Argot: Secret Language and Anti-language

Argots dialectically contrast with the “referential cleanliness” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein1996, 292) and emblematic unity of Standards. From the perspective of monoglot standardization, they obstruct reference and cultivate antagonism. Gaetano Berruto, for instance, identifies occultation and anti-language as the two functions of argot (Reference Berruto1987, 160–61). Occultation is front and center in Carla Marcato’s definition of argot as “a mode of expressing oneself that is not comprehensible to listeners” (Reference Marcato2016, 351), that is, nonratified overhearers. On the one hand, the occulting function may be entailed by changes in meaning or form, what H. C. Conklin (Reference Conklin1956) terms “speech disguises.” In the example of bard speech in the Moroccan High Atlas region documented by Abderrahim Youssi (Reference Youssi1977, 141–42), an expression is first borrowed from Arabic, but with a figurative meaning, before undergoing formal transformations: so, juqa ‘crowd’ becomes ajuwaq ‘the market’ and bəddl ‘to change’ becomes sg. avəddl pl. ivəddaln ‘clothes’. According to Youssi, the group of bards using these words, embedded in utterances that are otherwise grammatically Berber, do so to conceal the meaning of what they say to each other among the residents of the villages through which they pass. On the other hand, occultation may be entailed by code choice, that is, choosing to speak in a language that is not understood by overhearers. It is in this sense that Otto Jespersen (Reference Jespersen1925, 201–2) spoke of Romani as a “concealment-language” throughout Europe and the Caucasus, either as a full natural language or as a reduced form whose sole remaining function is, supposedly, concealment (see, e.g., Soravia Reference Soravia1977, 90). Italian colonial assumptions about the clarity of reference, that “threats to clarity come in ethnic-, regional-, gender-, and class-based deviations” from a Standard (Silverstein Reference Silverstein1996, 293), precluded analyses that did not center on the occulting function of argots. By contrast, while the students that Angela Reyes observed at a Korean-run supplementary school in New York described Korean as “a ‘secret language’ that teachers could not understand” (Reference Reyes2016, 316), Reyes examines the role of speaking Korean in voicing various figures of Koreanness, each of which differently affects how interaction is structured, thereby decentering occultation in her analysis.

The supposed anti-language function was the most serious and concerning to Italian researchers devoted to colonial designs in Libya. Michael Halliday (Reference Halliday1976) developed the notion of “anti-language” as the code of an anti-society, one that derives from but is opposed to established society. The anti-society is “a mode of resistance” against established society, and the anti-language is the vehicle for “a conscious counter-reality, not just a subcultural variant of, or angle on, a reality that is accepted by all” (1976, 582, see 576). According to Halliday, anti-language is characterized by the use of figurative language and formal transformations, shown above to serve an occulting function, but there is also a metasemantic dimension: purely anti-language expressions cannot be straightforwardly glossed in the Jakobsonian (Reference Jakobson1971, 566; Reference Jakobson1981, 27) and Sellarsian (Reference Sellars1950a, Reference Sellars1950b) manner, that is, in which to “give the meaning” of an expression is to proffer another expression that is functionally synonymous. In such a case, the metasemantic proposition “‘rosso’ (in Italian) means ·red· (in English)” presupposes that the expression-form ‘rosso’ plays the same role in Italian that the form ‘red’ does in English. Following Sellars’s convention, form-focused citations are encased by single quotes and function-focused citations by dot quotes. What Halliday suggests is that, in many cases, anti-language expressions may be explicable but not glossable since there is no corresponding role in the legitimate society played by another expression. So, describing the anti-language of male Jordanian students, Abdullah Shunnaq (Reference Shunnaq1995) observes that shiqfih ‘a piece’ means “a very pretty girl” in an objectifying sense, tamir hindiyy ‘tamarind’ means “a pretty, tanned female student,” and ibn Farīd ‘Farid’s son’ denotes students who lead a very luxurious life. The assertion is that there are no expressions in Arabic that are directly equivalent—they are explicable, but not glossable.

As I show in the following sections, French colonial Berberology and Italian racist criminology set the stage for taking supposedly argotic registers as objects of study; this provided a rationale for Italian colonial linguists and ethnographers to construe certain Libyan practices—such as systematic formal transformations and periphrasis—as opaque and so both occulting and oppositional. In the terms of the colonial metadiscourse, the argots under analysis involved the production of deviant expression-forms relative to those of a Standard (see Agha Reference Agha2015, 320–23)—in this case, a Libyan Arabic Standard and a number of Berber vernacular Standards. Also, Halliday’s characterization that the anti-language function of an argot entails a competing reality is a stronger formulation than what Italian researchers supposed. Though they did not use the term (which originated with Halliday), the anti-language function of argotic practice was, for Italian researchers, not about an alternative reality but about an alternative society, one that was anti-Arab for Berbers (Beguinot Reference Beguinot1918) and Jews (Sarnelli Reference Sarnelli1924) or anti-colonial for Libyans as a whole (Cerbella Reference Cerbella1942). It is in this sense that George Simmel described secrecy “as a sociological technique” (Reference Simmel1950, 332), a pragmatics of sociation: the space of secrecy opened up by the occulting function “satisf[ies] within secrecy the impulse toward communion which the secret destroys in regard to the outside” (356).

Argots of French Colonial Algeria

In 1885, French Berberologists René Basset and Adolphe de Calassanti-Motylinski collected a word list of adərn awal ‘changing the speech’, which they characterized as “the argot of Mzab” in Algeria, describing it as a “secret language, mixed from Arabic and Berber, deriving above all from metaphors and word games” (Basset Reference Basset1887, 437). This list was expanded upon by A. J. Mouliéras a decade later, for which he added that its “sole purpose is to render oneself unintelligible to outsiders that are listening to it” (1895, 31). According to these authors, to say aman ibəršan ‘black water’ instead of qahwa ‘coffee’ is to conceal one’s meaning, not only because the latter may be understandable to Arabophones, but also because the former is supposedly figurative rather than literal (Basset Reference Basset1887, 438–39; Mouliéras Reference Mouliéras1895, 32; see also Stumme Reference Stumme1903, 17). The assumption is that a more semantically transparent description of the referent in Berber is nevertheless more referentially opaque to an Arab overhearer. This assumption is, of course, unjustified. These sorts of semantically transparent expressions are commonly documented throughout Berberophone North Africa. Nevertheless, these early colonial descriptions understood languages to be nomenclatures, in which objects in the world have “literal” names in a given language: that is, “real” things are “successfully and correctly referable-to by means of ‘literal’ lexical simplexes” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2001, 73). On this view, any deviation from the literal name is figurative and thus more opaque.Footnote ⁴ This is especially clear in the example of asəmmad n lənzar ‘cold nose’ being used instead of aidi ‘dog’ (Basset Reference Basset1887, 438–39; Mouliéras Reference Mouliéras1895, 32). Here, the idea is that dog literally refers to dogs, while, on the other hand, cold nose refers to dogs metonymically and therefore ‘figuratively’. This was all that was needed to consider the expression asəmmad n lənzar argotic; speakers wanting to be clear, it was thought, would simply say aidi instead.

Earlier, in their momentous tomes on Kabyle customs, Hanoteau and Letourneux likewise described the use of professional argots by peddlers and poets arising from the “need to communicate their thought to each other without risking being understood by outsiders” (Reference Hanoteau1872, 307). For instance, they note that, in his professional argot, the peddler says afus d urin ‘a handful of esparto grass’ instead of argaz ‘man’ (308). Similarly, a poet might refer to a woman with the expression gwəzala ‘gazelle’ instead of thamǝṭṭuth ‘woman’ (309). The point here is that, like Basset and Mouliéras, Hanoteau and Letourneux view these variants as inherently less clear, less straightforwardly literal, than the simplex expressions with which they are referentially substitutable. Since we are not left with ethnographically rich accounts that might suggest how such expressions functioned in verbal play or verbal art or how they may have been more singularly meaningful in the lived experience of speakers, such equivalences have been reduced unifunctionally to occultation, the hiding of intentions. The discursive persistence of this logic was on display almost a century later when, in the summer of 1960 and the winter of 1961, in post-colonial Libya, Umberto Paradisi (Reference Paradisi1963) collected lexical material in el-Fuqah. Paradisi described as argotic the glosses he received from elicitation that did not seem to be literal and simplex, such as aman n tiṭ ‘water of eye’ for “tear ((as in crying)),” wa n temsi ‘that of fire’ for “stove,” and alum n tisənt ‘leaf/straw of salt’ for “tea.” There is no indication that Paradisi was told that these were argotic expressions by interviewees. Instead, it appears that this determination was his and was made on purely formal grounds.

Italian Racist Criminology

Perhaps the most important influence on the research of Beguinot, Sarnelli, and Cerbella with regard to argots was the analytic framework provided by turn-of-the-century Italian criminology. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso claimed that argots are “a species of hostility or conspiracy against outsiders [estranei]” (Reference Lombroso1894, xi), a point more fully elaborated in this tradition by Alfredo Niceforo, who characterized argot as “a language of war” (Reference Niceforo1897, 8). Niceforo, a member of the Italian school of racist criminology that generally attributed high levels of crime to some or another racial quality, wrote of argot that it

For Niceforo, then, argot is “a weapon of defense that serves to obscure” (8), that is, it is a pragmatics of opaqueness entailing a threshold of intelligibility, since it “serves to hide thought, to assault, to cover … to put in communication only those who understand and are part of the group that speaks it” (13). In other words, it offers “the ability to communicate thought between the argotiers [i.e., argot-speakers]” (Reference Niceforo1912, 192) while remaining opaque to those beyond the threshold defined by it. In fact, Niceforo would go on to say that the argot of the people—that is, the vernacular—serves “to fight in the struggle against men of the privileged classes, to attack them, to insult them, to fool them” (78). For this reason, Walter Benjamin lauded him for recognizing “the function of argot (in the broader sense of the term) as an instrument in the class struggle” (Reference Benjamin2002, 75). Ultimately, what Niceforo elaborates is a theory of the weaponization of opaqueness

In other words, the normatively loaded division between the shared, legitimate code and “authentic argots” is anchored in the metaphor of relative opacity. This mirrors the criminological division between the upright citizen with nothing to hide (so to speak) and the delinquent: the criminal argot “is none other than the darkness that seeks to cover and hide the conflict or the crime” (Niceforo Reference Niceforo1897, 174). So it is that, within this language ideological anchoring (see Gal Reference Gal2005), expounded by Niceforo and taken up by Italian orientalists, argots are conflict registers that index antagonisms. The continuum between argots and the “normal language” is between obscurity and clarity or opaqueness and transparency, mapping the social continuum between antagonism and moral uniformity, or as Halliday would have it, between an anti-society and the established society.

In the context of Italian colonial Libya, researchers’ views on the nature of such antagonisms were responsive to developments in Italy’s colonial project. In particular, issues of language were directly tied to shifting colonial interests, including racializing projects that took language as their jumping-off point (see Kroskrity Reference Kroskrity2004, 501–3; Reference Kroskrity2020). Drawing on a tradition of racialized distinctions between Arabophones and Berberophones in North Africa (see Lorcin Reference Lorcin1995; La Mattina Reference La Mattina2020), Italians viewed linguistic divisions in Libya as indexical of racial antagonisms.

In 1915, the year that Italian forces withdrew to the coasts of Libya during a period they called “the rebellion” (1915–22), Francesco Beguinot convincingly made the case to the Ministry of Colonies that Berber was a language of fundamental importance. So, by 1918, Beguinot, “one of the leading Berberists in Europe,” was overseeing the preparation of “a series of manuals for the languages and for the material that they teach at the [Royal Oriental Institute of Napoli] and the history of the Berbers” (Ministero delle Colonie 1918, 304). The reason for the importance of Berber, according to Beguinot, was that Berberophones in Zwāra and the Nafūsa highlands allied with the Italians during this early period in Italy’s colonial project (which they saw as in their own tribal and economic interests; see Ahmida [Reference Ahmida2005, 29–33]), and that this language was crucial to maintaining their racial consciousness and thus what appeared to Italians as their allegiance to fellow Mediterraneans against Oriental Arabs. So, comments such as Aldo Mei’s regarding Awjila (the only Berberophone settlement in eastern Libya), that “sedentism, and their laudable care in conserving the ancestral language, have so far saved the Berber centre of Cyrenaica from Arabization and dispersion” (Reference Mei1914, 16), were common in the colonial period before the 1930s. From this view, Berbers were an anti-society relative to Arab dominance. Beguinot himself would argue for the importance of the Berber language to Italian colonial designs by characterizing it as a weapon of defense against Arabization, much in the manner of Niceforo:

However, things shifted during the 1930s. After “the rebellion” and the “re”-conquest of Tripolitania (1923–30), overlapping with the Italo-Senussi War (1923–32), the 1930s had proved to be a more secure period for fascist Italy in Libya. During this later period, one characterized by an influx of Italian settlers to Libya (Segrè Reference Segrè1974; Cresti Reference Cresti1996), the Italian colonial project was less concerned with race consciousness and more concerned with governance. Up to 1942, the central issue was not producing and reproducing racial antagonisms against Arabs, but was to consolidate colonial power, which involved incorporating Arabs into normative frameworks of colonial governance by combatting anti-colonial antagonisms (Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1946; also see Ahmida Reference Ahmida2021). So, in the final decade of direct Italian colonialism in Libya, tribal society in Libya was taken as a dangerous anti-society in relation to colonial Italian society.

Speech Disguises

I now turn to a finer-grain description and analysis of the three most important works on argots published by Italian researchers during the colonial period in Libya: Beguinot’s 1918 account of Berber argots, Tommaso Sarnelli’s 1924 account of Tripolitanian argots, and Gino Cerbella’s 1942 account of Libyan Qurʾanic schools. First, in this section, I examine how Sarnelli and Cerbella understood the semiotics of occultation as a formal process of disguising speech (in what are sometimes referred to as “cryptolalic formations”). In the following two sections, I closely turn to Sarnelli’s and Beguinot’s explanation of the anti-language role of argots in Libya, among Libyan Jews and Libyan Berberophones, respectively. As I show, these colonial concerns, racial and criminological, reflect monoglot standardist assumptions about transparency of reference and emblematization of community.

Tommaso Sarnelli began his 1924 article “Di alcuni Gerghi Arabi della Tripolitania” (On some Arabic argots of Tripolitania) by making explicit his debt to Niceforo:

The argot, in the case described by Sarnelli, involves a procedure whereby a thought, which would be clearly expressed in standard, legitimate language, is disguised by transformations to the expression-form. As Conklin (Reference Conklin1956) would later describe it, “disguised speech” involves systematically transformed expressions which nonetheless continue to function in the same way: same meaning, different form. Sarnelli discusses two sorts of disguises, those which are written and those which are spoken. Of the first sort, used by students “to communicate among themselves without their masters’ knowledge” is gelb el-ḥurūf ‘switching the letters’ (Reference Sarnelli1924, 194). In this writing disguise, through the application of transformation formulae such as ق=ل, or those in which the ʾiʿjām (i.e., the dot) is added or removed as in غ=ع or moved as in ﻴ=ﺘ (fig. 1), the expression-form ‘عليه’ becomes ‘غقتح’. So, these systematic transformational equivalences (which can be, for instance, given in a cipher) motivate possible metasemantic equations such as: “‘ظزانقش’ (in “switching the letters”) corresponds to ·طرابلس·”. The expression-forms ‘ظزانقش’ and ‘طرابلس’ both mean the same thing, but only the latter is transparent to the non-initiate, since the former is its disguised version that hides the function it plays in a given utterance. Anybody who knows how to play the Arabic language game will intuitively recognize the indexical function of ‘طرابلس’, that is, occasioning the concretization ṭrābləs ‘Tripoli’, but only those familiar with the “switching the letters” language game will recognize ‘ظزانقش’ as playing the same role. It follows that to encode an entire utterance this way is to occult the thought it expresses. The argot, here, is basically a cipher defining equivalences between spellings and concretizations as readings.

Figure 1.

Letter equivalences for “switching the letters” (from Sarnelli Reference Sarnelli1924, 194). It is interesting to note that, though the expression-forms are written from right to left in conformity with Arabic orthographic conventions, the actual equational syntagmas in the examples are meant to be read from left to right (from original to disguised) in conformity with Italian orthographic conventions.

Of the disguises that apply to spoken as opposed to written language, Sarnelli also describes ziadet el-ge ‘adding the ge’ in Miṣrāta, in which a qāf (ق) is inserted between the last consonant and the final vowel so that nemshu ‘we go’ becomes nemshgew (Reference Sarnelli1924, 195). This operation, like all such disguising techniques, modifies the original expression-form but not its functional role, or its meaning. So, again, this rule motivates the following metasemantic equation: “‘nemshgew’ (in “adding the ge”) corresponds to ·nemshu·”. However, it is not clear how opaque the resultant expression-form ‘nemshgew’ is in relation to its meaning, prototypically illustrated in Libyan Arabic by ‘nemshu’. This simple addition of a letter is relatively common in Arabic play-language; consider, for instance, a similar process in Yemen in which a sīn (س) is added after each syllable, so hāḏā ‘this’ becomes hāsāḏasā (Serjeant Reference Serjeant1948, 123). In fact, Gino Cerbella claims to have heard this same operation among students in Tripoli, but with the addition of a zayn (ز) after each vocalized letter, such that ʾanā ‘I, me’ becomes ʾazanaza and ʾanta ‘you’ becomes ʾazantaza (Reference Cerbella1942, 320–21). According to Cerbella, this is enough to occult the meaning, though I believe that a richer ethnographic account may have illuminated functions other than secrecy, such as verbal play, especially among children.

In a section of his 1942 article on Libyan Qurʾanic schools, Gino Cerbella dedicates a few pages mostly to representing Sarnelli’s 1924 material while making a few connections to his own observations. As an example, Sarnelli describes an argotic practice used in al-Jifārah that involves repetition and a syllable-terminal -in, such that bayt ‘house/tent’ becomes bebin tetin (Reference Sarnelli1924, 195). Cerbella mentions having heard a variation of this operation, two decades later, by a student in Tripoli (Reference Cerbella1942, 319). The variation that Cerbella heard also involved repetition but a syllable-terminal -ūn, such that jāʾa Muṣṭafā ‘Mustafa has come’ becomes jājūn ʾaʾūn mamūn ṣaṣūn ṭaṭūn fāfūn yayūn. On this basis, Cerbella hypothesized a third possible but unobserved variant in which the repeated syllable terminates in -ān (Reference Cerbella1942, 320). Among the rare novel contributions to the study of argots in his paper, Cerbella also describes an operation in which each word is terminated with an accented yāʾ (ي), for which Cerbella gives the example, Muṣṭafī jāʾī məshayī li-l-maktabī ‘Mustafa came walking to school’ (Reference Cerbella1942, 320). It is even less likely that this operation truly disguises anything much, since the original forms are quite transparent even after such a transformation and, in fact, supports my contention that many of these supposedly argotic practices had playful and creative, rather than strictly occulting, functions for the students who employed them. Nevertheless, in addition to representing Sarnelli’s material and providing his own examples of Sarnelli’s disguise types, Cerbella takes the opportunity to cite Niceforo and to emphasize that the social function of argot is as an instrument of “scoundrels and all men of ill repute” to make themselves opaque, “to elude the vigilance and the control of the personnel of the police and of the social order” (Reference Cerbella1942, 321). Consequently, he says, “this research has for us considerable value” (321).

It is worth making a few remarks here on the formal realization of the occulting function of argots. Sarnelli and Cerbella share the assumption that all deviations from a Standard are reductions in clarity, that is, referential directness in virtue of a shared code. Since, in the monological framework (critiqued by Duranti Reference Duranti1993, 25), communication involves appealing to a shared code as a cipher to encode and decode intentions, any aberration from this code is de jure a reduction in referential directness and hence an occultation of the speaker’s intention. Even operations, such as some of those described above, that have little effect on understanding are still understood as functioning primarily for the purposes of secrecy for this reason. And, in the case of Cerbella, writing a decade after the end of instability and of the wars in Libya, this secrecy itself was a threat to colonial interests since the anti-language function of Arabic argots was understood to be clandestine and anti-colonial in nature. However, as I show next, this anti-language function was for Sarnelli and Beguinot a matter not of anti-colonial, but of anti-Arab antagonism.

Libyan Jews and Judeo-Arabic

In the same 1924 article, Sarnelli mentions an Arabic argot used in the en-Nofliyin neighborhood of Tripoli in which the order of the consonants is shifted. Yet, to his apparent frustration, Sarnelli says that he cannot discern a clear rule as to exactly how the consonants are reordered. Unfortunately, he gives very few examples of this practice, for example, nibi nemshi li-ḥosh ‘I want to go home’ becomes binni shimni li-shoḥ (Reference Sarnelli1924, 196). What is of interest here, however, is his explanation of this argot:

According to Sarnelli, this argotic practice was originally used as a secret language by the Jews of the neighboring Jewish quarter ʿAmrus, less than a kilometer away. He believes that it originally served an anti-language function, in Niceforo’s terms as a weapon of “defense and offense,” against their Arab neighbors. However, the counteroffensive was simply to learn the argot, neutralizing its occulting function and thus its anti-language capacity. This was because, Sarnelli believed, Arabs and Jews were natural racial antagonists.

When Nahum Slouschz had visited ʿAmrus at the turn of the century, he described it as “a network of mean, narrow alleys, bare and squalid” (Reference Slouschz1927, 35; also see De Felice Reference De Felice1985, 300–301) in which Jews were confined owing to “the state of relations with the Muslims” (Reference Slouschz1907, 29). However, according to Renzo De Felice, this was the product of a recent “deterioration of intercommunity relations” owing in part to the introduction of Italian banking, the relatively favorable position of Jews in European projects of modernization, and the seeds of Arab nationalism (Reference De Felice1985, 18–19):

Two additional points are perhaps relevant. First, Libyan Jews spoke a noticeably distinct variety of Arabic referred to as Judeo-Arabic. Sumikazu Yoda suggests that separation into distinct Jewish quarters and lack of influence from literary Arabic may account, on the one hand, for linguistic innovations not present in the Libyan Arabic spoken by Muslims and, on the other, for the conservation of features that could appear archaic in relation to other Libyan Arabic dialects, such as realizing qāf (ق) as [q] rather than [ɡ] (Yoda Reference Yoda2018, 78–88). So, calling the practice described above—in which the consonants of words are reordered—Hebrew may have been a snarky negative comment on Jewish ways of speaking, that is, as gibberish.

Second, although not conclusive, the peddler argots recorded by researchers such as Slouschz resembled those described earlier by Basset and Hanoteau and Letourneux and not the speech disguises discussed in the previous section. That is, extant descriptions of Jewish argots in Libya foreground the figurative use of expressions, archaisms, and mixing. On this point, documenting the Arabic spoken by the Jews of Algeria, linguist Marcel Cohen described the use of argot by hagglers when confronted by police, such as bla dabar ‘silence’ from Arabic b(i)lā ‘without’ + Hebrew dabar ‘word’ (Reference Cohen1912, 407). According to Cohen, the need for argot was possibly “more extensive when the Jews had no liberty or security during the time of Turkish domination” (405). As I similarly show in the following section with regards to Berber, where documentation exists, Judeo-Arabic argots were described as increasingly opaque with the increase of Hebrew expressions. In fact, rather than a Hebraicization of Judeo-Arabic, Slouschz preferred to think of this as simply a reduced form of Hebrew, “a few scattered and isolated words which Jews use among themselves in order that outsiders should not understand” (Reference Slouschz1927, 196; see Goldberg Reference Goldberg1983, 90–91).

Sarnelli was clear, as was Cerbella, about the importance of his work to Italy’s colonial project in Libya: “today no colonizing people is unaware of the necessity of knowing the language, the key to the soul, of the subjects” (Reference Sarnelli1924, 197). But Sarnelli’s observations not only contributed to the practical knowledge of colonial interpreters. His is another line of evidence in Italy’s “Libyan colonial archive” that Libya is plagued with antagonisms on the part of Arab aggressors which it is Italy’s duty to resolve. It is, I believe, no coincidence that Sarnelli saw things this way in the 1920s, right when it was in Italy’s interest to explain Libyan history as one of continuous and aggressive Arabization against which, at that very moment, the forces of Italian colonialism were struggling.

Berberization as De-Arabization

Francesco Beguinot’s article “II gergo dei Berberi della Tripolitania” (The argot of the Berbers of Tripolitania), based on fieldwork in the Nafūsī mountains of western Tripolitania from 1913 and 1914, ends with the observation that

Here, similar to the Hebraicizing practices of Jewish peddlers mentioned above, but unlike the speech disguises described by Sarnelli and Cerbella, Beguinot is principally interested in Berberizing practices as serving an occulting and an anti-language function. So, the article begins by remarking that what he will be calling an argot involves

In essence, what Beguinot argues is that Berberophones Berberize their Berber when in the presence of Arabs because otherwise the historically Arabized Berber they normally speak might not efficiently occult their intentions. The importance of this mechanism merits repeating: according the Beguinot, the occulting function of Berber as a language of concealment is increased as it is de-Arabized, or as Beguinot says, as it “repairs the breaches made by Arabic” (108). Consequently, as an anti-language against the wider Arab society in Libya, this use of Berber is an important means in virtue of which Berbers constitute an anti-Arab society, that is, in virtue of which they have ethnic consciousness as Berbers.

Consider, for instance, how Beguinot racializes linguistic choice alongside linguistic structure. Beguinot judges shāhi ‘tea’ to be (Libyan) Arabic: it has penetrated the Berber lexicon just as the Arabs penetrated Berber Libya, and to resist the Arab presence (and Arabization) is to repair the Arabs’ lexical breach.

Understood in metasemantic terms, Beguinot is asserting a number of functional equivalences that may likewise be given in the form of metasemantic propositions:

Each of these expression-forms corresponds to the Arabic expression-form shāhi in the sense that they all play the same role as shāhi in reference and predication, that is, they all indicate tea. In this perspective, in the order of generality, each expression-form is equally subordinated to this one referential function and for this reason they are substitutable with each other. It becomes a matter of linguistic choice. So, the Awjilan Berberophone has a choice: use the Arabic form shāhi or the Berber form imîn aḥmâna. However, a further distinction is required to understand Beguinot’s (and his Berberist predecessors’) logic. For Beguinot, the form shāhi is not only Arabic, but it is also a “literal” lexical simplex, while imîn aḥmâna is believed to be figurative (literally, ‘hot water’) and so, in some sense, contrived. (This is unjustified for a number of reasons, not least of which being that similar semantically transparent constructions are very common among Berberophones across North Africa). So, the unmarked choice would be for an Awjilan to indicate tea by shāhi, while to indicate tea by imîn aḥmâna is a motivated choice. Otherwise being functionally equal, Beguinot imagines that a Berber’s reason for deviating from the standard, unmarked shāhi is to make reference less transparent. That the alternatives to shāhi are Berber forms is, for Beguinot, the key to the maintenance of Berber race consciousness.

In another example, Beguinot does not judge the alternative expression-forms to differ in terms of what language they belong to (as in the previous example), but rather merely as a difference in referential directness owing to the literalness of reference.

Again, this equivalence can be understood in metasemantic terms, except in this case the descriptor does not qualify the expression-form as belonging to one language rather than another (e.g., Berber as opposed to Arabic), but as belonging to the standard- or to the argot-dimension of the same language, in this case understood to be Berber: “‘əčwa ṭārənnək’ (in argot) corresponds to ·ərwəl·.” The point is the same, that under such an analysis the expression-forms ‘ərwəl’ and ‘əčwa ṭārənnək’ are subordinated to the same linguistic function: this time, the directive one of telling someone to run. Yet, again, the same literal-figurative distinction comes into play. The form ərwəl is taken to be literal and thus unmarked (Standard), while the form əčwa ṭārənnək is taken to be figurative (because it is analyzable into “raise (up to) foot.pl-your”) and thus less standard, less clear, less referentially direct.

The final example I discuss from Beguinot’s paper involves a continuum from most to least transparent resulting from the layered application of the literal-figurative and the Arab-Berber dichotomies. As Beguinot says: “in Fassāṭo, horse is said as sg. agmār pl. igmārən” (Reference Beguinot1918, 108). However, in argot, horse is indicated by wīn rabaʿ n iṭārən, which is analyzable as “that which has four feet.” So, in the first place, the primary division is already set up between the literal, simplex, and standard expression-form agmār and the figurative, less transparent form wīn rabaʿ n iṭārən, both subordinated to the same general function: referring to horses. Still, the reader familiar with Arabic may have noticed that, in analyzing wīn rabaʿ n iṭārən into its constituent signs, the argot form contains rabaʿ ‘four’, a paraphone of the Arabic form ʾarbaʿa ‘four’. So, for Beguinot, “a phrase in which the Arabic word indicating 4 is substituted with the phrase ‘a hand minus one’ is considered to be a grade more stretto of argot” (Reference Beguinot1918, 108). For this reason, the most argotic version of horse is not only figurative, but also purely Berberized (i.e., completely de-Arabized): fùs ġayr íǧən n iṭārən, functionally equivalent to agmār but analyzable into is constituent signs as “hand except one of feet ,” that is, “5 − 1 = 4 feet.” These considerations can be figured metasemantically as:

On this analysis, even the Berberized argot may still be Arabized, and could thus be Berberized even further. As Beguinot sees it, figurative language is not enough, a truly occulting Berber anti-language will be completely de-Arabized, that is, will be completely and purely Berber (see fig. 2). This continuum matches the one mentioned by Niceforo in which transperency of reference decends from “the clear and normal language” to the “authentic argots where the obscurity becomes the most thick and complete.” Nevertheless, a couple points are in order. Of note here is the fact that ġayr in fùs ġayr íǧen ‘hand except one’ is itself a recognizably Arabic expression-form. Yet, another important factor concerns differences in use that indexically function in ways other than occultation (which is the case, as might be clear, in most of the Italian colonial examples of argot); for instance, German orientalist Hans Stumme observed that expression-forms for numbers among the Ishelhien in southern Morocco were differentiated by gender:

While it is unclear what sociolinguistic factors may have contributed to the data Beguinot obtained, his monoglot standardist assumptions that deviations from standard form functioned as secretive, and so as counter-social resistance, foregrounded racial antagonism between Berberophones and Arabophones in Libya. His article can thus be read as an appeal to the importance of de-Arabization as a project of liberating indigenous Berbers when Italians just happened to be waging a war of conquest throughout Libya in alliance with Nafūsi Berberophones.

Figure 2.

Degrees of argot; from top (literal) to bottom (figurative) and from right (Arabic) to left (Berber).