In this book the analysis of utterances sent over Facebook on the occasion of death was presented. The analysis of the material brings us to the conclusion that death in Egyptian society is a phenomenon dealt with indirectly; the picture is mediated by religion and beliefs. When responding to an announcement about someone’s death, Egyptians most often use blessings. They ask God to provide the mourner with patience and to grant the deceased a place in heaven. The solace of blessings is based on faith in the power of divine grace (baraka).

Baraka ‘divine grace’ is considered to operate in the life of Muslims at every moment and in all their endeavours. The transmission of baraka is one of the basic rituals of everyday polite exchange in Arab culture. According to Hamady (1960: 77–78) conveying blessing is a regular part of a broad complex of ritual greetings exchanged during visits; this involves requests addressed to God for the interlocutor’s health, long living and well-being: “God bless you”, “God multiply those who resemble you”, “God recompense you” (for thanks) are some examples of such expressions (ibid.). God is a constant agent in human life. His omnipresence is attested and referred to even in the most mundane activities of daily life. God is regarded as a source of power (quwwa, ḥawl). It is believed that all past, current and future human activity is carried out purely by the power of the divine that is granted to people, hence the expression: rabbina ʾaddarni ‘God gave me the power [to do something]’ A person often refers to God while asking for his active participation in their life. Daily interaction includes a request for blessing at every opportunity, recourse to God in moments of horror and danger, and sometimes requests for misery to befall enemies, e.g., curse.

In this book, a response to the taboo of death was studied based on the CMC data gathered from Facebook. A randomly selected group of 20 death announcements, 857 comments and 220 turns of dialogues were analysed in terms of their formulaicity. Additionally, the group of comments was also examined quantitively to provide a general structural pattern of response to death announcements on Facebook.

As previously stated, formulae are specific elements of language that are retrieved whole from the mental lexicon at the moment of speech production. In this sense, a number of proprieties distinguish formulae from words: “wide-ranging intraphrase flexibility”, “mandatory affective and attitudinal nuances”, “considerable length” (Van Lancker Sidtis 2012a: 358). The last point probably should be further refined on other occasion. Van Lancker Sidtis refers to them with a term “formuleme”, which is an item stored in the mental lexicon, a conglomerate of features relating to meaning (social and affective connotations), linguistic form (grammatical, phonetic, prosodic) and pragmatic contingencies (ibid.).The interest of researchers in formulae dates back to the mid-19th century, when the first studies of aphasiac patients revealed that some parts of language remain intact in their case (Wray 2002). Concepts interpreting the fixedness of idioms began to appear, e.g., in Bobrow and Bell’s (1973) model idioms are treated similarly to lexemes in memory. According to them, the analysis mechanism is as follows: literal interpretation is attempted first, and if unsuccessful, a switch is made to select an idiom form the lexicon. Further studies (Swinney and Cutler 1979) employing visual classification latencies did not confirm this theory, on the contrary, they revealed that idioms were processed even faster than non-idiomatic material (Wood 2015).

In one of the first reports in the neurolinguistic field, Winner and Gardner (1977) noted that patients with right hemisphere damage showed problems with a picture matching task involving formulaic metaphors. In the late 80s, a neuropsychological protocol defined a new term – pragnosia (Nelson et al. 1989), a deficit in the social use of language in persons with right hemisphere damage:

Due to its size, the work presented here very briefly tackles some of the problems that arise during analysis and therefore issues that require further research in the future should be summarised. In this respect, linguistic issues come to the fore, in particular those related to the use of mixed variety. A thorough study of formulae taking into account phonetic realisation as well as variation in the choice of classical or dialectal items along with their situational and contextual determinants is called for. Nevertheless, this cannot be achieved with the type of data analysed here; instead, it would require a sizeable corpus of spontaneous oral utterances gathered in an inobtrusive way, which obviously poses a considerable challenge to the researcher.

Other problems are more directly related to the type of data used here. A problematic issue is the “third party factor” in CMC, mentioned previously, leading to the numerous acts of self-presentation and an exceptional attentiveness to the form of the verbal production posted online. This situation also causes some other linguistic phenomena that were not discussed exhaustively in this work. One of them is the “emblematic” role of the standard variety and its development in CMC. It is assumed that at least some speakers have a poor command of MSA, yet they use this variety frequently in their online posts. Therefore, it would be of great importance to examine the language used by them in the context of linguistic correctness, and perhaps, language change.

Other issues concern typically Arabic manners of expression, an example of which is the role and pragmatic function of adjuration. Adjuration in EA is used in all types of conversations, strengthening the message and conveying the sincerity of speaker. It can be considered as a specifically Arabic act in everyday verbal exchanges. However, it does not appear in situations involving strong taboo like death. Investigating this issue might contribute greatly to the analysis of emotionality of Arabic speech.

Ferguson argues, “[t]he obligatory inclusion of a God-wish in response to a health inquiry, however, seems of sufficient regularity and the linguistic conditions of its occurrence so readily stable, that it would seem to belong within the grammar.

In the transcription system, the actual pronunciation is taken into account, therefore, for instance, in ya rabb il-ʿalamīn [ā] is shortened to [a]. Whenever there is doubt in terms of whether Egyptian Arabic (EA) or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)/Classical Arabic (CA) pronunciation should be applied, the transcription followed a native speaker suggestion (see Methods). Most of the examples, however, represent a mixed variety.

• • In dialectal material, whenever the environment of a sound calls for it, short vowels are dropped, e.g., ya bni, long vowels are shortened, e.g., fakra, mugamalāt, ḥagg, šabb and helping vowels are added.

• • In line with the above, vocative ya is spelled with the short a, whereas in standard examples it is spelled conventionally as yā.

• • Verbs with object pronouns, e.g., yikallimhum, nouns with possessive pronouns, e.g., kitābu and all word combinations in which one word is attached to another as a clitic are written together.

• • The use of hyphen is highly limited, it appears mostly in the article al-/il-.

• • The initial hamza is dropped when it is in a middle of a breath group and elsewhere with only a few exceptions, e.g., in which [ʾ] is the result of the reduction of [q].

• • The process of emphasis spreading, e.g., the occurrence of backed allophones of [a] and [ā] is not noted.

• • Ē in dialectal examples corresponds to the standard diphthong [ay], e.g., ʿalēh.

• • Both h and ḥ may be used to note the future tense particle, depending on the original notation.

• • In original examples the Latin spelling (if available) suggest both yi- and y- in verbal forms, therefore, in some cases short vowels were dropped, e.g., tkūn.

• • In aḷḷāh the final h is retained in consistency with ēh, lēh, etc., although, in most cases, it is silent.

• • The negative particle (la, lā, laʾ) is, for more consistency, spelled always as lā.

• • Individual pronunciation of EA users might differ, therefore, when in doubt, the spelling was

• provided by a native speaker.

• • In EA examples, the punctuation is limited to comas, question and exclamation marks, occasionally a colon might occur.

• • In direct citations the original spelling was retained, e.g. “sheex” (Parkinson 1985: 136).

• • No capitals are used in the transcription.

• • MSA/CA notation is consistent with ISO transcription. In English fragments the conventional notation is employed.

The current quantitative analysis encompasses 857 comments made in reaction to death announcements, the vast majority of which consist in condolences and blessings expressed with a set of conventional formulae. Single-formula expressions were very rare, most often at least a few of the elements presented below were represented. The scheme shown in the table below accounts for most of the typical formulae and the standard order in which they appear in the material studied. Additionally, the table shows the percentage of a given slot’s occurrence in the material studied.

The most typical example of a reaction to a death announcement has a multi-stage structure. Each of the stages is optional, yet the core appears in a majority of cases. Between the stages, the table shows empty slots called here discourse markers (DM). They can be filled with invocations directed at God (vocative forms), terms of address, terms of endearment or elements confirming blessings, e.g., amīn ‘amen’.

The core of condolences is usually two-cola, consisting of two twin supplications – requesting mercy and forgiveness for the deceased. Most frequently, they have the form of an optative expressed with the imperfective verb or, less frequently, imperative with vocative forms addressed directly to God. Perfect tense occurs as well, although it is rare. An explicitly expressed subject appears only with the first element of the group, while the second one is introduced with the wa/wi conjunction. Elements of the core might be separated by DM slots or appear one after another joined with the wa/wi conjunction.

(95) aḷḷāh yirḥamu wi yiġfirlu ‘May God have mercy on him and forgive him’.

(96) ya rabb irḥamha wi ġfirlaha ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy on her and forgive her’.

The stage which appears directly after the core is the supplement, i.e., an additional group of formulae, usually two-cola as well but with common diversions from the rule. The first part is a blessing for the deceased, in which the writer asks God to grant the deceased a place in heaven. The second part is a blessing for the mourner – the author requests relief, peace and patience (ṣabr) for the suffering bereaved one. It happens that only one of the formulae is used, while in certain cases more developed supplements occur as well. Optional DMs occur between the two elements of the supplement.

The material studied in this work consists of examples that illustrate the linguistic response to the taboo of death: death announcements and responses to them in the form of comments offering “condolences”. The word “condolences” is written here in quotation marks, because the reaction in response to death announcements in the Arab world is complex in terms of content and does not limit itself to expressions of sympathy and joining the other person in pain.

The material was obtained from Facebook and consists of written utterances. All speakers were adults. No age criterion was adopted, but it can be assumed that the majority of the utterances were made by young people. Another assumption, also unverified, is that the speakers are people with a higher level of education. The snowball method of accessing participants was used, often resulting in speakers with a similar social profile. Some of the speakers, especially when it comes to the authors of death announcements, are my personal Facebook friends. They are people with higher education in humanities or medicine, aged 30–40, professionally related to academic activity or playing an active role in the life of the community, e.g., as charity activists. However, their class affiliation varies, some come from the country’s political and financial elite, while others, thanks to hard work and personal talent, have risen from the working class. They addressed their posts to their Facebook friends (judging by the privacy settings), so they could access a maximum of about 500–1,000 people on average (based on the author’s number of Facebook friends). An assumption can be made that at least some of those who commented on the posts were people with a similar social profile. The total number of speakers was 774, including 156 men and 618 women. The disproportion in gender was not intended. Post and their comments were randomly selected from the enormous amount of material available. In all the examples, the criterion of informality was met. In the study, utterances containing information about the death of a beloved person or a friend as well as reactions to those announcements were analysed. All utterances were personal and no public posts and information about the death of public figures were ex-amined.

Everyday human exchange poses a number of threats to the social image of the interactants (Brown and Levinson 1987), therefore, a number of restrictions are imposed on people navigating the gamut of daily interactions with other members of the community. Such restrictions may be equated with taboos in which some modes of behaviour, actions or utterances are seen as prohibited. The nature of such taboo exchange is two-fold: on the one hand, it may be a source of benefit or blessing, while on the other hand, it brings danger and causes apprehension. Linguistic interaction in the Arab world may be summed up as: avoiding the evil through recourse to God and seeking the good in every speech moment, which is also achieved through requests directed to God. Blessing and danger are both transmitted in language. Elements of language (words and expressions) are the media carrying what brings luck or misfortune. Positive and negative transmissions are two aspects of communication that can be distinguished in the linguistic exchange, both of which bring a number of ritual behaviours involving a resort to God. People seek baraka ‘blessing’ for themselves and their surroundings as a necessary element of life. For dangerous situations, a number of avoidance strategies are found in communication forming a stable and conventionalised system. A similar point of view is presented by Piamenta:

Potentially, every situation presents an element of good and evil. In certain situations, when an Arab is involved in a form of danger (taboo), he/she pronounces a formula designed to ensure that he/she would experience only the positive aspects of it. Such utterances are usually invocations addressed to God or Quranic formulae thought to possess magical powers. These might include:

In her work Formulaic Language and the Lexicon, Wray states that “although we have tremendous capacity for grammatical processing, this is not our only, nor even our preferred, way of coping with language input and output” (2002: 10). According to her, the majority of linguistic production is not processed analytically, which is in contradiction to Chomsky’s linguistics. Wray cites two very important arguments that, until recently, were the only counterpoint to the opinion that the entire human linguistic production is generated on an ongoing basis. The first was the observation that idioms cannot be analysed in the way proposed by generative grammar, because such an approach is unable to reflect their meaning. The second was the observation that not all generated sentences, assessed by native speakers as grammatically correct, appear with equal frequency in their relevant situations (Wray 2002). As Wray claims, corpus linguistics and research carried out according to its methods revealed the extent to which natural texts are composed of prefabricated elements, rather than constructed from scratch: “Words belong with other words not as an afterthought but at the most fundamental level” (2002: 13). Sinclair postulated “the idiom principle” to be applied at first place when analysing natural texts, while the “open-choice principle” is applied when necessary (1991: 114). This switching can take place many times back and forth in the process of analysis. A feature of formulaic sequences is their close relationship with the social context in which they are acquainted. Therefore, such expressions constitute a separate set in the lexicon, impossible to fully analyse in isolation from the context.

So, what are formulaic strings? Formulaicity is a feature that occurs within a continuum, which means it is impossible to draw a line between formulaic and non-formulaic expressions. Wray (2002) says they are texts such as rhymes and prayers memorised within oral traditions. They usually include greetings, proverbs, riddles, blessings, curses, time-buyers, turn-holders, discourse markers, repetitions, and other stereotyped phrases. Wray proposes the following definition of a formulaic sequence: “a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar” (2002: 9).

In the previous chapters, the structure of the formulae used when speaking about death (announcing, acknowledging, reacting, and entering an interaction with a mourner) was presented. Some of their features, e.g., prefabricated language elements, were also discussed, including their variability. Formulaic language constitutes a relatively small percentage of death announcements, but it dominates the rest of the speech acts examined here. The death announcements researched, although only 20 randomly selected examples were analysed, follow many different models. Due to their diversity and the limited amount of material, no attempt was made to classify them, as any conclusions drawn this way would not be reliable. Analysing data obtained from sources other than CMC would probably produce different results. Al-Khatib and Salem (2011) studied Muslim and Christian obituaries in Jordanian Arabic newspapers. They discovered far more formalised structures in them. In their corpus, 65% of the obituaries were rounded off by a what is referred to here as a framing formula, appearing mostly in reactions to death announcements. In Christian obituaries representing 1% of their material, this formula was replaced with the Biblical verse: ʔarrab ʔaϛtaa wa ʔarrab ʔaxð. fal yakun ismu ʔarrabi mubarakan ‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord’. Invocations to God and prayers for a place in heaven for the deceased accounted for 30% of their material, though qualitatively these were different from those appearing in the Egyptian CMC. The authors summarised their analysis as follows: “most of Jordanian obituaries included verses from the Holy Quran and the Bible as well as many prayers for the deceased. The opening and closing parts of the obituaries were verses from either the Holy Quran or the Bible. Invoking God to forgive the deceased and let him/her enter paradise was a common feature of Jordanian obituaries” (2011: 93). Obituaries in the newspapers have a more formalised structure than personal posts on private social media profiles. In terms of structure, the texts appearing in them tended to correspond to the comments to the posts in the corpus analysed in the current study. These answers not only appear in abundance, but also use largely formulaic language, mostly following the scheme described in Structural Notes. Reacting to death is based on group rituals: linguistic items appear in their expected places.

Human beings are fearful creatures. The world that surrounds them is full of dangers. They fear death in particular, and therefore, seek protection from danger and the ubiquitous possibility of dying. Although this is common for all people, this book focuses on Egyptians, their fears and their sociocultural conditions.

Fear is perceived in Islam as a natural reaction to the surrounding world; people are fearful because they were created this way. According to the Quran, inna l-insāna ḫuliqa halūʿan ‘man was created anxious’ (Piamenta 1979: 19). So, people fear “physical, mental, and spiritual oddities, bad actions, adversities and misfortunes, demonic and evil forces” (Piamenta 1979: 92). There is a potential danger in everything, therefore, people, when overwhelmed by uncertainty, or when confronted with death, illness, loss of a precious possession, etc., seek refuge in God, beg for God’s mercy or express their resignation to God’s will:

• (1) ana fiʿarḍi rabbina ‘I implore the protection of our Lord’ (MP).

• (2) ana mitwakkil ʿala ḷḷāh ‘I have put my trust in God’ (MP).

• (3) ḥasbuna ḷḷāh wi niʿma l-wakīl ‘God is sufficient for us. Most excellent is he in whom we trust’ (MP).

• (4) ḫallīha ʿala ḷḷāh ‘Leave it to God!’ (MP).

• (5) iḥna ʾulna lli ʿalēna wi l-bāʾi ʿala ḷḷāh ‘We have said whatever we should; the rest depends on God’ (MP).

By reciting these formulae, people submit themselves to God’s will, hoping that God will save them from danger. They do not have to be explicit about their fears, for they are often a subject of taboo. Various methods of indirectness are used to circumvent a dangerous topic. In such cases, the way it is communicated reflects cultural identity and beliefs. In this book, I present an analysis of the reaction to the taboo of death, which can probably be considered as one of the greatest dangers in store for people in life and in society.

The first author to use the term “taboo” (Polynesian tapu) was Captain James Cook in the logbook of his third trip to Polynesia 1776–1779, on his voyage to discover the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (Allan and Burridge 2006: 3).

In this section I will discuss a specific phenomenon of Arab (and Egyptian) culture, namely, the reference to God and his constant presence in human life. This theme is essentially related to the issues previously mentioned, and particularly to the relation between human fears and linguistic behaviour arising from them. The necessary element of this relation in Arab culture is supernatural agency: the relentless action of God and, on the other hand, his sinister powers. Considering the paucity of material on the linguistic behaviour of Egyptian Christians in the available literature, only references to Islam and Islamic values are made, which, of course, constitute a serious drawback and calls for more studies in the future.

In this section a term “positive transmission” will be used with reference to the idea of communication based on conveying blessing between interlocutors or evoking divine agency and help when it is needed in human life. This springs from the deeply rooted belief that baraka ‘blessing’ is an active power able to protect people from the sinister forces that are similarly active in the world. Baraka is believed to support people in their everyday endeavours and give them the power to overcome obstacles. Linguistic expressions with reference to God and his baraka are among the performative acts so, in other words, they are believed to have the power to change the state of affairs in human reality, whether social or spiritual. This section also partly discusses certain aspects of Arab culture that have an impact on the way they communicate. The first of these will be the specific way of seeing reality, which includes the humble acceptance of misfortune, the fact associated with the belief that human destiny is guided by God and nothing people do can change it.

Transmission of baraka

Baraka is a force present in the sacred words of the Quran (hence amulets containing Quranic passages) used for many different purposes (Hamady 1960: 167). It is a magical power, and yet constantly present in the everyday life of Egyptians as well as in their language. Many of the examples analysed here were of Quranic origin:

The following qualitative analysis aims to discuss selected aspects of the formulaicity in utterances related to the subject of death in three different communicative types: death announcements, comments, and dialogues. In this part, the material from two periods will be analysed. The majority will consist of data obtained for the purposes of this work including 20 death announcements, 857 comments and 220 responses to comments from 2020–2021. On the other hand, a corpus of Facebook conversations of 60 people from 2007–2014 was also used, previously analysed in 2016 in my doctoral thesis Linguistic Etiquette and Taboo in the Language of Young Egyptians. A Text-Based Study of Online Communication. What is of key importance for the current study is more or less conventional formulae, as presented in the previous chapter. All of the analysed comments appeared in reaction to a death announcement. In this chapter, the bulk of the formulae will be extended to include posts and dialogues.

Death announcements

This analysis encompasses death announcements appearing on Facebook in the form of posts. Most of them concerned the death of a speaker’s loved one that happened shortly before the publication of the post. Some of them, however, related to situations that took place in the past, e.g., appeared on the anniversary of the death. Therefore, the tabooisation of the theme may have faded for the speaker, to some extent, over the passage of time. These posts refer to a tragedy that has already been processed. The pain that the authors indicate is more conscious and is talked about more openly. There are fewer prayers and more poetic attempts, although of course this observation is anecdotal rather than hard fact, taking into account the fact that the material analysed here is limited in size.

The material analysed here consists of 20 death announcements of differing lengths. A single sentence or its functional equivalent is assumed as a unit. Announcements consist of 16 sentences on average, although the differences are significant. Two of the announcements consists of a single sentence, while the longest one has 70 sentences. The material was randomly selected form enormous amount of such data available on Facebook. The most surprising feature turned out to be its diversity.

Researchers in the field of youth language in Africa have often been less than explicit about their sources of data and methods of collection. In order to provide recommendations for future research, this chapter reflects on the preceding chapters and highlights some considerations regarding different methods of data collection and different types of data on youth language practices. We consider naturalistic data and authenticity in youth language data. We present examples of data outcomes from a South African project that captured data on Tsotsitaal, and we also consider the methods presented in the chapters in this book in order to further illustrate the wide range of data outcomes in youth language research. The chapter makes the argument that the most important move is to define the object of analysis – and that it cannot be simplistically described as 'youth language'.