Volume 41, Issue 2

This article explores the management of multilingual mobile communicators at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) according to institutional requirements and the consequences on Arabic-speaking communicators’ careers. Based on interviews complemented by institutional documents, I analyse the impact of “multiple languages”, “‘easy’ nationality” and “flexibility for non-family posts” as key requirements for mobile communicators. The institutional shortage of Arabic speakers largely limited their experience to Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) while other communicators allegedly had a broader variety of field experience for career advancement. Linguistic repertoires and nationality shaped mission allocation since acceptance of one’s nationality in the host country largely outweighed linguistic competences in Arabic in MENA, with a preference for European or dual nationals and the Lebanese over other Arab nationals. Flexibility for non-family posts, numerous in MENA, seems to reinforce an unequal distribution of reproductive work and structural gender inequalities. Many interviewed women felt that they had to choose between the agency and family. Although desirable, family posts outside MENA were not considered as exciting communications work. Besides hiring L2 speakers with an acceptable nationality, interviewed communicators suggested a new rotation system, advising roles for Arabic-speaking professionals and special quota for women.

This article is a succinct approach to Mapudungun language ideologies and their development within the political and economic context of 21st century Chile. Social media have empowered Mapudungun language activists and intellectuals and helped them create digital communities, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, from which they establish and promote language policies, defined by themselves. Among the most relevant language ideologies found in the corpus, there is a representation of Indigenous languages as sacred, or untouchable, often implying an essential connection between Indigenous cultures and the natural or spiritual world. This representation (called “cosmovisionism” by activists) tends to contradict modernizing language ideologies that circulate in emerging Mapudungun language planning, mainly due to the influence of Basque and Catalan models based on the notion of language normalization, actively promoted in Chile by agents from those domains. Modernizing visions of Mapudungun tend to be linked to a nationalist political project that demands a solid connection between land, people, history, cultural identity, and language. This leads to ideological tensions between the urgency to anonymize and the need to depoliticize the language, both simultaneously considered fundamental to secure Mapudungun’s expansion.

This contribution treats “language immersion” as a linguistic ideology and explores narratives, practices, and subjectivities pertinent to that notion in the context of language-motivated voluntourism. Voluntourism programs offer short-term sojourns abroad, which combine voluntary work with holidays while promising “immersion” as an efficient alternative to classroom language learning. In the Mediterranean island state of Malta, whose population is mostly bilingual in English and Maltese, voluntourism has become an attractive product for the booming English language travel industry. Since there is a lack of critical sociolinguistic and second language acquisition research on the language learning trajectories of voluntourists, this piece examines the promise of immersion through the example of a hostel that figures as a workplace. Drawing on ethnographic data, it investigates how learning English through immersion while working abroad is imagined and promoted, whether or not it occurs, and what gains (linguistic or otherwise) it generates and for whom. The article argues that the voluntourism industry appropriates the discourse of immersion to responsibilize English learners for their linguistic self-skilling, thereby constituting them as neoliberal subjects that can easily be exploited as a cheap workforce.

In Abu Dhabi, multilingualism amongst its highly diverse population is typical. However, with Arabic as the official language and English as the lingua franca, the population’s other languages are subordinate on public signage. Those proficient in English or Arabic have more access to information than those who are not. While effective communication is important in ordinary times, it is especially vital during a crisis. This study looks at COVID-19 signage in two Abu Dhabi live-work contexts: A beachside community and an industrial site. The study takes an ethnographic approach to linguistic landscaping in which a corpus of 326 top-down and bottom-up signs are investigated in terms of languages used, spacing, prominence and location, as well as intended audience and sociolinguistic implications. Key findings revealed that bottom-up handmade COVID-19 signage was mainly monolingual (English only) and municipality-produced warnings were predominately bilingual (Arabic and English). Despite the multilingual composition of both contexts, only one third language (Korean) appeared on COVID-19 signage. The findings shed light on existing inequalities in linguistically diverse contexts, and the need to ensure access to information for all at a street level. The article concludes with practical suggestions for greater linguistic inclusion in the COVID-19 period and beyond.

A wide range of Arabic language variation in form, code choice and orthographic script was wielded by Lebanese political protestors in their graffiti and political placards in Beirut in 2015. That summer, civil protests spilled out into the streets to critique the government inaction over waste management and overall corruption. I will focus on four tactics that highlight a trend towards linguistic transgression and strategic recontextualization of Arabic discourse in these protests: reworking of state iconography; inscribing irreverent spoken dialect in written form; incorporation of hashtag (#) participant and interpretive frameworks; and the recontextualization of traditional calligraphic forms in new contexts. This paper explores the intertextuality of protest signage and consider the ways in which the transgression of traditional linguistic boundaries might inform understandings of the social dynamics of contemporary politics in Lebanon.