Stereotyped Representation of the Foreigner in Egyptian Cinema: A Phono-Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Study and Corpus

Hassan, Ashraf (2020). Stereotyped Representation of the Foreigner in Egyptian Cinema: A Phono-Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Study and Corpus. (Dissertation, Universität Bayreuth, Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät)

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This dissertation aims to describe how the foreigner is linguistically represented in classical Egyptian cinema from its beginning in the 1920s to the mid-1960s and, hence, to determine to what extent this representation is stereotyped. The study is based on a detailed analysis at various linguistic levels—phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical—of a corpus of dialogues that involve actors and actresses who play the role of foreigner—namely Greek, Turk, and Italian—and interact with other actors in Egyptian Arabic. The study is divided into two parts: the first gives a historical account of the birth of Egyptian cinema, the three foreign communities subject of this study, and the social, economic, and cultural roles they played in Egypt’s modern history and its cinematic art. Besides, it introduces the theoretical and methodological frame of the study together with the introduction of its corpus. The second section of the study is the applied study, where I carried out a systematic investigation on phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical levels of the salient features that characterize the registers of the foreigners throughout the corpus. The linguistic analysis of the representation of foreigners in Egyptian cinema reveals a noticeable variation on the three linguistic levels. This variation is due to two main factors: a) the interference of L1 in L2 (EA), including broken language; and b) the simplification of the register, which is probably based on the limited input provided by the Egyptian interlocutors interacting in the form of foreigner talk with the foreigners. The analysis of the corpus demonstrates typical characteristics of a speaker of EA as a second language, especially on the phonological and lexical levels. However, some of the features that characterize the speech of the foreigner are more prominent than others, even to the extent of being ‘exaggerated’, while some others cannot be explained on the same basis. Moreover, a conservative lexical behavior suggests the existence of a common register used in the interactions Egyptian-Foreigner and Foreigner-Foreigner that passes from generation to generation, but also a fixed image of how the foreigners speak in EA that was stabilized in the Egyptians’ collective imaginary. Intriguingly, the registers of the three EA-speaking foreign communities display a clear simplification and many shared traits, despite their belonging to different linguistic backgrounds. Such shared traits suggest the possibility of language acquisition with limited input, based on the way the Egyptians were interacting with them, i.e. the foreigner talk, given the fact that many Egyptians were acquainted with the foreigners’ languages to different extents, as reflected in the movies themselves. By the same token, the linguistic representation of the foreigners in Egyptian cinema, as displayed in the corpus and investigated in this study, exhibits many typical traits of a stereotype, especially the stability, conformity, and reduction in representing the foreigner. This stereotyping goes beyond the linguistic representation. It is evident in the names of the foreign characters, their profession, or their social status.

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