1 The sociolinguistic Profile of Tima Language . Nuba Mountains Languages Studies.pdf

Exploring the sociolinguistic profile of Tima in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan

Abdelrahim Hamid Mugaddam and Ashraf Kamal Abdelhay

1. Introduction

This paper discusses some of the defining features of the sociolinguistic situation of Tima in the Nuba Mountains situated within the larger national cultural order of Sudan. It attempts to answer two key questions: What is the nature of the verbal repertoires of the individuals in the community? Whether, and how, does Tima speech play a role in the production of an imagined sense of solidarity against the monoglot standard ideology of the State. The socioeconomically supported nationalist regime of language has significantly led to differentially distributed and valued sociolinguistic repertoires. We argue, however, that it has paradoxically resulted in the increasing ‘maintenance’ of the long subjugated linguistic practices in many parts of the Sudan, including the Tima of the Nuba Mountains. The sources of the data for the study are a linguistic survey triangulated with ethnographic observation and historical documentation of metapragmatic activities in Tima and Khartoum. The paper is structured into four parts: the first part is an introduction, the second part reviews the conceptual framework. The third part presents the findings of the linguistic survey, and it engages in a detailed discussion of the ongoing role of a translocal language planning body (Tima Language Committee) in the ideological enregistration of Tima speech with a new sociolinguistic profile. The paper concludes with an agenda for further research.

Abdelrahim Mugaddam & Ashraf Abdelhay 2

2. Conceptual background: the ideological value of sociolinguistic variation

Diversity as social meaning of linguistic variation has been the central attention of a number of interrelated research paradigms including quantitative sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov 1966), ethnographic sociolinguistics (e.g., Hymes 1974), interactional sociolinguistics (e.g., Gumperz 1968, 1982), linguistic anthropology in the semiotic mode (e.g., Silverstein 2003), and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1989). Labovian sociolinguistics is primarily concerned with the revealing of the mechanisms of linguistic change by focusing on the statistical correlation between socioeconomic variables (e.g., class and age) and patterns of linguistic variability (Aijón Oliva and Serrano 2012; Labov 1971, 1972a, 1972b; Meyerhoff 2006). Awareness of the socially ordered variation, which is a product of contact aided by a globalised political economy, is largely expected to result in the maintenance or the loss of (stereotyped) linguistic variants (for a discussion see Duchene & Heller 2007; Mufwene 2004; Nettle & Romaine 2000). In his classic study of Martha’s Vineyard, Labov (1972b) found that individuals use non-standard variants of certain phonological variables to mark their social identity as locals. Using the social network theory to study patterns of variation in Belfast, Lesley Milroy (1987) showed that persons who conduct their everyday social life within dense, multiplex sociolinguistic networks are more likely to maintain their normatively local form of speech.

A classic account by Trudgill (1972) of the urban dialect of Norwich which focused on variation along the dimension of sex showed that men might deploy more local-sounding, non-standard features since such a usage was believed to carry ‘covert prestige’ as strategy of constructing working-class solidarity. LePage and Tabouret-Keller’s (1985) study of the language situation in the Caribbean reconceptualised choices in a person’s repertoire as ‘acts of identity’. Integrating the quantitative and ethnographic perspectives in the study of the social order in a Detroit suburban high school, Eckert (2000) framed linguistic variation as ‘social practice’: ‘social’ in the sense that individuals embody norms, class-related ideologies, and trajectories, and ‘practice’ in the sense that it is through semiotic actions that different social categories of identification are created and reasserted. In other words, individuals’ varied linguistic repertoires perform the socio-linguistic order:

The social life of variation lies in the variety of individuals’ ways of participating in their communities — their ways of fitting in, and of making their mark — their ways of constructing meaning in their own lives. It lies in the day-to-day use and transformation of

The sociolinguistic profile of Tima 3

linguistic resources for local stylistic purposes, and its global significance lies in the articulation between these local purposes and larger patterns of ways of being in the world. (Eckert 2000: 1-2)

Ethnographic sociolinguistics in the Hymesian tradition is a significant multidisciplinary perspective that takes diversity/variation as its starting point (Hymes 1974, 1996; Blommaert 2010). For Hymes (1974, 1996), human history can be conceptualised as the history of diversity. The twin foundational theoretical principles of this paradigm is that all human societies have sociolinguistic systems, yet every linguistic system is socio-logically structured and patterned in specific way. And the exact nature of the functional organisation of linguistic forms in a society or any communi-cative event can only be understood through empirical and comparative inquiry. In this research tradition, the sources of inequality are the ways in which verbal forms are normatively and institutionally valued, stratified and distributed and access to them is controlled. Its package of conceptual and analytic toolkit developed from sociology and linguistics by Hymes and others includes, social stratification, norms, values, ideologies, performance, communicative competence, repertoires, genres, styles of speaking, speech events and speech acts (for definitions see Blommaert 2005, 2010; Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Hymes 1972, 1974, 1996; Saville-Troike 2003).

For Hymes (1996: 33), a repertoire comprises “a set of ways of speaking. Ways of speaking, in turn, comprise speech styles, on the one hand, and contexts of discourse, on the other, together with relations of appropriateness obtaining between styles and contexts” (emphasis in original). The principle of appropriateness focuses on the ranking and valuational orientations or attitudes towards linguistic resources in the person’s or group’s repertoires. It is the socioeconomic conditions which is the ultimate source of explanation and transformation of the structured hierarchy and inequality in use and access to the specialised communicative repertoires. The notion of ‘voice’ (Bakhtin 1981) in this paradigm is seen as a matter of access to the adequate sociolinguistic resources in society. More important, the focus here is not on ‘language’ but on ‘communication’ in situated events (on ‘communication’ as an integrated practice see Harris 1998). The ethnographic focus on the organisation of communicative events in terms of productive/interpretive repertoires, genres and registers problematises the very notions of ‘language’, ‘dialect’, ‘bilingualism’, and ‘literacy’, to name a few, as objects that pre-exist discourse (see Blommaert 2005; Blackledge and Creese 2010; Heller 2007; Makoni and Pennycook 2006, Street 1984). Focusing on the micro-level detail of interaction, interactional sociolinguists suggested that interlocutors make inferences as the conversation continues relying on what Gumperz (1992, 1995) called ‘contextualisation cues’ (e.g., intonation) that are largely


patterned and conventionalised (for a discussion see Collins 2007; for an illustration of this paradigm see Rampton 1995).

The work of the linguistic anthropologist Silverstein (1998, 2003) on ‘orders of indexicality’ and ‘enregisterment’ addresses semiotic variation and historical processes through which the use of particular linguistic variants ideologically come to index a particular social categorisation. The framework shows how ‘registers’ conceptualised in the broader sense as linguistic variants with particular social non-referential meanings emerge (e.g., standard and non-standard forms of usage) (Silverstein 2003: 212). According to this model, any sociolinguistic phenomenon comes in dialectical and ordinal degrees of 1st-order indexicality, 2nd-order indexicality, etc. Silverstein (2003: 193-194) stated that “any n-th order indexical presupposes that the context in which it is normatively used has a schematization of some particular sort, relative to which we can model the ‘appropriateness’ of its usage in that context”. For a linguistic variable to function as a 2nd-order indexicality it has to be mediated by a cultural schema (or local ethnometapragmatic ideology) for the enregisterment to be meaningful (Silverstein 2003: 212). This requires ideological engagement with the social value of the variant (e.g., it is association with class) and discursive or metapragmatic activities through which users become aware of the variation. The variants of the variable have become ‘enregistered’ in some verbal repertoires, and their deployment become entailing (creative) of the context: they can be semiotically used to conduct sociolinguistic work in relation to social class, locality, gender, etc. When a 2nd-order index becomes ideologically transparent, or ‘stereotypical’ in Labov’s (1971) sense, it would dialectically ‘erase’ (Irvine and Gal 2000) the 1st-order reality on the ground. Thus cultural values (e.g., good/bad, normal/deviant) associated with linguistic forms are ‘notoriously ideological’ since they emerge in micro-contextual interactions as straightforward naturalisations or essentialisations (Silverstein 2003: 202). However, the 1st-order normative linguistic forms can under specific folk metapragmatic ideology be invested with a potential 2nd-order indexical meaning: “for any indexical phenomenon at order n, an indexical phenomenon at order n+1 is always immanent” (Silverstein 2003: 212). Silverstein (1979: 193)) conceptualised language ideologies as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure and use”. In this sense, ‘linguistic scientific’ statements dressed in an n-th indexical order are ideological to the core.

Drawing on Silverstein’s work, Agha (2003) examined the processes of ‘enregisterment’ which led to the historical emergence of the English Received Pronunciation (RP), once a regional sociolect spoken by a few, as a


recognisable standard-register emblematising a particular social status. Agha (2003: 231) defined ‘enregisterment’ as “processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms” (see also Slotta 2012). Johnstone (2011, Johnstone & Kiesling 2008), using Silverstein and Agha’s conceptual apparatus, showed in a series of detailed studies how a Pittsburgh speech, once unobserved, has become, as a result of geographical and social mobility, ideologically enregisterd as a ‘local dialect’ (Pittsburgese) linked to a place and its people. Ferguson’s (1957) ‘diglossia’ suggested that intensive institutional work is involved in the relative stability of the ideological meaning of linguistic variation in Arabic (as an illustration see Suleiman 2003, 2004; Haeri 2000, 2003). Other conceptual metaphors developed by sociologists and cultural theorists which are appropriated in multimodal and critical discourse analysis of the social organisation of linguistic variation are Bourdieu’s (1991) ‘symbolic power’, Gramsci’s (1971) ‘hegemony’, and Foucault’s (1984) ‘orders of discourse’ (for a discussion see Blommaert 2005; Joseph 2006; Fairclough 2001; Kress 2003).

3. A historical note about the Nuba Mountains

The Nuba Mountains (Jibal al-Nuba in current Arabic discourse, or Dar Nuba in classic literature) are administratively part of the State of Southern Kordofan of the Sudan (for a review of an earlier history of the region see Spaulding 1987; see map1). Most of the Nuba communities are settled farmers and they share the geography of Southern Kordofan with Baggara (‘Baggara’ is a collective reference to cattle-herders, e.g., Messeria and Hawazma, relationally regarded as ‘Arab/Arabised’). The hilly region covers an area of 88,000 km2 (around 30,000 square miles) within the savanna rain belt. It is located between longitudes 29° and 31°30'E and latitudes 10° and 12°30'N (Baumann 1987; Komey 2010; Stevenson 1984). Topographically, the region is made up of a pattern of long mountain ranges separated by stretches of plains and valleys (for more information about the physical character of the region see Nadel 1947; Komey 2010).

Though the term ‘Nuba’ is generally used as a reference to the inhabitants of the region, it should be noted that the ‘Nuba’ are not a single homogeneous speech community (for a review of the etymology of the word ‘Nuba’ see Stevenson 1984). Rather the area is populated by communities with socially diverse practices (note that the current public discourse differentiates the

1 We are grateful to Thilo Schadeberg for providing this map.


Nuba of the Nuba Mountains from the Nubian/Nobiin of the most northern Sudan near Egypt)2. According to Nadel’s (1947) classic study, there are more than fifty ethnic groups/tribes in the region with various religious and cultural practices (e.g., Islam, Christianity; see also Thelwall & Schadeberg 1983). The 1955 population census estimated the Nuba with 572,935 people (6% of the total national population (Komey 2010; Thelwall 1978). The last population census in 2009 suggested 1,406,404 as the total population of the Nuba Mountains (Komey 2010). It should be remarked that in the postcolonial period figures by official population censuses are suspect since the Nuba and other marginalised groups (e.g., particularly in then southern

region) believed that the counting technology was manipulated in the service of the political interests of central governments.

The historical-linguistic litera-ture lists around fifty languages identified largely with two different phyla: Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan (Greenberg 1966). Among these languages Tima is enregistered as an ‘endangered language’. The Nuba Mountains have engaged in armed conflicts particularly with the current Al-Beshir’s Islamist regime (National Congress Party, NCP) which seized power in June 1989 (for a review of the Islamist movements in Sudan see Gallab 2008; Ibrahim 1999). Omer Al-Beshir’s regime has actively pursued a top-down homogenising policy of Arabicisation and Islamisation

2 The representation of the peoples in the Nuba Mountains as a single monolithic unit is, using Agha’s term, a product of historical ‘enregistration’ (see Abdelhay 2010).


(see Abdelhay et al. 2011; Sharkey 2003, 2008; Miller 2003; Taha 1990). This power-invested political programme has been rejected by the Nuba peoples. Arabic in its various interactional forms is part of the the repertoires of the majority of Nuba communities, however, they do not ideologically view themselves as ‘Arab’. The late Nuba leader Yusuf Kuwa Mekki was reported to have said: “despite all the talk about my Arabism, my religion, my culture, I am a Nuba, I am black, I am an African”3 (on the history of ‘Arabs’ in Sudan see Hasan 1967). The situation in the Nuba Mountains, and other parts of the Sudan, demonstrates an exploitative form of the centre-periphery relation within the larger scale of the modern nation-state (Abdelhay et al. 2011; Sharkey 2003; Komey 2010).

Due to political instability in the Sudan over the past three decades, many peoples from the Nuba Mountains (and other parts of Sudan) have moved to major urban centres such as Khartoum and al-Jazzeera region (Miller & Abu-Manga 1992; Mugaddam 2006a, 2006b). These sociopolitical conditions have shaped the sociolinguistic repertoires of the Nuba peoples including, in our case, the Tima individuals. In 2005, the NCP representing the government of the Sudan signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the southern rebels represented by the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). Since many Nuba people were/are an ally to the SPLM, the CPA dedicated a separate peace protocol to settle the conflict in the State of Southern Kordofan (including the Nuba Mountains) and Blue Nile. The protocol is entitled “The Resolution of Conflict in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile States”, originally signed on 24th May 2004 (see CPA 2005). For our purpose, the peace protocol stipulated: “The diverse cultural heritage and local languages of the population of the State shall be developed and protected” (CPA 2005: 73).

4. Exploring the sociolinguistic status of Tima in the Nuba Mountains and beyond

The social group under discussion is concentrated in a number of villages on Jebel Tima in the Nuba Mountains, about 15 kilometres southwest of the Katla region (Dimmendaal 2003). These four villages are Mariam, Balool, Kew, and Tambo. According to a recent estimation made by Dimmendaal (2009), Tima is spoken by approximately 5000 people, with around 6000 speakers live in the Khartoum area. The people are identified by their neighbouring communities with various group-defining labels including

3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13351773, accessed 30/7/2011.


Tima, Tamanik or Yibwa. Historically, the group self-identifies as Umurik (sg. Kumurik), and it refers to its area and speech as Lumurik and Dumurik respectively4. However, the term ‘Tima’ is currently used by the community in reference to its communal identity and language.

This study is intended to provide a general picture of the local sociolinguistic system in the Tima area, with a broad focus on the place of Tima in the repertoires of the community. A situated view of Tima as part of the individual’s and communal repertoires and its patterns of use can shed a significant light on the questions related to language endangerment and revitalisation. Besides, since the whole project derives it legitimacy from the people themselves or their representatives (a group of persons from the community contacted the Institute of African and Asian Studies to help them develop education materials), the engagement of the community in the linguistic was visible in every phase of the study. To understand the social value of Tima in relation to other linguistic forms we draw on data elicited by a survey questionnaire and direct observation of some communicative events (e.g., a wedding; TV watching).

4.1 The survey questionnaire

The questionnaire was intended mainly to derive some information about the structure of the repertoires in terms of the nature of the semiotic resources available to Tima individuals and the attitudes associated with them (for reports on previous surveys see Thelwall 1978; Hurreiz & Bell 1975). The first part of the questionnaire aimed at capturing metadiscoures in relation to the use of the communicative forms, and whether they are socially patterned according to the dimensions of age, sex, the village in which a person lives, and parents’ ethnic background. Since questionnaires by their nature of design cannot produce enough and precise information about the entire range of the communicative events which constitutes the community, we tried to elicit data by focusing on broad domains of linguistic use (e.g., ‘home’). And this is the focus of the second part of the questionnaire. Indeed a domain such as ‘home’ may itself comprise multiply patterned semiotic events in which a linguistic form of Tima may variedly figure.

Our purpose here is to detect any social patterns in relation to linguistic use and orientations. The third part of the questionnaire attempts to elicit more

4 http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/projects/tima/people, accessed 8 August 2011.


closely responses in relation to attitudes with a focus on literacy. For example, informants were asked about the linguistic variety they would like to learn to read and write, and the ones they would like their children to learn. Two caveats should be added here. Firstly, although the questions on literacy may reductively conceptualise the social phenomenon in terms of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’, the purpose is to uncover, if any, the effect of the ‘monoglot’ (Silverstein 1996) ideology which equates ‘language’ with ‘writing’. Our observation attests to the fact that various forms of literacy were displayed in the landscape and some are ‘embodied’ by the youth (e.g., T-shirts with English texts). Since we are aware that metaphors such as ‘language’‚ ‘dialect’ and ‘rutana’ may have ideological connotations in the community (they do in the larger Khartoum and other urbanised centres), every question about the social value of a linguistic variety is phrased in terms of the three variants (i.e., language/dialect/rutana). Since space limitation does not allow for a full exposition of the whole questionnaire responses, our analysis is inevitably selective. Yet, we maintain that the analysis can shed significant light on the nature and structure of multilingualism in the society viewed not in terms of monolingualism ‘multiplied’ (see Heller 2007) but in terms of verbal repertoires (in its productive and/or interpretive modes.

4.2 Participants

The informants of the present study numbered 1,189 persons in total and were selected from five age groups: 7-12 years (239 informants), 13-19 years (212 informants), 20-39 years (240 informants), 40-59 years (238 informants), and 60+ (260 informants). The persons were selected in order to have a representative sample of the four Tima villages Balool, Kew, Mariam and Tambo (287 informants for each village). Although the construct ‘informant’ may imply a particular interactional position within the participation framework of the questionnaire event, we should note that some individuals occupied multiple social roles: e.g., informant, research assistants and/or organiser. The survey was organised by the Tima Language Committee (TLC) in the area (more on TLC below). Five research assistants from each of the four villages were employed to help in the administration of questionnaires. They were briefed on the aims of the survey and trained on how to conduct it. The work went quite well under the close supervision of both the TLC and the researcher. The data collection process took about a week during which the research assistants showed a high level of commitment and enthusiasm. One of the most important results of the


survey is the fact that the whole Tima community became more aware that a serious step towards ‘standardising’ the group's speech has been taken.

4.3 Analysis

The questions in the first part of the questionnaire were intended to elicit information about whether the linguistic varieties in the community are organised in accordance to any specific social variables. It also aimed at detecting whether the linguistic variables a person knows and the knowledge of their use are ordered according to any specific ideological scheme (e.g., Good vs. Bad). Table 1 summarises the responses in terms of the variable dimension of age. One of the key questions asked is: “Which language/ dialect/rutana do you think you speak better than any other?”

Table 1. Linguistic repertoire among the Tima speech community by age

Tima Arabic Other* 100% 7-12 years 207 86.61% 31 12.97% 1 0.42% 239 13-19 years 182 85.85% 19 8.96% 11 5.19% 212 20-39 years 214 89.17% 23 9.58% 3 1.25% 240 40-59 years 225 94.54% 11 4.62% 2 0.84% 238 60+ years 250 96.15% 06 2.31% 4 1.54% 260 total 1078 90.66% 90 7.57% 21 1.77% 1189 *Other = English, Katla, Julud, Tabag, Tulushi

Informants were also asked about which linguistic forms they believe they use in the ‘home domain’. Table 2 provides a bird-eye view of language distribution according to the variable dimension of home. As can be read from the figures, more than 90% of the respondents stated that they used Tima exclusively in the home domain. Use of Tima in this way appeared to have been generally consistent across the different age group. The least percentage (88.7%) of Tima use in the home domain was registered by the youngest age group (7-12 years). Use of Arabic exclusively was reported by only 4.6%, and by 5.04% together with Tima. Table 2 also suggests that the use of Arabic in the home domain declines by age. Younger group members have indicated that they used Arabic more than older community members.


Table 2. Language use in the home domain by age

Tima Tima+Arabic Arabic 100% 7-12 years 212 88.7% 9 3.8% 18 0.4% 239 13-19 years 190 89.6% 11 5.2% 11 5.2% 212 20-39 years 216 90.0% 15 6.3% 9 1.3% 240 40-59 years 220 92.4% 11 4.6% 7 0.8% 238 60+ years 234 90.0% 16 6.2% 10 1.5% 260 total 1072 90.2% 62 5.2% 55 1.8% 1189

Table 3 is based on responses to questions targeting information about usage outside the home domain (e.g., school). Only 35.4% of the respondents indicated that they used Tima exclusively in communicating outside the home domain. The remaining respondents (about 64%) reported usage ranging from Tima together with English and Arabic to Arabic and English, and other linguistic varieties exclusively in the same domain. The Table also shows that 20% of the population surveyed have already adopted Arabic and English exclusively in interacting outside the home (151 informants for Arabic and 87 informants for English). A close look at the Table reveals that less than 36% of the elderly people use Tima exclusively outside the home domain. Table 3 also indicates that use of Arabic and English in general is quite common among the younger generation in Tima area.

Table 3. Language use outside home by age

Tima T+A T+E T+A+E A E+other total 7-12 y. 80 18 40 45 31 25 239 33.5% 7.5% 16.7% 18.8% 13.0% 10.5% 100% 13-19 y. 54 8 52 51 34 13 212 25.5% 3.8% 24.5% 24.1% 16.0% 6.1% 100% 20-39 y. 68 28 20 74 32 18 240 28.3% 11.7% 8.3% 30.8% 13.3% 7.5% 100% 40-59 y. 91 32 11 61 29 14 238 38.2% 13.5% 4.6% 25.6% 12.2% 5.9% 100% 60+ y. 128 36 15 39 25 17 260 49.2% 13.9% 5.8% 15.0% 9.6% 6.5% 100% total 421 122 138 270 151 87 1189 35.4% 10.3% 11.6% 22.7% 12.7% 7.3% 100% T=Tima; A=Arabic; E=English; other=Katla, Julud, Tabag, Tulushi


The third part of the questionnaire attempts to generate data in relation to social attitudes towards literacy. Measuring people’s attitudes towards a given variety may give some indications of the future of that variety with regard to maintenance and levelling/shift. The two questions asked were structured around which linguistic variety the respondents wish to learn reading and writing with and whether parents find it necessary for their children to be schooled. Table 4 and 5 give a summary of respondents’ answers.

Table 4. Attitudes to literacy in some linguistic varieties

Tima T+A T+E A E E+A T+A+E total 7-12 93 49 32 31 8 6 20 239 38.9% 20.5% 13.4% 13.0% 3.3% 2.5% 8.4% 100% 13-19 88 43 24 15 3 9 30 212 41.5% 20.3% 11.3% 7.1% 1.4% 4.3% 14.2% 100% 20-39 107 67 17 14 11 4 20 240 44.6% 27.9% 7.1% 5.8% 4.6% 1.7% 8.3% 100% 40-59 119 48 19 18 7 8 19 238 50.0% 20.2% 8.0% 7.6% 2.9% 3.4% 8.0% 100% 60+ 143 46 27 23 4 0 17 260 55.0% 17.7% 10.4% 8.9% 1.5% 0.0% 6.5% 100% total 550 253 119 101 33 27 106 1189 46.3% 21.3% 10.0% 8.5% 2.8% 2.3% 8.9% 100% T=Tima; A=Arabic; E=English

Table 5. Attitude to literacy in Tima by age

Yes No total 20-39 years 216 90.0% 15 6.3% 9 1.3% 40-59 years 220 92.4% 11 4.6% 7 0.8% 60+ years 234 90.0% 16 6.2% 10 1.5% total 1072 90.2% 62 5.2% 55 1.8%

Note that Table 5 covers only answers given by those whose age ranges from 20 to 60+ (Parents or potential parents). Table 5 also indicates that more than 90% of the parents or potential parents surveyed believed that it was important for their children to read and write in the Tima language.


4.3 Discussion

In the introduction we have posed two questions in order to have a broad view of the local sociolinguistic order in the area of Tima: What is the nature and structure of the verbal repertoires of individuals in the community? Whether, and how, does ‘Tima’ (in whatever ‘-lect’) play a role in the production of an ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1991) meaning of the community. As to the first question, a questionnaire was designed to to have an idea about the range of the sociolinguistic varieties available to individuals. The instrument also attempted to elicit some information as to whether there is any generally detectable patterns in relation to their usage according to dimensions such as age and some domains of use. The questionnaire also targeted the elicitation of attitudinal formulations towards the linguistic varieties. A close discussion of the nature of the dominant language ideology in the community will be made when we discuss the work of a community language planning body (Tima Language Community, TLC) in response the second question. In what follows we first comment on the findings on the survey questionnaire and then proceed to discuss the objectives of the TLC.

The first remark about the results is that individuals in the Tima community have polyglot repertoires with ordered linguistic varieties: Tima, Arabic, English, Tulushi, Julud, to mention some of the reported. In other words, verbal repertoires are varied and this variation is socially patterned according to the aspects of their usage. The linguistic variety of Tima predominates in the domain of home, while other varieties such as English and Arabic are more visible outside the domain of home. The findings also point to a regular decline in the reported usage of Tima by the youth corresponded with an increase in Arabic and English. This can be due to the general observation that the youth make use of these resources to index particular social identities (e.g., T-shirts with English texts are observed to be worn by some youths). Besides, the younger age group are exposed extensively to other linguistic forms such as English and other linguistic varieties (e.g., Amharic) through the regional media (e.g., televised local and international football matches), in the streets, markets and schools (English is the only medium of instruction in the two schools of the community). However, we cannot risk the generalisation that the youth does not have at least interpretive repertoires in Tima. Such a generalisation depends on further studies with qualitative methodologies. Further, although the majority of the older generation has productive and interpretive repertoires in Tima and Arabic, their predominant usage of Tima is largely shaped by the nature of their social networks.


The reported attitudes towards some linguistic varieties (Arabic, English, Tima, Julud, Katla, etc.) indicate that these communicative forms are indexical resources. In other words, they are assigned social meanings by the respondents (e.g., Tima is selected as a suitable medium of education). The fact that there is some inconsistency in the selection of Tima as a medium of instruction points to the existence of multiple language ideologies within the Tima community. Further, among other linguistic varieties (other than Tima, English and Arabic), Katla and Julud appear to be part of the repertoires of the majority of the people in the area. The historical linguistic explanation is that the three linguistic forms, Tima, Katla, and Julud are genetically related and thus there is a vast area of similarity among them, especially at the lexical level. However, a more plausible sociolinguistic account is that Tima, Julud and Katla populations are geographically and socially (e.g., by intermarriage) so close to each other, a situation which facilitates social interaction among the three communicative groups. This is supported by the fact that a considerable number of those surveyed have indicated that they socialise more often with people from Julud and Katla. To summarise the answer to the first question, Tima community has a sociolinguistic system with multiple, but generally patterned, linguistic varieties. Individuals’ repertoires are varied as a result of their social biographies. Let us now move to answer the second question (whether Tima is perceived to have any specific ideological value within this cultural system, and if so by whom) by discussing TLC with a focus on its metapragmatic activities.

The emergence of the TLC is itself evidence of the fact that linguistic variation is taken very seriously in the context of Sudan (i.e., it is socially meaningful). Our argument is that TLC is a language-making body set up by the locals to enregister in the local imagination a particular communicative form (Tima as ‘standard language’) linked to a particular social value (‘the entire community’). That is, as a result of the metadiscurisve activities of this body, Tima may potentially come to be imagined in new terms: as ‘a language’ linked to a place with specific social configuration (a united community of four villages). What we want to show is some of the historical moments and stages in the construction of ‘standard language’ called ‘Tima language’ through complex metapragmatic processes not just at the local scale but at other significant higher scales as we will show later. Some of the metadiscurisve processes involved in the production of physical artefacts (i.e. a curriculum) has certainly united individuals with different discursive histories: linguists living in Khartoum and outside Khartoum, European linguists, members of the TLC who live in community and outside the community, all in coordination with those living in the Tima community. It is evident that TLC has been operating with a particular ideological scheme


which is relatively compatible with professional linguists: for a particular local communicative form to be used in the educational system of a particular locality it has to be ‘armed’ with textual artefacts such as dictionaries and an educational syllabus. In a word, the task is that a register of Tima has to be indexically ‘elevated’ to the status of ‘language’ in a national sociolinguistic context where the ‘language-dialect’ opposition has serious consequences.

Our starting point is that a group of individuals belonging to the community approached the Institute of African and Asian Studies of the University of Khartoum (IAAS). The persons complained that their children’s proficiency in Tima is declining, and stated that they want their children in the community to be educated in Tima and not Arabic or English. In other words, they believed that Tima is a ‘threatened language’ by bigger languages such as English and Arabic. They met with Gerrit Dimmendaal who was a visiting Professor at the time for technical help. The TLC was founded in 2002 immediately after their meeting with Dimmendaal. The committee comprised 12 members in Khartoum and 12 members in Tima. Each branch has a female in its membership5. Five members from the TLC are tasked with the coordination with a team of professional linguists. The linguistic team was set up to work with the locals in the development of orthography and educational materials.

As mentioned above, Tima is not the ‘original’ reference to what the people speak in the area. The historical name of what populations do with language was ‘Dumurik: Dumurik simply meant ‘‘speech’ (‘klam’ in Arabic)6. In the local cultural system, the metaphor Dumurik was neither tied to specific part of the community nor its use had any specific ideological values in the way the use of terms such as ‘language’ or ‘rutana’ could index in other hegemonic cultural orders (e.g., Khartoum). The name ‘Tima’ which was originally used by the Arabised tribes referred only to the village of ‘Tambo’, which is presently one of the constituents of the larger community (the other three constituent villages are Mariam, Balool, and Kew). Now the 5 It was not the first encounter between community and pofessional linguists. The group reported that they had already had an experience with SIL which resulted in the development of two textbooks in Tima. Although evaluations such as ‘good/bad books’ in relation to previously produced textual artefacts are ideological statements, for our purpose they are indicative of the fact that the TLC actively and explicitly exercises some epistemic control rather than being a mere ‘receiver’ of institutional products. 6 We are grateful to Hamid Kafi and Gertrud Schneider-Blum for information on the historical meaning of the term ‘Dumurik’. We also thank Suzan Alamin for the linguistic analysis of the term ‘Dumurik’.


community and its TLC are using the term in its extended referent (to cover the four villages and their populations). Most important, viewed from the perspective of the Tima people, the construct ‘Tima’ as a name of their linguistic variety indexes positive meanings (e.g., a ‘marker’ of identity). However seen from the lens of the monoglot ideology of the State and its media, Tima is ‘a rutana’ (a pejorative metaphor for ‘less-than-language-proper’ varieties in Sudan), and the ‘rutanat’ are seen by nationalists and Islamists as an unnecessary ‘threat’ to the national unity of the country (on a review of the Sudan’s ‘identity crisis’ see Elnur 2009; Deng 1994; Garang 1992; Idris 2005; Lesch 1998). For example, the ruling regime’s journalist Hussein Khojali, an editor and owner of a newspaper and a TV station, has recently gone public (in an article dated 11 August 2011) and called for a public ‘battle’ against these linguistic varieties:

I wish the day will come when Rutanat of the Halfawis, Dongolawis, Masaleiti, Zaghawas, and Hadandwas become a thing of the past and that the “dhad” language will become the common language of the land. “The tongue of him who they wickedly point to is notably foreign, while this is an Arabic tongue, pure and clear.” This is a serious intellectual “battle” that should be openly “fought” in favour of a centralised culture. I say battle because we are fed up with trifling articles that are far from convincing anybody. Yes I am for the Arabic language and to those who envy us for our noble pursuit, I say God forgive you!"7

The above (institutional) position provides a very clear definition of the stratifying nature of the sociolinguistic regime at the national scale. The above statement, motivated by a particular ideological scheme (one centralised culture and one language), associates Arabic with particular social meanings (‘pure, clear, common language’) while other communica-tive forms are viewed by the contrasts of these ideological values. Rothman and Iverson (2010: 34) stated that “the concept of one-language-one-nation rallies the masses together inasmuch as it provides an indexical source of pride and commonality” (emphasis in original). For the Nuba, and other social groups in Sudan, this Herderian principle of nationalism has been a source of social subjugation. This cultural system of valuation which has 7 http://arabic-media.com/newspapers/sudan/alwan.htm (accessed 26 Feb. 2012). We thank Zuhair Osman for translating the original Arabic statement:

والمساليت والزغاوة أتمنى أن يأتي اليوم الذى تنقرض فيه رطانات الحلفاويين والدناقلةإليه أعجمي وهذا لسان عربي والهدندوة وتسود لغة الضاد الموحدة فلسان الذي يلحدون

الهواء الطلق لصالح الثقافة المركزية٬ نعم هذه معركة ذات نطع وغبار أطلقها فيمبين.. ً معركة فلقد سئمنا المقاالت .المسطحة التي ال تكسب الفكر عدواً وال صديقا


been in place since independence has become the centripetal benchmark against which identities and linguistic resources are scaled and ordered. The national education system in significant parts of the Sudan (the former southern region excluded) and for a long temporal span, has centrally contributed to the essentialisation of the indexical values of local linguistic practices as ‘rutanat’. The popularised ideology here is that since local linguistic varieties ‘lack’ a writing system, they cannot be used as media of instruction. However, in this centralising sociolinguistic system, a local linguistic variety even with textual cannon (e.g., orthography) can still not count as ‘a language’. As an effect and function of this hegemonic cultural order which is largely inscribed in the Arabicisation and Islamisation polices spearheaded by the current power holders, local linguistic varieties do not qualify as ‘languages’ (note the ‘Arabic-language’ indexical correlation in the above quoted position; for a detailed discussion of the ideological policies of Arabicisation in Sudan see Abdelhay et al. 2011). Since the ‘rutanat + social negativity’ correlation has been regularly enregistered, circulated through mass-mediated channels of publication communication, and largely institutionalised, it has become a commonplace particularly in the central Sudan (first-order indexicality in Silverstein’s sense). The result is a relatively fixed vertical and distributional sociolinguistic regime at the national level in which local communicative varieties have ideologically become associated with pejorative indexicalities.

Most important, as can be seen in the above quote, the standard monoglot ideology has essentialised the link between Arabic with ‘Islam’. In other words, for the Arab-Islamist power holders Arabic has become a first-order index of a particular social orientation (for a discussion on the relation between Islam and ethnicity in Sudan see Miller 2003; O’Fahey 1996; Sharkey 2003). Viewed from this ideologically rationalised socioeconomic system, the resisting Muslim groups in the Nuba Mountains (e.g., Tima) do not qualify as ‘Muslims’. As we write the Nuba Mountains region is engaged in an armed conflict with the ruling regime. This State-supported nationalist standard language ideology has significantly resulted in differentially distributed and valued sociolinguistic repertoires. It should be noted that the British colonial policies actively tried to create a monolithic sense of ‘the Nuba’ by actively isolating them from the ‘Arabised’ groups (Abdelhay 2010; Salih 1990; on colonial linguistics see Errington 2001, 2008). Awareness by isolated groups or individuals of the social meaning of their practices (diversity) was an effect of mobility/contact (e.g., wars) with the outside populations particularly during the late years of the colonial period and strongly during the postcolonial period. The regular interactional encounters brought to the observation of the individuals from the region not just that


they had or ought to have ‘birthdays’ but most importantly they were ‘Nuba’. Observe the following biographical fragment from an interview conducted in 2001 by the Dutch Journalist Nanne op ’t Ende with the late Nuba leader Yusuf Kuwa (for the full interview see http://www.occasionalwitness.com/, accessed 23 Feb. 2012):

Op ’t Ende: “Mr. Kuwa, when were you born?”

Kuwa: “Well, in those days our people didn't care about birthdays, but my mother said I was born when my father came back home from the war of Tullushi. And the war of Tullushi was in 1945. It was the last battle between the British and the Nuba people. My father had been a noncommissioned officer during World War II. He fought in many places: in Ethiopia, in El Alamein and so on”.

Op ’t Ende: “Before that [before joining Khartoum University in 1975], you had no idea of the diversity and the different customs and…?”

Kuwa: “It is one of the funniest things: when you were in the Nuba Mountains, you just knew your own tribe. We for example were Miri. So if we were asked: "Who are the Nuba?" we would try to say: "The other tribes—but not us." Only when we came out of the Nuba Mountains, to the north or south or west, we learned that we are all Nuba.”

However, the discursive and coercive socioeconomic circumstances particularly from 1989 onwards (politically manufactured hunger and wars) paradoxically has led the subjugated groups as the Nuba to stick to their linguistic guns, so to speak, as part of the struggle against the hegemonic regime in Khartoum (for a discussion of the history of the Nuba struggle see Rahhal 2001). It is against this brief sociolinguistic backdrop the emergence of TLC that the significance of its semiotic work can be adequately under-stood. To recap the observation, the TLC was set up to resemiotise (to give a new social meaning to) ‘Tima’ in the translocal verbal repertoires as a ‘standard language’ linked to a particular form of social identity (Tima as a community composed of four villages). In other words, the sociolinguistic plan is to recreate Tima with new indexicalities to which people can positively orient.

The significant point to keep in mind is that both the awareness to standardise Tima and the text-artefacts produced so far do not pre-exist the metadiscourses (e.g. Tima is ‘threatened’) being verbally circulated at the (trans-) local scale. TLC itself dialectically reproduces itself through the same set of standardising discourses. The production of the textual artefacts by


TLC and a team of linguists turn Tima into a semiotic resource for social actions ( e.g., some Tima members are receiving certified literacy training in Tima at IAAS). In what follows we will try to analyse some of the ‘datable’ metapragmatic activities with the aim to show that the current synchronic situation is just a moment in an ongoing, complex series of historical trajectories to enregister Tima as ‘standard language’ and not just a ‘rutana’. In other words, the following sketched narrative of events should be interpreted as historical points in the emergence of a contextually integrated ‘local’ symbolic form as a denotationally bounded ‘standard language’ (and not ‘a rutana’) indexically linked to a particular community of speakers (Tima community) in a particular place (the Tima of the Nuba Mountains).

One of the significant metadiscurisve genres which primarily involve talking about Tima is a series of regular linguistic planning meetings in the community. In these organised community meetings, members of the TLC update the local community (usually the middle-aged and elderly) of work-in-progress in relation to the development of literacy materials. Professional linguists, if they happen to be in the area, participate in the Tima-language meetings. For example, the encounter which we attended comprised mainly men across the age range of 25-75. Remarkably the dominant communica-tive medium through which the semiotic encounter was conducted was ‘Arabic’ (viewed dialectally). On one occasion during the meeting a member of the community (let’s anonymously call him Nasr) intervened with a contribution using (a form of) ‘Tima’. To be sure, Arabic is part of Nasr’s repertoire because his contribution was a dialogical reaction to the convenor’s briefing and also because we came to know that he could communicatively conduct himself in Arabic quite well. The substance of Nasr’s comment turned out to be a reminder of a past event in which a linguist came to the area to document Tima. The locals helped the linguist with the required data, and the linguist left with a promise to return with ‘materials’ which can be used for educational purposes. The professional linguist unfortunately was never seen again. The convenors and one of the linguists assured Nasr that in this project the locals are not only ‘data providers’ but partners with expertise in the project of literacy development (more on ‘expertise’ below).

For our purpose, three points are in order about the above encounter. First, the majority of the people in the Tima area meaningfully deploy the linguistic resources in their verbal repertoire. Secondly, some members such as Nasr intertextually mobilise elements of their discursive biographies in support of their ‘views’. Nasr’s comments were indicative of his structured position within the narrated participation frame of unequal power relations: they were mere ‘subjects’ in our traditional technical vocabulary. Further,


the Tima community language-oriented meetings as metadiscurisve events (i.e., involve explicit talk about Tima) play a considerable role in investing Tima with potential positive indexicalities: for example, as un-stigmatised ‘language’; a marker of the communal identity linked not to a village but to the whole Tima community, and a medium of education in the making. It is evident that these social values require to be validated through regular semiotic work in a variety of genres. Here we should note that the emergence in the Tima community of what the Milroys (1985) called the ‘tradition of linguistic complaint’ is a significant enregistering discourse of Tima with the above ideological values.

It is observable that the ‘communicative value’ of Tima vis-à-vis Arabic and English as a consequence of concentrated ‘upscaling’ (Blommaert 2006) labour particularly among the elderly and middle-aged people is gaining ground at the local sociolinguistic regime of the community. As we have shown above, the majority of the mobile Tima individuals’ indexical repertoires are shaped by a postcolonial history of subordination in relation to the monoglot ideology of the ruling regimes in Khartoum. The question of whether the youth could orient to Tima in the same way as their seniors could only be answered empirically. Yet, it may be argued that they are ‘aware’ of such indexical orientations: Tima as a linguistic form can be used by their parents to do semiotic work in relation to communal membership vis-à-vis hegemonic languages such as Arabic. However, it is equally evident that the potential social value of Tima as, for example, ‘the school language’ may not stand the test of other hegemonic cultural orders as that of the Khartoum. Tima does not have a fixed social load once and for all: its functional value changes according to the sociolinguistic system in which it is deployed.

Another key metadiscurisve event which takes place in the community is the relatively regulated encounter of ‘data collection’ by professional linguists in collaboration with the community members. Here the community people are centrally engaged in the construction of empirical materials. For example, a number of people from the various sectors of the society varied along the dimensions of age and sex volunteered to take part in the event of ‘language documentation’ (see photograph). The metadiscourses about the importance of Tima in such relatively formatted occasions are locally circulated through direct face-to-face encounters. The constructed empirical materials, which are now used in the development of educational materials, are expected to help in the circulation and stabilisation of the indexical values of Tima across time.


Before closing let us briefly comment on the professional linguistic expertise vis-à-vis the expertise of the Tima community members. It cannot be denied that the two forms of knowledge-making practices are motivated by unequal distribution of power. For example, generally in relation to educational matters, the institutional ‘voice’ of the professional linguist is more hearable than that of the community members on the ground. However, in some contexts, the locals can strategically deploy their semiotic repertoires as an indexical strategy to assert their epistemic authority in relation to that of the linguist. The following transcribed interaction that took place in the Tima community is an instance of how the locals can manipulate their discursive repertoires to do sociolinguistic work in relation to power:

Tima person: takhasus? ‘Specialisation?’ Linguist: takhasus lughuwiyyat. ‘Specialisation is linguistics.’ Tima person: lugha nubiyya walla lugha ma katīr? ‘A Nubian language or, there are many languages?’ The Linguist: lughuwiyyat sudaniyya. ‘Sudanese linguistics.’ Tima person: uhm ‘Uhm’ Linguist: takhasus fi lughāt sudaniyya. ‘Specialisation is in Sudanese languages.’ Tima person: wa inta inta bititkalam lugha bita tuloshi? ‘And you do you speak the Tuloshi language?’ Linguist: la la. “No no.” Tima person: wa kayf inta takun dictūr? ‘And how then are you a doctor?’

It is worth noting that one of the sources of coherence in the above interaction is the ideological assumption that there are enumerable ‘named languages’ linked to places/communities (e.g., ‘Tulushi language’, ‘many languages’). Since some of the locals with a particular discursive biography subscribe to this ideological scheme, they are ‘language-makers’ (Harris 1980), just like us!


5. Conclusion and agenda for further research

This paper has set out to achieve two related objectives: to explore the nature of the sociolinguistic repertoires in the Tima community of the Nuba Mountains situated within the larger periphery-centre scale of the nation-state, and the potential ideological function of Tima speech in the production of a particular value of identity vis-à-vis the standard monoglot ideology of Arabicisation. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative sources of data, the study has generally shown that the surveyed individuals in the community have varied forms of verbal repertoires. The elicited metadiscurisve comments on forms such as Arabic and Tima indicate that the individuals are aware of their potential indexicalities. The study has also shown that most of these sociolinguistic varieties are normatively patterned. English (in varied forms) predominately features in the school curriculum. Tima speech has strong presence at home. Arabic, English and other varieties seem to dominate in the public landscape. The study has also demonstrated that the majority of the youth do not orient to Tima in the same way their elderly do. The prolonged historical struggle of the Nuba peoples and its attending effects of displacement have resulted in the production of multiple language ideologies and increasing visibility of linguistic varieties such as English in the community. However, the study has argued that the same socio-political conditions have motivated the Tima community to standardise a particular form of its speech. The ongoing metapragmatic work by the Tima Language Community is enregistering the Tima speech with a particular social value: as the ‘language’ of the entire ‘Tima community’. Since the work of the TLC has been formed recently and its activities are still taking root, and since as we write the region of Nuba Mountains (of which Tima is a part) is engaged in an armed struggle against the ruling regime, we suggest the following items for a future research agenda in order to have a close understanding of the full sociolinguistic complexity of Tima in the life of the people:

(i) Specific and detailed linguistic-ethnographic studies of the full range of the communicative events in the Tima community are much needed to make any conclusive statements about the nature of the social functioning of Tima in the society.

(ii) A follow-up study of the metapragmatic activities of the TLC is required in order to understand some of the historical processes through which Tima speech is assigned collective soical meanigns at various translcoal scales (e.g., in Khartoum vs. Tima community).


(iii) Using a bottom-up phenomenological perspective, classroom inter-actions in the community are required to be investigated to understand how Tima is used by teachers and students.

(iv) Since a number of linguistic forms (e.g., Arabic, English) are visible (or hearable) in the landscape of the community, the exact nature and structure of these resources in the public space need to be thoroughly studied.

People who administered the survey questionnaire in Tima (2007)

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