In this paper, I will present a descriptive analysis of Jibli Arabic, or the Bedouin Arabic dialect of the Jibli tribe of the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, with some discussion about the linguistic genealogy of their language from the viewpoint of historical and comparative Arabic dialectology.
The ethnic origin of the Jibli tribe is very mysterious. It is recorded in the Chronicle of Eutychius, Patriarch of Alexandria in the ninth century, that when the Byzantine emperor Justinian (527-565 A.D.) built the Monastery of St. Catherine, he settled by it some 200 families brought from the northern shore of Anatolia and from Alexandria in order to serve and protect the monks of the Monastery. The people of the Jibli tribe are the offspring of these families, who originally lived as serfs in the present district of Bosnia (the southwestern part of the former Yugoslavia, Wallachia (the southern part of Rumania), and Alexandria (Egypt). It is worth noting that they proudly see themselves as Greeks or at least as descendants of Greeks, and interestingly enough, at the same time, they have a strong inclination toward ethnic identity as Arab in its rather original sense, that is, Bedouin. The people of the Jibli tribe are today Muslims. But, at the time of their settlement, they embraced Christianity, and their conversion to Islam was a comparatively recent affair.
It is not clear what language they were speaking when they settled in Sinai. Still less is it clear when they began to speak Arabic. Based on a little fragmentary historical knowledge about the linguistic situation around the sixth century, we can tentatively say that as for the people who came from Bosnia and Wallachia, their original language was a dialect of (vulgar) Latin. Whatever language they spoke before their acquisition of Arabic, they must have learned to speak Arabic in a very short time after the arrival of Arabic-speaking Bedouin from the Arabian Peninsula. It is inferred from the circumstances in which they lived and their needs, such as the procurement of daily necessities and food from the Arabic-speaking tribes in their neighborhood, that their first Arabic was pidgin-like and used only or mainly for the purpose of commerce, which became a linguistically full-fledged mother tongue as spoken at the present time through the processes of creolization and de-creolization.

Key Words: Arabic dialect, Bedouin Arabic dialect, Egypt, Sinai Peninsula, Jibli tribe

After the loss of the former Japanese colonies and the occupied territories, many Japanese anthropologists organized mass-media-sponsored expeditions, one of the few means of conducting scientific fieldwork. This phenomenon was particularly notable in the period between 1955 and 1960, having its roots in the alpinist expeditions to the Himalayas which began with anthropologists’ participation in 1953. Distinguished expedition members included Hitoshi Kihara, Nobuhiro Matsumoto, Masao Oka, Kaoru Tanaka, Kinji Imanishi, Eiichiro Ishida, Namio Egami, Kosuke Yamashita, Sosuke Sugihara, Seiichi Izumi, Sasuke Nakao, Jiro Kawakita, and Tadao Umesao, among others.
Most of the expeditions were accompanied by movie cameramen, whose films were released in movie theaters, making the sponsorship profitable. Newspaper reporters also used to follow them, headlining the expedition’s activities, and publicizing exotic scenes or arcane scientific knowledge. Newspaper companies, after the expedition, organized exhibitions, expedition members’ talks, and free film shows.
This partnership started to collapse around 1963, when the film industry began to decay because of the rise of TV, and because ordinary citizens were more able to make overseas trip. Another reason was that mass-media companies no longer needed academic authority, for they were free to organize their own expeditions. In this situation, some expeditions tried to keep up partnerships with mass-media companies, though these declined in number. Fortunately the Ministry of Education began to provide anthropologists with funds for overseas research, enabling them to do fieldwork more easily. Thus, the cooperation between academia and the mass media lasted only during the period of insufficient governmental support for expeditions. However, as an unintended result, the anthropological expeditions of this time led the general public to recognize the significance of anthropological activity, which brings knowledge of distant areas.

Key Words: Japanese anthropology, expedition, newspaper, documentary film, television