Al-Nadïm’s choice to neutralize Sudanese accent contrasted sharply with Sanü`a’s mocking portrayals

Evidence

Al-Nadïm knew that many of his pieces were read out loud, and thus he forced his readers to articulate this challenge to themselves as well as to illiterate listeners. The reader would therefore become both subject and object for a brief moment, before he and his listeners began to discuss the merits of al-Nadïm’s points. Unlike the dialogues of Yaqüb Sanüa, in which Sudanese characters regularly mispronounce Egyptian dialect, al-Nadïm offers no indication of accent in this discussion. Would people reading this dialogue out loud have mimicked Sudanese or Nubian accents? Would that last sentence have felt like a rebuke of such mimicry, or would it have been an effective means of driving home the point about Sa´id’s humanity? — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 686

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how colonial-era media represented colonized voices, and to wider literature on dialect as a marker of hierarchy.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether readers actually mimicked Sudanese accents when reading such dialogues aloud, and how accent mimicry functioned as racialized mockery in Egyptian print culture.