Voice of a nation: How Juba Arabic helps bridge a factious South Sudan
By the time he was a young man, Dedy Seyi’s head was crammed with languages.
In the refugee camp where he lived in northwestern Kenya, he spoke at least four every day. There was Kakwa, his mother tongue, shouted across scratchy cellphone lines to South Sudanese family back home and scattered around the region. With Kenyan and Somali friends in the camp, he chatted in Swahili, and in the high school where he taught, he switched into an English as crisp as the queen’s.
But the language he loved best was one he spoke mostly to himself.
Rabuna, Abuna fi sama, de akil al bi saadu gisim, he would whisper each night in Juba Arabic, hands clasped over his dinner plate. Kede ita bariku, be isim Yesuwa Masiya, Amen.
Almighty God, our Father in heaven, this is food to nourish the body. Bless it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Mr. Seyi hadn’t always spoken Juba Arabic this way, in a quiet, unanswered whisper.
When he was growing up in the town of Yei, the Arabic-based language was everywhere. It was the language of haggling over tomatoes and shouting about football scores, the language of folktales and Bible stories he swapped with friends and the news updates blasted from microphones by self-appointed town criers, who carried news from the front lines of the country’s slow-burn civil war.
“In a place like South Sudan, you have all these different languages hovering around you,” Seyi says. “So you need a way to talk to people across those barriers, and Juba Arabic was how we did that.”
In much of the world, that kind of linguistic toggling is). Some 200 million of Indonesia’s 260 million people speak more than one of the country’s 746 languages.
