In this post, Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi (Department of English Literature & Linguistics, Qatar University) examine the specific form this language panic takes in the Gulf countries, where Arabic is in close contact both with the languages of labor migrants from South and South-East Asia and with English as the language of globalization.

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Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi
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Is Arabic under threat in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and the UAE, where the number of non-nationals exceeds the nationals? Do non-Arabs living in the GCC pose a threat to the Arabic language and Arab identity? These questions have been the subject of debates not only in the Arabic language media but also conferences and seminars. Since Arabic is a symbol of national identity in the GCC, it is understandable why Arabs may be concerned, but beyond the emotional rhetoric, do facts support the anxiety about the decline of Arabic?

Demographic changes after discovery of oil in GCC

The GCC countries have experienced an influx of migrant workers over the past few decades following the discovery of oil and gas. The massive economic and social projects undertaken by the GCC governments have further created needs for labor and skills that the local population cannot fulfil leading to reliance on temporary foreign labor. In the GCC, non-nationals outnumber the nationals, accounting for 52% of the total population. In the workforces, the percentage of non-nationals is even more pronounced reaching up to 95% in Qatar. While migration into the GCC has brought many benefits to the region, it has also given rise to concerns among the local population that the Arabic language and Arab identity are in danger.

Fear of decline of Arabic

GCC Flag (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In popular discussions, the perceived decline of Arabic is generally attributed to two factors. First, it is argued that the presence of non-Arab migrant population from South and Southeast Asia not only poses a threat to the structure and use of Arabic but also endangers the Arab identity of the youth. Al-Farajānī, a political thinker and a columnist, in an article published on Aljazeera in 2008 argued that the presence of Asians had negative cultural consequences, the most important of which is ifsād al-lughah al-‘Arabīyyah, ‘corruption of the Arabic language’.

In 2013, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Center for Language Planning and Policies, based in Saudi Arabia, organized a conference aimed at developing strategies to strengthen the Arabic language and identity against the backdrop of social, demographic, and economic changes in the GCC. On a panel, Dr. Lateefah Al-Najjar, a professor of Arabic at UAE University, presented a paper on the effects of the Asian workforce on the Arabic language in which she argued that Asian maids and drivers affect the language of children and recommended that the Asian workforce be replaced with Arabs and that the learning of Arabic be a condition of employment in the GCC.

A second source of anxiety comes from the presence of numerous English-medium schools and colleges in the region. In a report published in 2019 on the occasion of UN Arabic Language Day – celebrated annually on December 18 – it was argued that English was a threat to Arabic in the GCC in the same way as French endangers Arabic in Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa. According to another report published in the Economist, in 2022, the youth in the GCC uses English more than Arabic and the use of Arabic is becoming limited to the home domain.

English is literally on the move on the roads of the UAE (Image: Language on the Move)

Some scholarly studies have also argued that English medium schools and colleges in the GCC are a threat to Arabic and Arab identity. A similar fear of the decline of Arabic in the entire Arab World was the theme of a Pan-Arab conference entitled “The Arabic language is in danger: We are all partners in protecting it” held in the UAE in 2013 indicating that the purported decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC.

Language policy changes in the GCC

The presence of large non-Arab populations has also led to communication problems between monolingual Arabs and non-Arabs. The governments of Qatar and UAE have started to use migrant languages in dealing with issues related to the workforce. At the same time, the concerns about the decline of Arabic have led the countries in the region, especially Qatar and UAE, with the largest foreign populations, to take measures aimed at protecting the Arabic language and identity. In the UAE, the Cabinet passed Resolution Number 21/2 in 2008 whereby all ministries, federal entities, and local government departments were required to use Arabic in all their official communications. In 2015, the Department of Economic Development of Dubai in the UAE issued violation tickets to 29 restaurants for not having their menus in Arabic in addition to not specifying the prices. Similarly, in 2019, Qatar passed the Law on Protection of the Arabic Language which regulates the use of Arabic and foreign languages and provides a fine up to 50,000 Qatari Riyal in case of non-compliance in some cases.

Language decline as proxy for social and political crises

A major shortcoming of the above reports, studies, and conferences is that no concrete evidence was provided to support the purported decline of Arabic. There is no linguistic evidence that Arabic spoken by young people in the GCC shows linguistic influences of their maids and drivers. They may have acquired some words, phrases, and sentences from their languages to communicate with them, which only suggests that their linguistic repertoire has been expanded. In fact, maids and drivers learn to communicate in Arabic with proficiency ranging from broken pidgin Arabic to native-like command. There is a need of systematic research based on empirical data to understand the linguistic effects of maids and drivers on the languages of host society.

Magazine ad for the University of Wollongong’s branch campus in Dubai (Image: Language on the Move)

Moreover, the discourse of the decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC but covers the entire Arab World, as was the theme of the 2013 conference in the UAE. Yasir Suleiman, a sociolinguist who has written extensively on the Arabic language and identity describes the situation as one of language anxiety, which is less about language and more about social and political tensions and crises besetting the Arab world.

One major external factor that contributes to the anxiety is the presence of English in educational institutions. Another is the demographic changes that the discovery of oil and the massive modernization projects have brought to the GCC countries whereby non-nationals constitute a significant part of the Gulf social and cultural space. Suleiman argues that the discourse of decline of Arabic is a proxy for these social tensions whereby a defense of Arabic becomes a defense of the Arab social and moral order.

The issue of anxiety and fear notwithstanding, something concrete has appeared in the linguistic landscape of the GCC, and maybe even more broadly in the Arab World, which is that for the first time in their history, Arabs are becoming bilingual in their dialect and English.

Before the advent of English-medium international schools and universities, Arabs from the region would seek higher education in other Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, where the medium of instruction was Arabic. Their level of education would be displayed in their knowledge and use of Standard Arabic.

By contrast, many GCC students today graduate from English-medium schools and international universities in Qatar and the UAE with a better command of English than Standard Arabic, especially in discussing professional issues.

This is part of the anxiety that English is encroaching upon the space of Arabic. However, we know bilingual people can command two languages equally proficiently and use each in its appropriate context. More research is needed to better understand usage patterns at home and in professional spaces. Census data, similar to those collected in bilingual Quebec in Canada could shed empirical light on what language(s) people use in different social domains such as the home, the workplace, or social gathering such as majlis. This might be more productive than the fear about the decline of Arabic that currently prevails.

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Figure 1: The Year of Tolerance Pillars

Jogging along the Abu Dhabi coastline at sunrise, I see small groups of two or three people wearing masks. They are expatriates walking dogs, Emiratis in national dress strolling, fellow joggers escaping lockdown inactivity, and transnational workers clearing fallen date palm leaves from the path. Cautiously wary as I pass each group, I hear snippets of multiple languages being spoken. This is a typically diverse Abu Dhabi scene in highly atypical times.

While Arabic is the official language of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and English is the de facto lingua franca, such labels ‘hide more than they reveal’. Rather, multilingualism and translingual practice is the norm due to its highly diverse population of approximately 200 nationalities, speaking over 100 languages as well as various dialects within diglossic languages such as Arabic. However, power attributed to these languages is far from even. Arabic and English are the most visible in society as reflected in their side-by-side presence on public signage, in education, official channels, and technology. Such a situation results in those proficient in English and Arabic having more access to information than those without. While communication barriers are important to challenge in general, in emergency situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of linguistic inclusion is amplified.

Superdiversity and the year of tolerance in the UAE

In multilingual contexts globally, increasing attention has been given to social justice via the prevalence of the words ‘inclusion’ and ‘tolerance’. Inclusion can be defined as ‘ensuring access for all’ across many sectors. Several inclusion-based government-led initiatives have occurred in the UAE recently. One prominent initiative was the naming of 2019 as the ‘Year of Tolerance’, where all languages, backgrounds, ethnicities and abilities were to be valued. Figure 1 shows the ‘Year of Tolerance Pillars’ prominently displayed on a shopping mall billboard.

Figure 2: Bilingual COVID-19 safety sign

The seven pillars advocate tolerance in the areas of education, community, workplace, culture, legislation, and media as well as establishing the UAE as a model of tolerance. Here, the message of inclusivity as an ethical and moral value is loud and clear. However, even with carefully implemented awareness campaigns on diversity and inclusion, an unprecedented crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic can disrupt such efforts, and rather shine a spotlight on pre-existing societal and linguistic inequities. In addition, a crisis leads to priorities shifting from ideal values to emergency messaging, where instinctual and on-the-spot decisions are made with the resources available. This is often the case with linguistic choices in public spaces where English monolingualism seems to be the preferred or default choice in a moment of crisis.

Linguistic inequalities in a crisis context

In the UAE, top-down government communication relating to the COVID-19 pandemic is suitably multilingual and inclusive. Guidelines and announcements appear in Arabic, English, Hindi, Tagalog, French, and many more languages. Neighboring Gulf states such as Qatar and countries further afield such as China have also ensured that official communication is linguistically diverse. However, it is often the bottom-up ad hoc messages in public spaces which are most visible. This is especially the case for the UAE’s large migrant worker population who may not have access to mobile devices like laptops and smartphones.

Linguistic landscaping, or the analysis of language on signage in public spaces, can tell us a lot about how languages are used and about the power certain languages have over others. ‘Every sign tells a story about who produced it, and about who is selected to consume it’, as Blommaert (2018) points out. Public signage tracks local practices as well as contributing to the COVID-19 era’s zeitgeist. In this sense, locally-produced impromptu thrown-together messages are indeed authentic ‘signs of the time’. Such signs act as sociolinguistic evidence of power dynamics existing between languages and their speakers.

In the UAE, while municipality-issued COVID-19-related messages appear in the country’s two dominant languages, Arabic and English (Figure 2), in many cases make-shift or hand-written signs appear in English only. This is similar to other English-dominant multicultural and multilingual contexts such as London and Sydney.

Figure 3: Bilingual working hours sign and monolingual COVID-19 sign

It is easy to see a contrast between permanent signs with English and Arabic side-by-side, such as a working-hours sign in a pharmacy window (Figure 3), and an impromptu COVID-19 sign which appears only in English. In Figure 3, the latter is typed in large capital letters which fill the page, without the use of other languages, perhaps due to the urgency needed in communicating quickly. The pharmacy owner or clerk who created the sign most probably did so with a sense of emergency where lack of time and resources did not allow for consideration of the society’s linguistically-diverse population.

A further example of a make-shift monolingual COVID-19 sign can be seen in Figure 4. Here, lifeguards at an Abu Dhabi beachside community have written a message in the sand warning residents to ‘stay home, stay safe’. The manager who instructed the sign to be made on a scorching mid-March afternoon, decided to use English only. Was this perhaps due to limited space on the beach? Was it deemed impractical to write the message in several languages considering the size of the letters? Whatever the reasoning, the space which could have been used for another version of the message (e.g. Arabic), was instead given to a set of images including a house, heart and the ‘sun cross’ symbol (circle with cross inside) meaning eternity or the spiritual whole.

While the use of ‘English only’ may be appropriate in compounds renowned for ‘Jumeirah Janes’ (pampered British housewives living in English-speaking bubbles), since 2008 such monolingual communities have become less common. The beach community featured in Figure 4, for example, is linguistically diverse with Australians living next to Koreans, and Emiratis neighboring Swedes, as well as many dual nationality families, including my own (UK/Canada). Recently, nationalities which had not previously been drawn to the UAE are arriving for work opportunities. Accompanying family members sometimes have only basic English. For example, the number of Koreans living in the UAE has grown to 13,000 residents in what is known as the ‘Korean wave’. With most expatriate households being double-income, live-in nannies, who are usually from the Philippines, are also part of such communities. Despite the multilingual composition of residents, English is often the sole language used for communication in emergency contexts (Figures 3 and 4).

Inclusivity in crisis communication

Although the beach community shown in Figure 4 is home to mainly mid to high-income professionals, it is also the workplace of hundreds of laborers who are now called ‘essential workers’. Arriving on buses from the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, they spend their days working on the upkeep of existing buildings or on constructing new residential towers whose owners have deadlines to meet in order not to lose certain incentives. Figure 5 shows essential workers cleaning apartment windows while wearing masks but not perhaps social distancing, as is a government mandate. They do not have the ‘luxury’ of self-isolating, as many residents do, and it is clear that the message on the beach (Figure 4) was not intended for their eyes.

Figure 4: Covid-19 warning sign written in the sand (Photographer: Genevieve Leclerc)

Nevertheless, as laborers spend their days at their worksite, the make-shift monolingual signs in shops, lifts and  other public spaces represent their main way of accessing safety warnings. Monolingual communication in contexts of disasters or crisis has been named ‘disaster linguicism’, where linguistic minorities (not necessarily in number, but in power or prestige) are particularly vulnerable due to language-based discrimination at multiple levels.

Concerns over the lack of access laborers may have to COVID-19 warnings have been voiced on community Facebook pages as well as in national newspapers. Such concerns have led some residents to try and bridge the communication gap. For example, Indian expatriate teenager, Suchetha Satish, composed COVID-awareness songs in 21 Indian languages including Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Assamese. The songs urge people to social distance and wash hands. Such efforts are perhaps aimed at offsetting the prominence of monolingual (English) or bilingual (Arabic/ English) signs in public spaces. However, the potential success of such initiatives is debatable, due to many laborers having limited access to certain mediums. Besides, even with access to such songs, social distancing is not often an option in essential worker contexts, as seen in Figure 5.

Linguistic landscaping: An eye-opener for future action

Figure 5: Essential workers wearing masks during COVID-19 times

For those without access to official multilingual COVID-19 warnings, gaining accurate information about the crisis through a minority language can be a challenge. This highlights linguistic inequality in relation to crisis communication, as well as putting into sharper focus class divides. In top-down initiatives promoting tolerance, there is a danger of glossing over hidden exclusions in favour of celebrating ‘linguistically flexible neoliberal urbanites’. As most sociolinguistic research in the UAE focuses on the language choices and experiences of Emiratis, transnational linguistic experiences are under-researched, especially those from less privileged groups. In this exceptional time when the slogan ‘We are all in it together’ or ‘#TGether’ (as seen in Figure 2) is advocated, it is important to draw attention to the incongruities between slogans of inclusion and the reality on the ground. As Jones (2020) states, ‘Coronavirus is not some grand leveler: it is an amplifier of existing inequalities, injustices and insecurities’ or as Hurley (2020) puts it, ‘Coronavirus exacerbates the fault lines’. Although this is a time of reflection on what a new normal may look like, ‘often these seemingly revolutionarily happenings ultimately result in retrenchment of a status quo defined by durable inequalities’.

The Year of Tolerance supports including all, even those who speak languages other than English and Arabic. However, the pragmatic choices made at the height of the COVID-19 crisis show English is often the default choice. By excluding some, there are significant ramifications for the spread of the virus. Concerned looks on the faces of the diverse groups described in the opening coastline scene of this blog show us this is an issue affecting society as a whole. Thus, the need to ‘include the reality of linguistic diversity into our normal procedures and processes, including disaster preparation’ is pressing. Going forward, a critical look at the signage and warning messages in our landscapes can be eye-opening, with the goal of substantiating the priority of tolerance and inclusion.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Promoting the University of Bolton’s Ras Al-Khaimah branch campus on the streets of Ajman

The other day I was stuck in traffic in Ajman, one of the smaller of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one that has to do without Abu Dhabi’s and Dubai’s global glitz. Imagine my surprise when a car painted in the Union Jack came into view! I’ve been stuck in traffic in many parts of the world and I’ve got a sizable collection of pictures of cars decorated with flag stickers, images of flags or actual flags. This car, however, is, I think, the only one I’ve ever seen that was completely painted as a flag. The status of the little car as an island of Britishness moving in a sea of mundane Middle Eastern traffic was further enhanced by the fact that it had its steering wheel on the right-hand side: just like in Britain, but unlike every other car in the UAE.

So what do you think this car was advertising? Surely, the British state is not desperate enough for some good PR to send little cars painted with the Union Jack out onto the streets of the Middle East?

Well, the mystery was revealed when the car’s rear window came into view. The car was an ad for higher education! Specifically, it was advertising for the University of Bolton and the slogan on the rear window reads “Get a UK degree/At The First British University/in Ras Al Khaimah, U.A.E.”

Never heard of the University of Bolton? Well, it’s an institution in the Manchester metropolitan region and its main claim to fame is that it has consistently ranked last in league tables of British universities.

In 2008, the University of Bolton opened a branch campus in Ras Al-Khaimah, the northern-most and least-developed emirate. Initially, the university’s low ranking at home caused some raised eyebrows but the branch campus now seems to be doing well and enrollment rose from an initial 100 students to 300 in 2010.

Not favored with oil wealth nor tourist attractions, Ras Al-Khaimah has tried to turn itself into a higher education hub in the last couple of years by “enticing and luring” American and British colleges and institutions into opening branch campuses in their free trade zone. However, since the spectacular failure of George Mason University’s branch campus in Ras Al-Khaimah after only three years in 2009, the enticing and luring may have become a bit more difficult.

Despite the fact that many international branch campuses have ended in a fiasco (in addition to the George Mason University withdrawal from Ras Al-Khaimah, Australian readers will be familiar with the debacles of the University of New South Wales in Singapore or the University of Southern Queensland in Dubai), branch campuses continue to be a popular internationalization strategy and the number of international branch campuses reached 200 in 2012, up from only 82 in 2006; a remarkable growth figure of around 150% in little more than half a decade.

According to a 2012 report, the largest number of international branch campuses originate from the UK and about a quarter of all international branch campuses are located in the UAE. However, the scene is quickly diversifying. In addition to the UK, Australia and the USA have long tried to be big players in franchising their higher education institutions overseas. They are now joined by other European countries, particularly France and Germany, as well as emerging source countries, particularly India, Iran and Malaysia.

The destination countries of international branch campuses, too, are diversifying away from the Gulf States with the largest growth now in Asia, particularly China and Thailand. Africa, too, is starting to attract international branch campuses, with some already set up such as the Iranian Islamic Azad University in Tanzania and many others, originating particularly from China and Malaysia, in the planning stage.

Preston University campus in Ajman

So, what drives the extraordinary growth of international branch campuses? Sadly, it’s not the search for knowledge nor the desire to provide more equitable access to higher education. According to Altbach and Knight (2007) the primary motivation to establish an international branch campus is the desire to make a profit. This is particularly obvious with for-profit universities and includes a fair number of shady degree mills such as Preston University originating from Pakistan.

Making money is, of course, also attractive to traditional not-for-profit universities starved of public funding and that’s obviously where institutions such as the University of Bolton come in.

As far as non-financial motives for the establishment of international branch campuses are concerned, Altbach and Knight (2007) identify access provision and demand absorption as more and more young people want to attend higher education, particularly in countries that may be ill-equipped to meet that demand. Additionally, they note that internationalization is in itself highly valued in higher education. Indeed, an international orientation has long been a central aspect of the academic habitus (see also my recent discussion here) and university rankings have recently served as an additional incentive to internationalize.

Students, by contrast, are attracted to branch campuses for reasons of convenience, as Wilkins et al. (2012) argue. Based on a survey of students studying at an international branch campus in the UAE, they found that students chose to study on the branch campus rather than the main campus because it was cheaper and closer to home and because they preferred the life-style of the UAE over that in Australia, the UK or USA.

Magazine ad for the University of Wollongong’s branch campus in Dubai

Wilkins et al.’s (2012) research questions did not include any that related to the motivation to study at a branch campus rather than a local university but a significant number of respondents mentioned that “foreign universities have best reputation in UAE” (p. 426). Indeed, country reputation is the unique selling proposition evident in the University-of-Bolton advertising car. Advertising for other international branch campuses in the UAE also relies heavily on the reputation of the Western country where the university is headquartered, as is evident in this magazine ad for the Dubai campus of the Australian University of Wollongong.

Like many others, I find the subjection of education to the profit motif objectionable. Indeed, senior administrators of not-for-profit British universities are loath to admit a profit motive underlying their institution’s establishment of international branch campuses, as Healey (2013) discovered. The administrators this researcher interviewed preferred to talk about their non-commercial motives such as the desire to internationalize and to contribute to global development through education, etc.

However, even if profit were not the main motivation why universities set up international branch campuses, I’m still troubled by the vexing association between quality higher education and the franchised university. Isn’t higher education diminished for all of us if the university becomes nothing more than yet another expression of banal nationalism and neocolonial imagery?

Altbach, P., & Knight, J. (2007). The Internationalization of Higher Education: Motivations and Realities Journal of Studies in International Education, 11 (3-4), 290-305 DOI: 10.1177/1028315307303542
Healey, N. (2013). “Why do English Universities really Franchise Degrees to Overseas Providers?” Higher Education Quarterly: n/a-n/a.
Wilkins, S., Balakrishnan, M., & Huisman, J. (2011). Student Choice in Higher Education: Motivations for Choosing to Study at an International Branch Campus Journal of Studies in International Education, 16 (5), 413-433 DOI: 10.1177/1028315311429002

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”

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!

To me, the prevalence of an Indian culture indigenous to the UAE is most apparent in the radio stations. These billboards on the highway from Dubai to Abu Dhabi provide some examples. Both City 101.6 and Hit 96.7 are stations in the Arabian Radio Network targeting urban young people with an Indian background. Without any knowledge of Hindi and Bollywood movies, it took me some time to figure out the slogan “Sara shehar mujhe city 101.6 ke naam se jaanta hai.” It turns out that the slogan on this billboard is an intertextual reference to a famous line spoken by the Bollywood actor Ajit Khan (1922-1998) in the 1976 movie Kalicharan. What he said was “Sara shehar mujhe Lion ke naam se jaanta hai,” which translates as “The whole town knows me by the name of Lion.” I’m amazed at the complex cultural references on a simple billboard and that a movie line spoken a world away in space and time continues to “fly.”

I’ve learnt two things from the conversation with the study agent and the exercise of trying to figure out a billboard: you ignore diversity at your peril, and I wish I knew Hindi!

January 2010

In the year in which I’ve been away from the UAE, the fervor for the use of “Arabian Gulf” instead of “Persian Gulf” has certainly heated up here. This map showing the travels of Ibn Battuta in Dubai’s Ibn Battuta Mall identified the gulf as “Persian” when I took the first picture in January 2010. By December 2010, when I took the second picture an unsightly white piece of paper had been used to cover up the “Persian Gulf” name. I suppose the official internationally recognized name “Persian Gulf” became unspeakable (or rather unshowable) in this Dubai mall in the wake of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deliberate flouting of international conventions when she used “Arabian Gulf” in October this year.

Before I came to live in the UAE, I’m not even sure I was aware that you could call this particular waterway anything other than “Persian Gulf.”

December 2010

However, I have since learnt that the name “Arabian Gulf” has been a bone of contention and an efficient way to stir ethnic tensions and passions for about half a century. In the Huffington Post Jamal Abdi offers the following history of the term “Arabian Gulf:”

The term “Arabian Gulf” first appeared fifty years ago as Pan-Arabism propaganda aimed at unifying Arabs against Iranians, Israelis, and other non-Arabs in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein later co-opted the term to exploit ethnic rivalries in support of his regional claims and territorial ambitions, including his invasion of Iran and his campaigns against Iraqi Kurds. Later, Osama Bin Laden adopted the term in an attempt to stir ethnic rivalries to bolster his appeal among Arab populations.

The name war around “Persian Gulf” vs. “Arabian Gulf” is an age-old strategy of empire: Divide et impera! Still, the fervor with which people fight over nothing more than a name is sad and shocking to see whenever it happens.

One of history’s indictments against our generation will doubtlessly include that we fought over names while the referent of the name was dying. No matter what you want to call it, the Persian Gulf is on the brink of environmental collapse as Waterlink International explains:

The Persian Gulf’s contained environment makes it a natural repository for pollutants. Now the Gulf’s marine ecosystem is under stress from the impacts of unprecedented coastal reclamation, oil exploration and tanker movement, industrial developments and desalination projects.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a gulf by any other name is dying from pollution.

Sociolinguists have been paying surprisingly little attention to the UAE despite the fact that, along with other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the UAE has been engaged in a language policy experiment of large-scale language shift from Arabic to English. Widespread language shift in these heartlands of the Arab world has been such that there is now an emerging concern for the long-term viability of Arabic in GCC countries (see also our earlier post “Where is the Arabic?”).

How is such as state of linguistic affairs possible one might ask? Gulf Arabs don’t fit the typical patterns of societal language shift, which is commonly associated with disenfranchised minorities, poverty, and oppression. The only researcher who, to the best of my knowledge, has attempted an answer to this conundrum is Sohail Karmani with his 2005 article “Petro-Linguistics.” There the author explores the nexus between an oil-based rentier society and the GCC countries’ burgeoning English language teaching industry. Karmani starts from the premise of the Arab Human Development Report that oil has been more of a bane than a boon for the region. The well-known paradox of the “resource curse” is based on the observation that countries with plentiful natural resources have often poorer development outcomes than those with less.

Despite the well-known economic and socio-political dangers of overreliance on the extraction of primary resources, the overreliance on oil revenues in GCC countries continues for three reasons: first, the rentier economy serves to buy political consensus; second, oil wealth has led to a capital-intensive mode of development instead of a labor-intensive one; and third, soaring international demand creates strong pressure to continue current high levels of extraction and the attendant rentier mode of social organization.

Karmani argues that these three reasons for the continued over-reliance on oil are directly related to language policy in GCC countries. To begin with, while the rentier state is conducive to political consensus it is not conducive to political participation in the way a tax-dependent state is. Consequently, state-society links in rentier states are usually weak and underdeveloped and state policies, including language policy, do not need to take the needs, desire or practices of the Arabic-speaking citizenry into account.

Second, a capital-intensive mode of development encourages reliance on huge numbers of advisors and international experts, who by the very nature of their backgrounds and expertise, not to mention self-interest, favor English. Finally, international demand and pressure for continued high levels of oil extraction also indirectly favor English through their support for the rentier mode rather than mass industrialization and mass education.

Consequently, Karmani compares the operation of the TESOL industry in GCC countries to the operations of an oil cartel: in this account, the TESOL industry largely controls language policy and, more crucially, language practices in education, and the profits of the enterprise flow back to Western English-speaking countries. Indeed, despite the huge investments into English that GCC countries have made over the past decades, there is also a consensus that overall levels of English proficiency in the region are low. This lack of “success” in English language learning is partly an in-built feature of language teaching in a context where language is a commodity, as I have argued previously with reference to the South Korean context (see here and here). However, it is also a feature of the modus operandi of a cartel:

[…] an increasingly assertive, self-serving mercenary culture had set in that relied largely for its survival on weak state-society linkages and on the stark absence of the kind of accountability and transparency […] (Karmani, 2005, p. 93)

In 2008, the UAE made Arabic their official language, a move that seems to fly in the face of the account above. However, simultaneously, English-medium instruction is expanding to ever more segments of public education. The rhetoric around Arabic as the language of identity and English as the language of modernization has pitched the proponents of both languages against each other in zealous rivalry. It seems to me that these language wars are nothing but distracters from the burning questions humanity is facing today. While the immense challenges of population explosion, environmental destruction, climate change, and extreme inequality confronting us today may have nothing much to do with language, the question remains how language policy can serve to undergird sustainable development and a more peaceful future.

Karmani, S. (2005). Petro-Linguistics: The Emerging Nexus Between Oil, English, and Islam Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 4 (2), 87-102 DOI: 10.1207/s15327701jlie0402_2

• Language-on-the-Move workshop: Understanding language contact and multilingualism in the 21^st century (Tehran University, Dec 21-22)
• New directions in intercultural communication (United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain Women’s Campus, Dec 13; Isfahan University, Dec 26; Shiraz University, Jan 01; Sharif University of Technology, Jan 04; Zayed University, Abu Dhabi campus, Jan 10)
• Blokes, Mates, and Wogs: Language and Identity in Australia (Isfahan University, Dec 25; Tarbiat Moallem University, Karaj Campus, Jan 05)
• Native, non-native and bilingual English teachers: language ideologies in English language teaching (Qazvin Islamic Azad University, Jan 03)
• Teaching language, teaching culture? (Sharjah Women’s College, Jan 11; Fujairah Women’s College, Jan 13)
• How to get published in international journals (Shiraz Medical University, Dec 29)

Language-on-the-Move workshop: Understanding language contact and multilingualism in the 21st century

In this workshop, we will explore language as an object in motion. Specifically, we will ask what globalization and migration mean for a contemporary understanding of language contact and multilingualism. The workshop consists of four parts and it will be impossible to join after the first meeting.

Session 1 is devoted to language ideologies and particularly the language ideology known as the “monolingual mindset,” which privileges a view of a homogeneous standard language and renders linguistic diversity invisible. We will explore questions such as: How many languages are there? How can we distinguish between a dialect and a language? What and whom do language names include and exclude?

Session 2 explores the methodological issues raised by an understanding of language as a circulating resource. This session is designed as an overview of the history of sociolinguistics. Additionally, I will share examples from my own research to highlight critical sociolinguistic ethnography. We will end the day by discussing how language questions, observations and interests of participants could be turned into research questions and research designs.

Session 3 will focus on the role of English as the hypercentral language of globalisation. Additionally, this session will serve as an introduction to the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and will explore a view of language as a market commodity. Session 4 will then move on to language in education. In addition to key concepts such as additive and subtractive bilingualism, we will discuss questions of language education and social justice.

New directions in Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication research is often predicated on essentialist assumptions of what it means to “have a culture.” In this lecture, I will use examples from the intercultural communication advice literature on how to improve communication between “Middle Easterners” and “Westerners” to make the point that “culture is a verb,” i.e. an interested discursive construction. I will outline a new research agenda for intercultural communication that is relevant to contemporary social justice challenges in a globalized and transnational world by suggesting a unified research question: Who makes culture relevant to whom in which context for which purposes?

Blokes, Mates, and Wogs: Language and Identity in Australia

In this lecture I will present an overview of Australian English as a case study in language and identity. I will begin by providing a standard variationist account of the development of English in Australia since its inception as a British penal colony in 1788. In a second step I will treat the standard account of Australian English speech, or strine, as an interested discursive construction of national identity. I will show how the idea of Australian English is used to construct what it means to be Australian in two sets of ideologically loaded discourses: namely, consumer advertising and media discourses about immigration. Both these discourses often serve to create hegemonic notions of Australian identity that exclude Aboriginal Australians, migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and women from the imagined nation. I will end by exploring the role of these discursive constructions of identity in the production of the social order in Australia.

Native, non-native and bilingual English teachers: language ideologies in English language teaching

Educational research from around the world has consistently shown that teacher qualifications and teacher experience are central to student learning and good schools. Good teachers make good students! However, in language teaching, particularly English-as-a-Foreign-language teaching, non-native-English-speaking teachers are often burdened with a linguistic inferiority complex. Teacher training, language teaching materials, and the political economy of education often inculcate a sense that native-speaking teachers are superior. In this lecture I will use case studies from East Asia to explore the linguistic ideologies undergirding English language teaching in these contexts. In a second step, I will explore ways to overcome such debilitating linguistic ideologies. How can we turn these discourses on their head? How can we empower “non-native” teachers by reinventing them as bilingual teachers?

Teaching Language, Teaching Culture?

There is an increasing trend towards seeing the language classroom as a vehicle for teaching culture and intercultural communication. In this lecture, I will first explore how the presumed link between language and culture has historically developed in the context of European nation building. I will then explore how that link plays out in contemporary language teaching materials from a range of contexts. Finally, I will suggest ways in which language teachers can engage with culture critically and productively.

How to get published in international journals
Publishing in international English-language journals has become an imperative for academics around the world. At the same time, access to international journals is particularly challenging for early career researchers and researchers from non-English speaking backgrounds and/or those based in non-English dominant countries. In this workshop I will draw on my extensive experience both as an academic author (4 books and more than 100 journal articles) and an editor and reviewer of academic publications. I will share strategies that work and point out common mistakes that lead to rejection. The workshop will be relevant to early career researchers particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

If we accept that consumption has become the key driver of our age, it doesn’t come as a surprise either that consumption is inspiring art in the way that death and religion used to inspire art. The art inspired by consumption is, of course, called advertising. Multilingual advertising is a fascinating site for research into language ideologies and the ways in which languages and their speakers are (de)valued in one of the most hegemonic discourses that is around. I did a couple of studies of the use of languages other than German in German advertising in the late 1990s, all of which are available from our Resources Section. They are all a bit dated by now but an overview of language contact in international advertising which sketches future research directions for the field and which I did for the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics in 2003 (and which is also there) isn’t.

In that paper I was suggesting that a sociolinguistics of advertising needed to move beyond mere descriptivism in order to make a meaningful contribution to the social sciences. In particular, I was calling for investigations of the role of multilingual advertising in making corporatism appear benign, and obscure the neo-colonial and exploitative social structures that ultimately make the kind of hyper-consumption we are witnessing today possible. To quote myself:

At a time when the values, tastes, and industrial practices of American brands are being exported to every corner of the globe, there is a simultaneous attempt to distance these brands – symbolically—from America. One way of doing so may be to use languages other than English in their advertising. The indexing of heterogeneity through the use of multilingual advertising, particularly by U.S. brands, at a time when these very brands rely upon homogeneous consumption practices for their profits, looks set to be another intriguing area of research for linguists working with language contact phenomena in advertising (2003, p. 177)

So far, no one seems to have taken the bait. The challenge still stands, though, as does Naomi Klein’s analysis of diversity marketing on which I was drawing:

Today the buzzword in global marketing isn’t selling America to the world, but bringing a kind of market masala to everyone in the world. In the late nineties, the pitch is less Marlboro Man, more Ricky Martin: a bilingual mix of North and South, some Latin, some R&B, all couched in global party lyrics. This ethnic-food-court approach creates a One World placelessness, a global mall in which corporations are able to sell a single product in numerous countries without triggering the cries of “Coca-Colonization.” (No Logo, 2001, p. 131f.)

Reference
Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Arabic and English are in a complex relationship in this country. While Arabic is the official language of the UAE, English is the de facto public language. Both of the organizing universities, the American University of Sharjah, a private institution, and Zayed University, a public institution, have English as the medium of instruction. As a matter of fact, none of the colleges nor universities in the UAE have Arabic as the medium of instruction. The situation in the K-12 system is more complex but also favoring English: the majority of private schools use English as the medium of instruction, and there are some public schools that use English as the medium of instruction, either throughout the curriculum or for selected content areas. All non-national students attend private schools (82% of the population of the UAE are made up of non-nationals, as I pointed out in an earlier post) and 40-50% of the national population also attend private schools. The maths is clear: the education system is obviously steering the UAE’s young towards English. Furthermore, there is the trend to start English education ever earlier with a boom in English-medium nurseries and preschools. Not even home is necessarily a bastion of Arabic as families are likely to include maids and nannies from South-East Asia or East Africa and a least some communication even in the private domain is thus likely to be in English.

It’s easy to blame English for squeezing out Arabic and the tension between powerful global interests and less powerful local interests is certainly played out on the terrain of language. However, the position of Arabic is further complicated by its famous diglossia. Linguistically speaking, the centers of the Arabic-speaking world are outside the UAE: the main Academies of the Arabic language are based in Algiers, Cairo, Damascus, Khartoum, and Rabat, and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the corpus of which they are planning in their offices are not heard anywhere on the streets of the Arab world, and maybe even less so in the UAE. Gulf Arabic, the local vernacular of the UAE is very different from both MSA and any of the other 15 or so vernacular varieties of Arabic.

On top of the fact that Arabs from outside the Gulf find Gulf Arabic, or Khaleeji, difficult to understand, Gulf Arabic is one of those varieties that don’t get much respect: one speaker at this conference, an Arab from the Levant, referred to the local speech of his students as “some sort of broken pidgin language.” Little wonder that such attitudes from their teachers don’t exactly encourage pride in local identities nor do they encourage people to speak Arabic in public: if your choice is between sounding stand-offish and stilted (MSA) or backward and ignorant (Khaleeji), it’s little wonder that many people vote with their mouths and go for English. Tragically, English is not the liberating haven, either, as which some TESOL practitioners like to present it: the predominant professional discourse about English in the UAE is also one of deficiency.

Ultimately, the challenge for policy makers and educators in the UAE will be less about which languages to teach, which varieties to prescribe as the standard, and how to raise proficiency levels in Arabic and English but how to foster pride in the multilingual, multidialectal, multimodal and fluid communicative practices people in the UAE engage in all the time.

One person on whom Dubai has left an impression was our keynote speaker Suresh Canagarajah from Pennsylvania State University. In his closing panel, Suresh held up the diversity of the UAE as a model for the world. During his three days in the UAE, Suresh has come to the conclusion that the language diversity and transnational community of the UAE could serve as a model for the wider world. He may be on to something: instead of continuous self-flagellation about the low standards of Arabic and English in the UAE, Emiratis might be better off promoting their brand of Language-and-Communication-on-the-Move to the world …

Rarely do language students get an actual say in institutional offerings and a current polling initiative by the Student Council at Zayed University is therefore the more exciting. This internal poll has been running for a couple of days and I can’t take my eyes of it: for a sociolinguist this is like Melbourne Cup Day without the hats!

The way the survey was first published a few days ago, the choice was between Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. “Chinese plus the usual choice of European languages” I thought and noticed particularly that none of these languages are widely spoken in the UAE while some of those spoken by large segments of the UAE population such as Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu or Tagalog are absent.

This is not particularly surprising as language learning is often about the desire to reinvent oneself and that desire is crucially influenced by media discourses and these discourses often set up Western identities as the pinnacle of desirability as Kimie Takahashi and I have shown in a study of the Occidental longings of young Japanese women and how they are exploited by the English language teaching industry (available from our Resources Section (click on “Language learning, gender & identity” > ”A passion for English”).

محمد إدريس, who blogs on “Language and Globalization,” has a similar, even if somewhat more sinister explanation for the reasons why learning Spanish has become so popular in Germany: he sees Germans’ desire to learn Spanish as mindless copying of US tastes and preferences, an acceptance of US hegemony. He argues that learning Spanish is undoubtedly in the interests of US-Americans and so that preference is mediated by Hollywood to the world, even if German foreign language learners would be better served with the languages of neighboring countries such as Czech, French or Polish. So, that’s similar to my own observation that there were no regional languages offered in the Zayed University Student Council Poll.

Well, it’s not all that simple, at least not here at ZU: after the original poll was published, the members of the Japanese and Korean clubs demanded the inclusion of these languages, and since then Korean had been gaining ground steadily on French, the initial leader, until it drew ahead yesterday.

So, does that invalidate the idea that the desire to learn another language is influenced by hegemonic discourses? It doesn’t – it just shows that the center of gravity is shifting. The West is no longer the only source of desirable identities, and particularly cool youth identities, on offer. South Korea has been an exporter of popular melodramas for about a decade and the popularity of Korean youth culture has become known as Korean Wave or even “Korean Fever” in China and Japan. Little surprise then that this also opens up a market for Korean language teaching!

I’ll keep watching that poll – for now, I’m betting on Korean.

Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie (2006). A passion for English: desire and the language market Aneta Pavlenko. Ed. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 59-83