‬ ‫‪Count with me‬‬ ‫‪ -١‬بتلف يمين بتلف شمال بتالقي إيران بوشك‬ ‫‪1- btliff yamīn btliff šimāl btlā’ī Iran bi-wišk‬‬ ‫‪You turn right and left and you find Iran on your face‬‬ ‫مننقتل بسالحن‬ ‫‪mnәn’atel b-silāḥon‬‬ ‫‪We are killed by their weapons‬‬ ‫‪ -١‬حزب الالت مو ناوي يحل عنا ليقرضنا كلنا‬ ‫‪1- ḥizb l-lāt mu nāwy yḥill ‘anna la-y’rәḍna kilna‬‬ ‫‪Hizbollah won’t leave us until we’re extinct‬‬ ‫‪ -٣‬العراق يا أمة محمد ويلي حضنا أبناءها ‪ ٩‬سنين‬ ‫‪3- al-‘irāq ya ’immet Muḥammad u-’yilli ḥaḍna ’abnāha 9 snīn‬‬ ‫‪And Iraq, for God’s sake, whose children we hosted for nine years‬‬ ‫“ مين سكرها ؟؟ الحكومة يلي بتنفد ع إيران وحزب الالت “ فهمكن كفاية‬ ‫”‪mīn sakkara?? l-ḥukūme ’yilli btnaffid ‘a ’irān u-ḥizb l-lāt “fahimkon kifāye‬‬ ‫‪And who shut them?? The government that executes on behalf of Iran and Hezbol‬‬‫)‪lah (enough said‬‬ ‫وعطيناهون عيونا كرمالن وما فتحنا تمنا بحرف ‪ ،،‬كمان سكروا حدودن بوشنا‬ ‫‪u-‘aṭēnāhon ‘yūnna kermālon u-ma fataḥna timmna b-ḥarf,, kamān sakkaru‬‬ ‫‪ḥudūdon b-wišna‬‬ ‫‪and gave everything to without a single complaint, and they shut their borders in‬‬ ‫‪our faces..‬‬ ‫‪ -٤‬بتالقي ناس سوريين ومن نص حومص وقت اجتاح النظام حومص والناس اندبحت بالميات وهالناس‬ ‫عمتقول‬

Appendix 155 4- btlā’ī nās sūriyīn u-mn noṣṣ Ḥōmṣ waә’t iğtāḥ in-niẓām Ḥōmṣ, w-in-nās indabaḥet bi-l-miyāt u-ha-n-nās ‘amt’ūl You would find Syrians in Homs, when the regime invaded Homs, that were slaughtered in hundreds, saying “ ‫ ونطالب بدخول الجيش وسحق الناس بحومص والضرب بيد من حديد‬، ‫“ تقبر قلبي يا ماهر على هالطلة‬ “toqbur qelbi ya Māher ‘ala ha-ṭ-ṭalle, wa nuṭālib bi-duḫūl il-ğayš w saḥaq an-nās bi-Ḥōmṣ wa ḍ-ḍarb bi-yad min ḥadīd” “Hail you, Maher, we demand the intervention of the Syrian army to crack down on the people in Homs heavily”8 ‫وهدول الناس نفسن ها ويلي عاساس سوريين ها ما بتالقيهن االحيموتوا من البكي يا حرام كرمال البحرين‬ ‫وعلى سب وسب وسب ووين‬ u-hadōl in-nās nafson ha-u-’yilli ‘asās sūriyīn ha ma btlā’īhon ’illa ḥaymūtu mn l-bakī ya ḥarām kermāl l-Baḥrēn u-‘as-sәbb u-sәbb u-sәbb u-wēn And those people are the same Syrians who you’ve always find shouting “Down with Bahrain, down with, down with, down with and where’s ”‫اإلنسانية وين منظمة حقوق اإلنسان “ وفهمكن كفاية‬ l-insāniye wēn “munaẓẓamat ḥuqūq al-’insān” u-fahimkon kifāye humanity gone, where’s the “Human Rights Organization” . . .  enough said ‫ بيطلعلك عراقي من هدول تبع إيران وحزب الالت “ كمان فهمكن كفاية “ وبيتهم اي واحد مع الثورة‬-٥ ‫بالعمالة والخيانة لصالح أميركا‬ 5. byṭla‘lak ‘irāqī mn hadōl taba‘ ’Irān u-ḥizb l-lāt “kamān fahimkon kifāye” u-byttahim ’ay wāḥed ma‘ s-sawra bi-l-‘omāle u-l-ḫyāne la-ṣāliḥ ’Amērka And you find an Iraqi, one of those who support Iran and Hizbollah (enough said), who accuses anyone who sides with the revolution of treason in favor of America, ‫ونسيان حبيب قلب الماما تبعو انو العراق اندبحت على يد اميركا بمساعدة من هيك شكيالت وانو هدول‬ ‫الشكيالت كانوا رح يسجدوا‬ u-nasyān ḥabīb ’elb la-māmā taba‘o ’innu l-‘Irāq indabaḥet ‘ala yad ’Amērka b-musā‘adet mn hēk šakīlāt u-’innu hadōl iš-šakīlāt u-’innu hadōl š-šakīlāt kānu raḥ ysğudu while forgetting, the poor mother’s soul, that Iraq was slaughtered by America with the help of those individuals and that those very individuals were about to kneel ‫ألميركا اال شوي النو خلصتن من صدام هللا يرحمو ياااااااارب‬ la-’Amērka ’illa šway la-’innu ḫallṣeton mn Ṣaddām aḷḷa yrḥamo yaaaaaaaa rabb America because it freed them from Saddam Hussein, May he rest in peace!!!!! !!!!!‫وشو بدي عد لعد بكفي هيك وال كمل ؟؟‬ u-šu biddi ‘odd la-‘odd bykaffi hēk wla kammil??!!!!!! Do I need to keep counting or is that enough??!!!! July 25, 2012 at 3:05pm · Like · 4 Comment 49 ‫الهي بينقرضو بئاا‬,,,‫لك يخرب بيتن طلع حرف القاف من عيونا كتر مامنسمعو‬ lak yḫrab bēton ṭala‘ ḥarf l-qāf mn ‘ayūna ma mnisma‘ō,,,ilhi byn’arḍū ba’aa F* them, we have the letter qaf coming out of our ears, we’ve heard it so much. About time they went extinct already July 25, 2012 at 3:07pm · Like · 1

156  Appendix Comment 50 ! . . . ‫ و عم يقاقي‬..‫لككككك أناااا ما فلجني اال مواطن بريئ من الميدان‬ !***** ‫يحرئ ديبن شو‬ lakkkkk anaaaa ma fallağni ’illa mwāṭin barī’ mn l-midān.. u-‘am yqāqī . . . ! yaḥri’ dībon šū ***** ! Dudeeee I was shocked by an innocent citizen from the Midan neighborhood in Damascus.. clucking just like them! God what an *****! July 25, 2012 at 3:11pm · Like · 1 Comment 51 ‫وهللا نفس السؤال خطرلي‬ waḷḷa nafs is-su’āl ḫaṭarli The same question came to my mind July 25, 2012 at 3:20pm · Like Comment 52 ‫هههههههههههههههه بقاقوا النو هي هيي الهجه االمنيه ليكون عبد الحليم خدام بقاقي وطالس بقاقي وهداك‬ ‫اليوم طلع عقيد بالقصر من بيت زهر الدين درزي كان عم يقاقي روح احضر االخوين ملص عملو‬ ‫اسكتش انو محقق عم يحكي علوي عم يعزب واحد عم يحكي بالئاف وباالخر طلع المحقق سني‬ ‫والضحيه علوي هههههههههههههههه‬ hahaha [x16] byqāqū la-’innu hiye hey l-lahğe l-’amniye la-ykūn ‘abdul ḥalīm ḫaddām byqāqī u-ṭlāss byqāqī u-hadāk l-yōm ṭala‘ ‘aqīd bi-l-’aṣәr mn bēt zahr ed-dīn dәrzī kān ‘am yqāqī rūḥ ḥḍar l-’aḫawēn mlaṣṣ ‘amlo sketch ’innu muḥa’’i’ ‘am yḥki ‘alawi ‘am y‘azzib wāḥәd ‘am yḥki bi-l-’āf u-bi-l-āḫәr ṭala‘ l-muḥa’’i’ sәnni w-ḍ-ḍaḥiye ‘alawi hahaha [x17] hahaha [x16] they cluck because it’s the security jargon as Abdul Halim Khaddam clucks, and Tlass clucks and that colonel of the Druze Zahr el Din’s family was clucking too. Go watch the Mlass brothers’ sketch in which a police man speaks in Alawite torturing another guy who speaks with glottal stops and in the end it turns out that the policeman is Sunni and the victim is Alawite hahaha [x17] July 25, 2012 at 3:22pm · Like · 1 Comment 53 [same commenter as 52] ‫برافو عليكون خربو الثوره لقلكون لهيك ضل لهال قاعد ع قبولنا النو رح تضلوا هيك وكلكون تربايه النظام‬ ‫لالسف ديكتاتوريات صغيره وتافهه‬ bravo ‘alēkon ḫarribo s-sawra la-’illkon la-hēk ḍall la-hallā’ ’ā‘id ‘a ’ulūbna la-’innu raḥ tḍallo hēk u-kilkon tәrbāyet in-niẓām lil-’asaf diktatoryāt ẓġīre u-tāfhe Way to go y’all. Destroy the revolution. Because of you Bashar al Asad is still in power, because you it won’t change. You’re all children of the regime, unfortunately. Insignificant little dictatorships July 25, 2012 at 3:24pm · Like

Appendix 157 Comment 54 ..‫حرف القاف هو دليل على تمسكهم بثوابت اللغة العربية‬ ḥarf al-qāf huwa dalīl ‘alā tamassukihim bi-ṯawābit al-luġa al-‘arabiyya.. The letter qāf is evidence for their command of the fundamentals of the Arabic language July 25, 2012 at 3:32pm · Like Comment 55 ‫حبيبتي فسريلي استفساري قبل تعليقك بخمس تعليقات‬ !!‫شو رأيك كمان بالموضوع ؟؟؟‬ ‫بس ما بعتب عليكي أنا كنت متلك تمام ضد يلي بيعترفوا بهالحقيقة كمان مشان ثورتنا تنجح‬ ‫بس أي عاقل في شوية مخ بيفهم يلي عم يصير‬ ‫وانت نفسك مارح تطولي لحتى تآمني وتصدقي وتحكي متلنا‬ ḥabibtī fassirīlī stifsārī ’abl ta‘lī’ek b-ḫams ta‘lī’āt šu rā’yek kamān b-l-mawḍū‘??? bass ma ba‘tab ‘alēki ’ana kint mitlek tamām ḍidd ’yilli by‘tarfu b-hā-l-ḥa’ī’a kamān mšān sawretna tinğaḥ. bass ’ayy ‘ā’il fī šweiyyet muḫ byfham ’yilli ‘am yṣīr. w-inti nafsek ma raḥ ṭawli l-ḥatta t’ammani u-tṣaddi’ī u-tәḥki mitәlna [Name of commenter 52], my dear, look at my interpretation five comments above. What else do you think about this topic? I don’t blame you, I was exactly like you against those who acknowledge the truth so that our revolution succeeds but any rational person with a brain understands what’s going on and you, too, it won’t take you long before you get it, and start talking like us Comment 56 >>‫كل هالشي من المتة فيها فيتامين