Language ideologies can be defined as ‘cultural ideas, presumptions and presuppositions with which different social groups name, frame and evaluate linguistic practices’ (Gal 2006: 13). With the significant political and social shifts in post-Arab Spring Egypt, came significant linguistic shifts, specially in the discourses of social media as a globalized mode of communication. In presenting the self to others through linguistic choices, the tendency to use Standard Arabic (SA) or Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) in Facebook posts emerged as a discourse mode that transforms, and is transformed by, social practices. The discursive analysis of diglossic switching in some post Arab-Spring Facebook posts can help shed a new light on the concepts of identity and affiliation. The aim of this paper is to analyze and describe the interdiscursivity of the mix of SA and ECA, or lack thereof, based on data of posts of some advocacy groups like ‘Al-Mawqif AlMasri’ “The Egyptian Stance” in an attempt to understand the semiosis of this process of negotiating communal identity and expressions of transculturality in the current Arab context. The study argues that the type of code-mixing or code-switching of Arabic that the group uses, mainly dialectal elements of Egyptian Arabic (EA) with features of Standard Arabic (SA) is an intermediate register that represents a form of ‘crossing’ or ‘stylization’ (Rampton 2009) which enabled the group members to ideologically reference their commitments, position themselves and build their own community across the Arab world with respect to group identity through the functional use of language that represents its own type of social action in a culturally and linguistically diverse Arab world. The multidisciplinary theoretical framework of this paper relates approaches from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) inspired by Fairclough (2000, 2003) and van Dijk (2011) with insights from Social Semiotics theory introduced by van Leeuwen (2005) with a view to providing a better foundation for understanding how social groups as epistemic communities of practice, thought and discourse share knowledge, that has been used to define the vary basis of cultures, as opposed to the traditional time and space parameters.

Speaking of Bodies Embodiment in Arabic Morphology The publication of Metaphors We Live By, (Lakoff and Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1980), precipitated an explosion of inquiry into the pervasive role of the body in metaphor, and “embodiment” quickly became a hot interdisciplinary topic. From literature, psycho-linguistics and anthropology to philosophy, gender studies, and beyond, researchers have shown, in language after language, that the body is essential to our thinking and the source of innumerable figurative expressions. Embodiment refers not just to explicit imagery involving body parts, but also to metaphoric expressions that implicate the body. Who has not felt the pangs of love, the heat of anger, the ache of loss? For better and for worse, our experience of life is intrinsically bound up in the body, and human languages reflect this universal truth. Arabic, however, seems to have received less than its fair share of research on embodiment, at least in English publications. The only researchers I am aware of who have investigated body metaphor in Arabic and published the results in English are Ateek, Hassan, Naylor, & Sarofim in A Roving Eye, (Cairo, New York: AUC Press, 2014), a bilingual and pictorial exploration of body idioms in Egyptian Arabic, and the prolific Zouheir Maalej. Beginning in 2004 and using Tunisian Arabic as his corpus, Maalej has written widely on metaphoric expression involving the body and emotion, with articles on anger and fear, the heart and the eye, the head and the hand. He also co-edited Embodiment via Body Parts, (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2011) a study of the figurative use of body parts in such diverse languages as Chinese, Japanese, Estonian, Greek, Danish, and German. What my study adds to the just-emerging discussion of linguistic embodiment in Arabic is the way in which Arabic morphology systematically exploits roots referring to body parts to create constellations of vocabulary which are semantically and metaphorically connected. This fact is of particular relevance to second language learners and teachers. So far, in terms of academia, the intriguing intersection of embodiment and Arabic morphology is virgin territory. My paper examines the basic issue of embodiment in Arabic, and offers specific illustrations of its powerful, coherent, and poetic presence in morphology. Exploring this domain enriches metaphoric and cultural competence and also has important pedagogic implications.

Like the Tanzimat literary period which preceded it, Edebiyat-? Cedide (New Literature, 1896-1901) is part of late-Ottoman cultural history and the impetus to modernize literary form and language. Yet, Edebiyat-? Cedide authors invigorated literary language that in important ways went against the Ottoman project of linguistic modernization of the nineteenth century, a state sponsored project to simplify the composite nature of Ottoman written language. Countering these efforts, Edebiyat-? Cedide writing, directed at forging artistic writing with the power of conveying complex emotional states of the individual, incorporated Arabic and Persian vocabulary and grammatical structures to coin new words and expressions to represent and replace European (mostly French) words, concepts, categories and so on. I examine Edebiyat-? Cedide’s response to the Ottoman project of linguistic modernization, as articulated by leading figures of Edebiyat-? Cedide Tevfik Fikret (1867-1915) and Halit Ziya U?akl?gil (1866-1945), who, in articles published in Servet-i Fünun (Wealth of Science), delineate what constitutes a modern aesthetic language within a structure of unequal power relations. If the project of linguistic modernization involved processes of suppression of Arabic and Persian in written language, the Edebiyat-? Cedide movement might best be understood as releasing them—the very aspect that caused discomfort to advocates of linguistic simplification like Ahmet Midhat (1844-1912). Tevfik Fikret and Halit Ziya U?akl?gil’s discourses on Edebiyat-? Cedide writing lay bare the tensions implicated in this release at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. For, as I argue, drawing on Arabic and Persian was not an attempt to restore the increasingly disintegrating (because increasingly suppressed) hybrid “Ottoman interculture,” to borrow from Saliha Paker, but to forge aesthetic language comparable to western European languages.

The linguistic conflict of Arabic and Hebrew, much like the escalating Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is overtly played out in languages displayed on signage in both Palestine and Israel. Suleiman (2004) contends that language use is one of the least studied dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While past studies such as Ben-Rafael, et al. (2006) explore the symbolic function of languages through signage in Israeli public spaces, there are no studies that investigate these same ideas in Palestine. This paper responds to Suleiman by investigating how power and solidarity are reflected through both public and private signage in Palestine. An analysis was conducted as to how the hierarchical existence of different linguistic representations are ordered on both public (storefronts and shops) and private (road/highway) signage within the rural village of Ni'lin and the city of Ramallah. Arabic, Hebrew, and English tokens were also examined according to Spolsky and Cooper’s (1991) criteria for analyzing the use of multiple languages within a singular display. These criteria identify three methods by which inclusion and exclusion are established: the first being people write in a language they know. Secondly, people write signs in the language that intended readers are assumed to read. Thirdly, people prefer to write signs in the language of which they wish to be identified. This information contributes to our understanding of how linguistic representation and order are manipulated by power and solidarity relations. Results of the current study show evidence of power relations being represented on both private and public signage. For instance, multiple languages on signs can be an indication that multiple nationalities are welcome. However, signs with a singular language can signify that only the one who speaks that language is able to enter the claimed spaces. This is a common occurrence within Palestine where the Arab-Israeli conflict focuses on land ownership rights that can be represented linguistically by signs. This language display of signage exhibiting one language or the other and/or language hierarchy suggests a deeper symbolic layer of this ongoing conflict.

The Moroccan government has recently engaged in a conscious effort to reintegrate itself into the African continent. The latest evidence of this is the Kingdom’s reentry into the African Union after an absence of more than thirty years. While much attention has been given to the political and economic stakes of these efforts to relocate Morocco in Africa, this paper argues that a cultural relocation has in fact been years in the making, but that the transformation of these new geographies into intimate sensibilities is still in the process of being worked out in everyday life in Morocco. In this paper, I first track the ways in which Africa has been not-so-subtly folded into the Moroccan imaginary and Moroccan identity over the past decade through a sort of domestic cultural diplomacy. Looking at a combination of music festivals and televised media, I trace the cultivated presence of Africa in Moroccan popular culture, with particular attention to the ways in which Moroccans have been recruited into thinking of themselves as almost but not quite African. Second, my paper then traces the linguistic negotiations of an African presence within Moroccan popular culture by looking closely at three recent attempts to “voice” West African residents in Darija (colloquial Moroccan Arabic): a dubbed documentary (Aji-Bi), an anti-racism campaign (Ma Smitiych Azzi), and a comedy skit (Saad Mabrouk). Through an examination of these attempts to reimagine the place—and the voice—of Africa within the Moroccan cultural soundscape, I reveal an unevenness in how this imperative of geographical relocation is being taken up by ordinary Moroccans. Ultimately, I argue that a more abstract acceptance of Morocco’s cultural africanité does not preclude an intimate discomfort with accepting “foreign” African voices into the most intimate sphere of Moroccan life—Darija. Yet significantly, I also suggest that these attempts to “voice” foreignness in Darija are a potentially pivotal step towards reimagining (or rehearing) Darija as a cosmopolitan public language whose sonic borders include all of the Morocco’s diverse residents.

Since as far back as the first century AD, Omani and East African coastal merchants have been involved in various economic, material, cultural and other exchanges. Despite such long established contact, it was not until the 1800s with the Omani sultan establishing Zanzibar as the capital of the Omani Empire, that the two regions entered into a period of trade that had a historically profound impact on each other’s current subjective identities. In terms of the populations that inhabit modern-day Zanzibar, they did not begin to refer to themselves as Swahili-a contested term that is used to this day-until the early 1800s as a result of increased Arab influence. Similarly, after many Arabs were expelled from Zanzibar following the revolution of 1964, these Arabs returned to Oman identifying as Swahili, too. Despite a previous tendency to portray Swahili and Omani Arab identities as rigid and exclusive, I argue that the increased 19th century trade between the two regions proved just how fluid the identities were and how such identities changed over time up until the 1964 revolution. By focus on the effects of increased trade relations, this study aims to uncover to what extent Omanis both in Oman and coastal East Africa, specifically Zanzibar, became ‘Swahilised’ and how that effected subjective identities. Additionally, this study aims to understand how the subjective identities of the peoples inhabiting what is now referred to as the Swahili coast-particularly near present day Zanzibar-changed with increased Omani influence. Gathering from an array of sources, including but limited to academic, art and oral histories, I aim to illustrate how different facets of Omani and ‘Swahili’ identity such as material cultural, musical identity, linguistic identity and social identity changed throughout the course of the Omani occupation of Zanzibar from the 1830s until the revolution of 1964. Many cultural aspects of each population had a great influence on the other, and even today, one can see the remnants of ‘Swahili’ culture in Oman and vice versa.