In this post, I will explore the global flow of remittance monies and the language practices to which they are related.

Remittances are big business

The amount of remittances – monies transferred internationally by individual international migrants to family members in their home countries – is staggering: according to World Bank data, in 2016, migrants remitted USD 601 billion to their families back home.

Migrants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are amongst the world’s top senders: in 2015, Indian nationals alone transferred USD 13 billion from the UAE to their families back home; another USD 5 billion were sent to Pakistan and USD 4 billion to the Philippines.

Multillingual money transfer ad in English, Hindi, Bangla, Urdu, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil

Staggering as these totals may be, they are made up of relatively small individual sums: the average value of an individual transfer from the UAE is 700 dirham, that’s about USD 190. Workers remit about 70% of their salary.

During Ramadan 70% is not enough, though, as Abdullah, a construction worker from Pakistan, explains:

“There is a need for more money in every home for Eid, it’s a necessity,” [he] said. He earns Dh700 [USD 190] but sent home an extra Dh200 [USD 54] on top of the Dh500 [USD 136] he sends each month. “I budget and save, and keep less for my needs. A gift must be given and everyone at home must get a gift.”

That it is very modest amounts that add up to form these large remittance streams is further illustrated by Zubair, a factory worker from India:

“Some people borrow but then they spend the whole year paying back,” said Zubair. “I try and save Dh30-40 [USD 8-11] more a month, so I can send more money now. Slowly, slowly that is how you can keep money aside, but it will not stay with you for long, so best send it home quickly.”

Bank ad offering to transfer “happiness” from Dubai to India

Languages in the UAE

The official language of the UAE is Arabic and the de facto language is English. This overview statement hides as much as it reveals, as I explain in a chapter about the urban sociolinguistics of Dubai. One of the complexities the statement hides is the fact that the UAE’s huge migrant population of around 85% speak a great variety of languages other than Arabic and English.

As is true of most migrant-receiving countries, migrant languages are, by and large, hidden and rendered invisible in public space. Migrant languages do, of course, appear in the signage of small ethnic businesses but they are excluded from “mainstream” commercial spaces: in the large supermarket chains, the shopping malls or the multinational eatery chains one will look in vain for any signs of languages other than Arabic and English.

For people on salaries such as those of Abdullah and Zubair, these venues have nothing to offer and just as these men are excluded from Dubai’s glitzy image, their languages are.

Multilingual money transfer businesses

While the signage in each and every corporate business in the UAE is dominated by English and, to a lesser extent, Arabic, there is one industry that is an exception and where extensive multilingualism is prominently displayed: money transfer businesses.

The ubiquitous retail outlets of global money transfer service providers constitute one domain where Dubai’s other languages have a strong presence in the public linguistic landscape. Given the figures cited above, it is not surprising that money transfer businesses in the UAE always seem to be doing a brisk business and on Fridays long queues can often be observed as migrants use their weekly day off to send remittances back home.

Money exchanges advertise their services in many different languages. It is not unusual to find advertising materials printed in up to seven languages in a variety of scripts.

Ad for moneygram.ae

What do remittances buy?

The main purposes for which remittance monies are used are education, emergencies and gifts, according to a survey by Western Union. These material uses are loaded with an emotional connection in remittance advertising, where the money sent home constitutes the migrant’s key link to family left behind. Remitting money is invested with the promise of belonging, connection and happiness.

The lives of migrants are often schizophrenic and caught up in transnational circuits where different parts of the migrant’s identity are anchored in different places. The money migrants send and Dubai’s other languages provide a link between their economic identities in their destination and their familial identities in their place of origin.

Want to learn more about urban sociolinguistics?

Watch out for this new book on urban sociolinguistics due to be published by Routledge later this year:

Smakman, D. & P. Heinrich. Eds. 2018. Urban Sociolinguistics: The City as a Linguistic Process and Experience. London: Routledge.

From the blurb:

From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Urban Sociolinguistics is a sociolinguistic study of twelve urban settings around the world. Building on William Labov’s famous New York study, the authors demonstrate how language use in these areas is changing based on belief systems, behavioural norms, day-to-day rituals and linguistic practices.

Each chapter is written by a key figure in sociolinguistics and presents the personal stories of individuals using linguistic means to go about their daily communications in diverse sociolinguistic systems such as:

• extremely large urban conurbations like Cairo, Tokyo and Mexico City
• smaller areas like Paris and Sydney
• lesser developed areas (from an urbanisation point of view) such as the Western Netherlands Randstad area and the Kohima area in India.

Providing new perspectives on crucial themes, such as language choice and language contact, code-switching and mixing, language and identity, language policy and planning and social networks, this is key reading for students and researchers in the areas of multilingualism and super-diversity within sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and urban studies.

A preprint of the chapter about Dubai – “Language in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city” (pp. 77-94) – is available here.

A preview of my draft chapter about “language in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city” of Dubai is now available here.

Examinations of the linguistic landscape of Dubai are a regular feature of Language on the Move and Dubai is in many ways an ideal city to interrogate many of the concerns that animate contemporary sociolinguistics such as mobility, “superdiversity” or commodification. Dubai is widely seen as a utopian superlative city and a model exemplum of contemporary cities as sites of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and resulting multicultural conviviality. However, real life is inevitably more complex than the utopian vision and the chapter examines what forms of urban linguistic practices are enabled or disenabled by racial anxieties and ethnolinguistic hierarchies on the one hand and the classed ability to consume on the other.

Dubai: the image of a utopian contemporary city of superdiversity and multicultural conviviality

The first part of the chapter provides an overview of Dubai as a non-liberal modern city-state with a neoliberal free-market economy and comprised of a highly mobile and strictly stratified population. The second part then hones in on the linguistic tensions and dilemmas that can be observed in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city: dilemmas related to various forms of Arabic variously associated with the weight of tradition, economic dominance, transnational media and youth practices; tensions between English, as the language of globalization and modernity, and Arabic, the official national language; and, finally, the complexities of lingua franca use and the use of Dubai’s languages other than Arabic and English.

The chapter identifies three contributions that the study of Dubai can make to urban sociolinguistics:

1. Dubai is hierarchically organized in the extreme. However, it carries its social inequality on its sleeve so to speak. The structures of inequality in similarly affluent cities tend to be less obvious. To examine how linguistic diversity serves to constitute social inequality remains a central task of sociolinguistics.
2. Dubai is an unabashedly materialistic place. The same is true of most cities in the world where neoliberal market ideologies have elevated economic concerns above all else. The linguistic habitus of the flexible entrepreneurial urbanite often sits uneasily with practices and ideologies that sustain themselves from other ideological sources such as national, ethnic or religious identities. Sociolinguistics can help to illuminate how these ideological tensions produce and reproduce belonging and affiliation but also exclusion and disaffection. As the growing chasm in cities everywhere between the haves and the have-nots is widely misrecognized as a clash of cultures, this is a task of some urgency.
3. Dubai is extremely diverse. However, this “super-diversity” rarely translates into strong networks across ethnolinguistic boundaries. Instead, “parallel social lives involving public tolerance, yet little meaningful interaction, are the norm” (Coles & Walsh, 2010, p. 1322). Yet multilingual and intercultural interactions do take place in the workplace, in malls or in housing complexes. Many of these interactions may indeed be superficial and fleeting; what makes them “meaningful” from a sociolinguistic perspective is not so much how sustained they are but whether they reinforce or challenge existing linguistic and cultural stereotypes and hierarchies. Therefore, urban sociolinguistics will have to continue to be based in institutional ethnographies to understand language in the hierarchical, commodified and mobile spaces that make up the city.

I hope that the chapter will make a worthwhile and enjoyable read for both sociolinguists and lovers of Dubai.

Piller, I. (2016). Dubai: Language in the ethnocratic, corporate and mobile city. In: Smakman, D. and P. Heinrich. Eds. In preparation. Metrolinguistics: Urban Language Ecologies around the World. Routledge.

Is this Arabic or English? Or is that asking the wrong question? (Transliteration: sbaisi tinisi tshikn and shrmb*)

I’ve often wondered what linguistic theory would look like if its foundations did not lie in 19^th century Europe and 20^th century America but in 21^st century Dubai. Would we still think predominantly in terms of discrete languages or would we take a more holistic view of communication? Would we treat linguistic diversity as the default and consider monolingualism as an exception worthy of special (but somewhat marginal) attention? Would mainstream journals deal with diversity in communication as the norm and would we then have some smaller special interest journals such as a Journal of Monolingualism and maybe another one devoted to International Studies in Monolingual Education?

A coach at the Dubai Ice Rink yells at a group of kids: “Boro, boro! Let’s go, boys! Yallah!” Does it make sense to think about this utterance in terms of code-switching? In the most mainstream current analysis of this exclamation, the coach would be seen as mixing Persian, English and Arabic and we would then have to ask why he is mixing. As the audience remains constant and he is basically saying the same thing (‘let’s go’) three times, we would most likely start to muse about the identities he is claiming by switching: Is he trying to affiliate with the Persian, English and Arabic “speech communities” (another of those theoretical concepts that no longer make much sense)?

I overheard this interaction as a bystander and so cannot claim any further insights as to what the coach was trying to do other than the obvious: he was trying to get a group of exhausted 8-12-year-olds to keep together in a crowd and to keep them moving. From the labels on the kids’ uniforms, I know that they are from a school attended only by Emirati students (rather than non-nationals who make up more than 80% of the UAE’s population). In terms of their ethnic looks, the kids look all different – as befits the inhabitants of a place that has been a kind of way-station at the cross-roads of Africa, Asia and Europe since time immemorial. I cannot guess where the coach is from. As I just said, going by looks is even more pointless in Dubai than in most other parts of the world. He could have been Emirati but the statistics about teachers in national schools suggest that he is more likely to hail from elsewhere.

Khaleeji (Gulf Arabic) has always been a “mixed” language and variationists break it up further into Coastal and Saudi; the former can be subdivided into Emirati, Kuwaiti, Omani etc.; Emirati can be subdivided into Bahrani, Bedouin, Coastal, Shihhi, etc.; not to mention Ajami, another traditional language of the Gulf, which is mostly classified as an “Arabicized Persian dialect” or some such. You get the idea: it’s complicated …

If Khaleeji as the ancestral way of communicating in Dubai challenges linguistic theory, contemporary linguistic and communicative practices render it completely useless. Artists and designers have been among the first to have embraced obvious heterogeneity as foundational rather than condemning it as deviant. Salem Al-Qassimi, a designer specializing in bilingual urban design, for instance, refers to Dubai’s seemingly chaotic linguistic practices as “Arabish.” Arabish originally referred to Arabic texting in the Latin script but “is now more than just that. It is a way of speaking and a way of life,” he explains.

So, what does all this complexity mean for linguistic theory? We need to step back and let go of linear lenses such as the monolingual and variationist ones. In fact, you do not need to spend time in Dubai to do that; we could also turn to the natural sciences. The physicist (and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) Ilya Prigogine wrote in his 1997 book The End of Certainty that linearity is no longer a viable form of scientific thinking. He explains that linear science only works well where it deals with phenomena that are close to equilibrium.

The social contexts where many mainstream linguistic theories developed could be described as spaces of equilibrium and – combined with the desire to imitate classical science – it is not surprising that order and stability became the bedrock of linguistic thinking.

However, the natural sciences have moved on, noting “fluctuations, instability, multiple choices, and limited predictability at all levels of observation” (Prigogine 1997, p. 4). Chaos theory recognizes that, as complexity increases in a system, precision and relevance become mutually exclusive.

Trying to describe even a mundane little utterance such as “Boro, boro! Let’s go, boys! Yallah!” precisely with current linguistic tools (“Arabic,” “code-switching,” “code-mixing,” “English,” “multilingualism,” “Persian,” “speech community”) renders the analysis either meaningless or irrelevant.

Whether we take our inspiration for a new linguistic theory from the chaotic world around us or the natural sciences may be a matter of preference but change our lenses we must. Bob Hodge has a useful preliminary introduction to chaos theory for TESOL practitioners here.

*Standard English: “Spicy Tennessee Chicken and Shrimp”

In the past weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to re-visit two quite different cities of whose linguistic landscapes I consider myself a longtime observer: Dubai and Munich. Both in Dubai and Munich, I was struck by the ever-increasing presence of Arabic (Munich) and Chinese (Dubai). In Munich, one can now see menus and shop signs in Arabic and much of the official signage at Munich Airport is trilingual in German, English and Arabic. Similarly, the presence of Chinese is expanding in Dubai through shop signs, store guides and service personnel wearing badges identifying them as Chinese speakers. Most intriguingly, in the airport lounges of both cities, I discovered glossy magazines in Arabic (Munich) and Chinese (Dubai) addressed at Arabic- and Chinese-speaking travellers respectively. Both the Chinese-language Luxos (subtitle: ‘Your guide to luxury’) and the Arabic-language Arab Traveler (subtitle: ‘Magazine for the Arabian Friends of Bavaria’) are high-end consumption guides with lots of ads for exclusive brands of jewelry, perfume, hotels, clothing or wellness interspersed with infomercials about boutique shopping and luxury consumption.

Neither Arabic in Munich nor Chinese in Dubai are likely language choices given the settlement and migration history of these cities. So, how come they are making their presence felt in such conspicuous ways in addition to the local language (German and Arabic respectively) and the international language English? The answer lies in the fact that Arabic and Chinese are the languages of the biggest tourist spenders in these places: Munich is popular with Gulf Arabs as a shopping and health destination and, according to this SZ report, the average Arab tourist spends 569 Euros per day in Munich. By comparison, the second-biggest spenders, Japanese tourists with 370 Euros per day, seem almost miserly and there are far fewer of them anyways.

Chinese tourists are to Dubai what Arab tourists are to Munich: the most lucrative group. According to one report, in 2011 300,000 Chinese tourists came to Dubai and their combined expenditure of USD 334 million made them the most valuable group of tourists.

In a consumer economy, language is a means to make a profit. As purchasing power shifts, so do language ideologies and English may be starting to encounter rivals after all.

The world in Arabia

I spent my last day in the Middle East at Dubai Mall, the self-proclaimed “Centre of Now.” The mall guide has the heading “Welcome to Everything.” Without a doubt it’s one of the most amazing places on earth! A huge temple devoted to the gods of consumption. One of the things that make Dubai Mall awe-inspiring is the way in which the signifiers of the global have been brought together in one space.

Many of the more than 1,200 retail outlets explicitly reference other places, as in “Baldi, Firenze 1867” (interior decoration) “Dockers, San Francisco” (clothes) or “Kozi, Africa” (a coffee shop decorated with the flags of a number of African nations).

The referencing of other places is complemented by the brands’ multilingualism. Elsewhere, I have described this multilingual branding as an emerging non-language, the global consumption register. In addition to Arabic and English, and Arabic written in the Latin script and English written in the Arabic script (more on transliterated brand names here), I’ve mostly noticed French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian. I’m sure that that is only a partial account, as I only spent a few hours there and was there as a consumer, not a linguist. I hope someone will do some systematic research of the linguistic landscape of Dubai Mall soon!

The languages apparent on the signs are complemented by the languages you actually hear spoken by the people who work and visit there. Most transactions seem to take place in English, the language of everyone and no one in this world. The people who stroll around in groups, pairs and families, spoke more different languages than I could count. Both workers and visitors seem to hail from all the lands on earth. Dubai unites people from all races, creeds, colors and languages. I will miss being in the centre of now and everything!