Presenter: Peter Kitlas (Emory University)
Discussant: Tunç Şen (Columbia University)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
Letter Writing and Language Learning: a Case-Study from 18th-Century Morocco
Throughout his career as a Viennese ‘language boy,’ Franz von Dombay (d. 1810) collected hundreds of personal letters, which he collated in several scrapbooks. While past scholars have done much work to demonstrate the ways in which Dombay excelled in his service across Morocco and the Ottoman Empire during the late eighteenth century, this talk focuses on the pedagogical techniques and practices of his Moroccan teacher, Ḥasan al-Wāfalāwī. Here, I demonstrate how a closer examination of the numerous letters written from al-Wāfalāwī to Dombay sheds light on their function as linguistic exercises and language learning opportunities. Through these letters, I argue, it becomes possible to think more critically about the dialectical features of language learning between student and teacher in eighteenth-century Morocco.