Arabo standard e ʿāmmiyya: esclusione e inclusione nei fumetti di ʿUmar Khūrī

Abstract

Adult comics have developed in the Arab world as an independent literary genre and are often used as a tool for social criticism. Linguistically, this new cultural product tends to favor the use of the vernacular (‘āmmiyya) as a written variety instead of standard Arabic (Høigilt 2017a, Høigilt 2019, De Blasio 2020, inter alia). However, in the comic books Ṣālūn Ṭāriq al-Khurāfī (The salon of Ṭāriq al-Khurāfī) and in its prequel Yūtūbiā (Utopia), both by the Lebanese author ‘Umar Khūrī, standard Arabic, used by some characters instead of the vernacular, also finds a place. Therefore, starting from the definition of language as a marker of the identity and as a symbolic resource (Suleiman 2013), the aim of the study is to investigate the link between language variety and the identity of the different characters and to examine what social and political functions language is invested with within the fictional societies of these comics strips.

Keywords

• adult comics
• social criticism
• standard/vernacular arabic
• authoritarianism/exclusion
• resistance/inclusion