Spelling variants in written Egyptian Arabic: a study on literary texts

Egyptian Arabic is the spoken vernacular for the most populated Arab country. It is also a form of written communication in informal genres, for instance chats, blogs, emails etc., and in more traditional genres such as novels, short stories, poetry, and theatre. Although the current systems of online communication have seen it emerge as a relevant phenomenon in recent years, vernacular writing is not a novelty in the modern age. From the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards, Egyptian literature has offered several cases of works written in vernacular. This paper presents some results of a study carried out, in a diachronic perspective, on literary texts belonging to different genres and discourse modes, in search of words written according to different spellings to identify variants, to compare them, and to evaluate their common and diverse elements. Indeed, by comparing the practice of writing Egyptian Arabic which has not been codified as a literary means, some noteworthy features emerge not only from the lexical and morphological choices of authors but also from the graphic representation of this language variety, allowing the description of a framework of variants which could be considered as a basic corpus in a possible operation of normalizing the vernacular orthography.