Combining empirical and theoretical approaches from a range of disciplines, Linguistic Identities in the Arab Gulf States examines current issues surrounding language and identity in the Arab Gulf states. Organized in four parts, the book addresses the overarching theme of ‘waves of change’ in relation to language and power, linguistic identities in the media, identities in transition, and language in education. The authors of each chapter are renowned experts in their field and contribute to furthering our understanding of the dynamic, changeable, and socially constructed nature of identities and how identities are often intricately woven into and impacted by local and global developments. Although the book geographically covers Gulf region contexts, many of the concepts and dilemmas discussed are relevant to other highly diverse nations globally. For example, debates surrounding tolerance, diversity, neoliberal ideologies in English-medium instruction (EMI), media representation of language varieties, and sociolinguistic inequalities during coronavirus communication are pertinent to regions outside the Gulf, too. This volume will particularly appeal to students and scholars interested in issues around language and identity, gender, language policy and planning, multilingualism, translingual practice, language in education, and language ideologies.

Language and Identity in the Arab World explores the inextricable link between language and identity, referring particularly to the Arab world. Spanning from Indonesia to the United States, the Arab world is here imagined as a continually changing one, with the Arab diaspora asserting its linguistic identity across the world. Crucial questions on transforming linguistic landscapes, the role and implications of migration, the impact of technology on language use are explored by established and emerging scholars in the field of applied and socio-linguistics. The book asks such crucial questions as how language contact affects or transforms identity, how language reflects changing identities among migrant communities, and how language choices contribute to identity construction in social media. As well as appreciating the breadth and scope of the Arab world, this anthology focuses on the transformative role of language within indigenous and migrant communities as they negotiate between their heritage languages and those spoken by the wider society. Investigating the ways in which identify continues to be imagined and re-constructed in, and among Arab communities, this book is indispensable to students, teachers and anyone who is interested in language contact, linguistic landscapes, minority language retention as well as the intersections of language and technology.

The question of identity in relation to language has hardly been dealt with in the Middle East and North Africa, in spite of the centrality of these issues to a variety of scholarly debates concerning this strategically important part of the world. The book seeks to cover a variety of themes in this area.

The book analyzes recent changes to the identities and cultures of the GCC countries. These important transformations have gone largely unnoticed due to the fast-paced changes in the region that affect all aspects of society. The volume unpacks these transformations by looking from a holistic perspective at the intersections of language, arts, education, political culture, city, regional alliances and transnational identities. It offers selected case studies based on original research carried out in the region. Chapter 7, ‘Identity Lost & Found: Architecture and Identity Formation in Kuwait and the Gulf’, of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

As the Gulf assumes an ever more important identity in the global political economy, we see the emergence of a new popular and political culture underpinning its increasingly self-confident national identities. This volume explores the new dynamism of the Gulf, reflected not just in high-rise buildings and booming stock markets, but also manifested in the realms of art, ideas and expression, and their relationships with political authority. Contributors include figures instrumental to the emergence of these new identities, including artists, broadcasters and cultural commentators.

"Tribal Modern analyzes what is most distinctive about Arab Gulf culture over the past 15 years and how this culture shapes distinctive national identities. It highlights the tribal as the decisive element in modern Arab Gulf culture and identity. The question incredulous outsiders ask is: how could fishermen, pearl divers and pastoral nomads catch up with the rest of the modernized world? Observers remain skeptical about the apparent clash between the modern and the backward tribal. But in these newly rich desert societies different meanings attach to the tribal generally coded non-modern. Tribes here are not primitive; they are the instruments and symbols of identity for hypermodern Gulf societies. Nationals make claims based on a newly imagined tribal identity that entitles them alone to the rights and privileges of modern citizenship. Tribal Modern explores the interweaving of the tribal and the modern into a national brand. Structural, performative and cognitive, the brand is being built into heritage and fantasy architecture; it is performed in neo-tribal sports, dress codes and language, especially neo-Bedouin poetry contests. The tribal signals a new aristocratic identity in the anonymity of 21st century globalization. The tribal in the Arab Gulf states is a fundamental and constitutive part of the modern. The tribal modern shapes a national brand to project political power abroad and prestige at home. Most studies of these new, mega-rich countries come from the social sciences. Tribal Modern looks at cultural indices of local self-assertion. It provides a cultural analysis of Gulf Arab social formation that examines the intersection of race, class and gender"--Provided by publisher.

The Arab Gulf region is one of the standard examples of diglossia, where standard Arabic (SA), as a high variety, and colloquial Arabic (CA), as a low variety, co-exist (Ferguson, 1959; Kaye, 1970; Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015). However, this linguistic pattern has been changing, with speakers increasingly using English due to globalization (Winford, 2002). In this paper, I examine the use of SA, CA, and English in the speech of two groups of public figures in the Arabian Gulf region: politicians and actors. It is hypothesized that the two groups will have distinct speech styles as they are constructing different personae (Eckert, 2004): a socially conservative one for politicians, and a more popular and cosmopolitan one for actors. It is further hypothesized that politicians will use standard Arabic more, because of its association with conservative values, and actors will use more colloquial Arabic and English for their popular association. The study uses naturalistic data that was obtained by examining a 30-minute interview, from public recordings on YouTube, for each of the 18 subjects: six politicians (three males, three females) and 12 actors (six males, six females). An analysis of 2,808 utterances yields results that support the hypothesis. More than half of the politicians' utterances are a mixture of SA and CA. Actors, on the other hand, adopt a different style in which CA is the dominant code, but they also use utterances that are a mixture of CA and English borrowings (12% of their speech). These findings can be seen as an indication of a linguistic change in the region: CA forms are replacing SA, not only in the speech of popular figures such as actors but also in that of more conservative speakers such as politicians. The appearance of English borrowings in the utterances of the actors is another indication that linguistic norms in the Arab Gulf region might be shifting towards the vernacular.