Language Change and National Integration: Rural Migrants in Khartoum.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.

By Catherine Miller and Al-Amin Abu-Manga. Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 208.

More than a hundred languages are currently spoken in the Sudan. When it received its independence in 1956, Arabic was declared the sole official language. The few educated southern Sudanese were, however, English-speaking (as a second language), whereas they spoke as their mother tongue a variety of Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Kordofanian languages (Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, Moru, Zande, etc.). As a direct result of the first Sudanese civil war (1955-72), English was recognized as the main language of the South on a par with Arabic. This book is the first to deal with the Arabic varieties spoken by Sudanese non-Arabs, who have come to live in the Khartoum area as a direct consequence of the Sudanese civil war and the drought.

Today's Greater Khartoum (Khartoum, Khartoum North, and Omdurman) contains over 4 million people. When one compares this with the quarter of a million at the time of independence, one easily comprehends the sociological phenomenon of urbanization, i.e., that more than half of the current population has come during the mid-1980s from the Nuba Mountains (dar nuba) and the southern Sudan. The authors focussed their study on the Takamul quarter in Hajj Yusif, Khartoum North, which began as an illegal settlement in 1984, and its adjacent sub-quarter, Takamul Gharb, since they were both densely populated. They conducted fieldwork among these migrants (nazihin 'refugees', also called sakan al-aswa?i) by recording their speech and having them fill out questionnaires. The results clearly show a rapid process of Arabization, i.e., language shift to Khartoum Arabic.

The fieldwork has led to statistical conclusions about such matters as intermarriage (30% of all the marriages in Takamul are inter-ethnic, p. 53), language acquisition and use (most migrants state they knew Arabic in their native homelands as a second or third language, but it has become the dominant language, even for "family interaction within the household," p. 102), and language attitude (e.g., the domain of song is highly conservative as 76% of the non-Arab migrants sing only in their vernaculars). The most important part of the fieldwork results can be found in chapter 5, "The Arabic Varieties Spoken in Takamul" (pp. 128-96). The authors conclude that, in general, westerners...