This book provides a nuanced portrait of the complexities found within the cultural and linguistic landscape of the United Arab Emirates, unpacking the ever-shifting dynamics between English and Arabic in today’s era of superdiversity. Employing a qualitative phenomenological approach which draws on a rich set of data from questionnaires to focus groups with Emirati students, Emirati schoolteachers, and expatriate university teachers, Hopkyns problematizes the common binary East-West paradigm focused on the tension between the use of English and Arabic in the UAE. Key issues emerging from the resulting analysis include the differing attitudes towards English and in particular, English Medium Instruction, the impact of this tension on identities, and the ways in which the two languages are employed in distinct ways on an everyday scale. The volume will particularly appeal to students and scholars interested in issues around language and identity, language policy and planning, multilingualism, translanguaging, and language in education.

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 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, and 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 identity 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, and minority language retention as well as the intersections of language and technology.

This Handbook discusses the theoretical and disciplinary background to the study of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education worldwide. It highlights issues relating to EMI pedagogy, varying motivations for EMI education, and the delivery of EMI in diverse contexts across the world. The spread of English as a teaching medium and the lingua franca of the academic world has been the subject of various debates in recent years on the perceived hegemony of the English language and the ‘domain loss’ of non-English languages in academic communication. Encompassing a wide range of contributions to the field of EMI, the chapters of this Handbook are arranged in four distinct parts: Part I provides an overview of English-medium instruction in higher education worldwide; Part II focusses on EMI in Europe; Part III on EMI in the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa; and Part IV on EMI in the Asian region. The overall scope and level of expertise of this Handbook provides an unrivalled overview of this field of education. It serves as an essential reference for many courses dealing with applied linguistics, English language education, multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and related subjects at many levels of education, including Master’s and PhD-level studies. This Handbook serves as a valuable edition for university libraries across the world and an essential read for many faculty, undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and policymakers.

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic and Identity offers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of studies that relate the Arabic language in its entirety to identity. This handbook offers new trajectories in understanding language and identity more generally and Arabic and identity in particular. Split into three parts, covering ‘Identity and Variation’, ‘Identity and Politics’ and ‘Identity Globalisation and Diversity’, it is the first of its kind to offer such a perspective on identity, linking the social world to identity construction and including issues pertaining to our current political and social context, including Arabic in the diaspora, Arabic as a minority language, pidgin and creoles, Arabic in the global age, Arabic and new media, Arabic and political discourse. Scholars and students will find essential theories and methods that relate language to identity in this handbook. It is particularly of interest to scholars and students whose work is related to the Arab world, political science, modern political thought, Islam and social sciences including: general linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology, literature media studies and Islamic studies.

This book investigates socio-linguistic interactions in different second language (L2) contexts in an effort to identify the trends that lead to the acquisition of sociolinguistic variations by L2 learners, contributing significantly to L2 research and practice. It addresses sociolinguistic subjects such as multilingualism and its effects, as well as regional and social dialectology in L2. The different chapters explore the overall effect that society – including cultural norms, expectations, and contexts – has on L2 usage. They also consider how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social variables such as ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, and age, and how these variables categorise individuals into social or socioeconomic classes. The volume brings together careful theoretical and empirical research conducted in different countries, including Catalonia, Finland, Greece, Malta, Malaysia, the Republic of Cyprus, and the United Arab Emirates.

This volume sets out to investigate the linguistic ecologies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai, with chapters that combine empirical and theoretical approaches to the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. One important feature of this publication is that the five parts of the collection deal with such key issues as the historical dimension, language policies and language planning, contemporary societal multilingualism, multilingual language acquisition, and the localized Englishes of global cities. The first four sections of the volume provide a multi-levelled and finely-detailed description of multilingual diversity of three global cities, while the final section discusses postcolonial Englishes in the context of multilingual language acquisition and language contact.