Arabic accents delineated ethnic and class distance in Egyptian social hierarchies

Evidence

The imitation of the Nubian accent cements that agreement. As Jacob Landau and others note in their analyses of early Egyptian drama, the strangeness of an accent, in Arabic, delineated the degree of foreignness of the speaking character. Images of Turkish-speaking pashas were always good for a laugh,especially when they stumbled through the colloquial Arabic of Egypt as they tried to issue orders to the subject class of the fallahïn. This situation represented an ironic view of the unsuitability of the pashas as rulers that resulted from their linguistic distance from Egyptian culture. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s question of how Egyptians positioned themselves versus Sudanese within an internal colonial hierarchy, complementing the British colonial framing. — connects to: Regional accents are erased through class-aspirational self-suppression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1348; Retaining a regional accent resists class subordination because the bourgeoisie share one accent — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1349