The Beginnings of Wikipedia Masry

Abstract

Having been officially launched in 2008 by a group of young Egyptian internet users, Wikipedia Masry became the first Wikipedia to be collaboratively written in one of the colloquial varieties of Arabic - Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA). This has caused a lot of controversy and criticism in numerous forums, blogs, and Facebook groups, both in Egypt and throughout the Arab world. In this article, I discuss the ideological background of this project which is grounded in territorial Egyptian nationalism and articulated around the claim that, rather than a dialect, ECA is a separate language, completely different and independent from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). My analysis of several lexical, morpho-syntactic and orthographic characteristics found in Wikipedia Masry articles demonstrates that a lot of what active contributors to Wikipedia Masry write is, in fact, an admixture of ECA and MSA. Despite the contributors' insistence on linguo-ideological claims that they write in the 'Egyptian language', many linguistic features of their language production reveal that the resultant written discourse of Wikipedia Masry still relies on MSA.