Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

Arabia, and net preference for French in the three Maghreb countries and
the Comoros. Egypt and Tunisia are worth observing because of the changes
we will see later during the revolution. In terms of preference of language
interface, users in Egypt split evenly between the use of Arabic (49.88%) and
English (48.98%) interfaces (similar to Jordan, Libya and Iraq). Tunisian users
showed a net preference for French interface (94.60%), then English (2.72%)
and finally Arabic (1.56%).
However, the language of the interface setting (only one language at a time)
doesn’t say much about the languages in which users are actually interacting
on Facebook or other social media 70 . In fact, thank to HTML and UNICODE,
browsers are now able to display text in virtually all the world languages.
“Facebookers practice a diversity” or a mix of languages which “challenges
conventional notions of multilingualism as a combination of two or more
monolingualisms” 71 .
Revolution Promoting Local Language
It is not a surprise that language played an important role during the social
and political uprising in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as in other countries of
MENA. Some slogans chanted by demonstrators made the tour of the planet
and became symbols or songs and are repeated by demonstrators around the
world. Remember: “Ben Ali, dégage!” in Tunisia, or “The people want the
regime to fall” طاقسا ديري بعشلا)‏ ‏,(ماظنلا repeated in Tunis, Cairo, Damascus,
Benghazi, and Sana’a. Signs made and handled by protestors in Cairo streets
were in Arabic mainly, but also in English, French, and Hebrew 72 .
On the social media front, linguistic creativity was positively impacted by the
uprising. We are making the hypothesis here that due to the revolution and the
need to reach out to a larger community on burning issues social media users used
local languages (Arabic), increasing the quantity of Arabic content published
online both on social media like Facebook and Twitter, and on regular websites.
This hypothesis is based on our observation of 1) the number of new websites
published in Arabic by newspapers, social movements, and government entities;
2) the number of social media users who are now writing in Arabic.
70
As demonstrated in http://www.languageonthemove.com/language-globalization/multilingualism-2-0,
blog posted on August 02, 2010 by Ingrid Piller.
71
Ibid.
72
See picture by glcarlstrom (Gregg Carlstrom) at http://yfrog.com/h3fbsbj with a slogan in Hebrew “Azov
Mubarak”, translated as “Leave, Mubarak”.
162