“The ADF commits itself to safeguarding the independence and territorial integrity of Iran, while endeavouring to establish milli va yerli (national and local) autonomy for Azerbaijan which is defined in civic, economic and cultural terms.” With the declaration of this constitutional article drafted at its first congress, the Azerbaijan Democrat Party (ADP, Azerbaijan Demokrat Ferqesi) committed itself to the maintenance of Iranian borders and established that it was working in the interest of Iranian lands at local and national levels. Entailed in this commitment was autonomy for the Iranian province of Azerbaijan in “civic, economic and cultural terms” as outlined in the ADP’s official party newspaper, Azerbaijan, printed during the ADP’s one-year control of Azerbaijan from 1945 to 1946. Examinations of the short-lived autonomous government of the ADP have focused on the identities of key figures within the movement as well as Azeri language politics and Azerbaijani ethnic identity and their relation to Iranian nationalism. Using selections from Azerbaijan, this paper will acknowledge and problematize the importance of these focal points as well as investigate how the ADP contested the content of the Iranian state’s national narrative through its vision of “cultural autonomy” as found in its cultural project, or works produced to argue for increased representation in the Iranian state’s national narrative. These works included the newspaper itself as well as works documented therein, including literature, poetry, historical monuments, and tributes to Azerbaijani heroes such as Shah Ismail. This essay builds upon recent literature about the historical process of nationalization in Iran to suggest that contestation via the cultural project of the ADP is missing from the historiography of the autonomous government and it is through examining the cultural works and legitimation symbols employed by the ADP that we can see how they engaged with and challenged the Iranian state’s national narrative. This brief period of autonomous Azerbaijani government offers a unique case study because it highlights the limitations of the Pahlavi period’s linguistic and cultural homogenization programs and their implications for the Pahlavi goal of national unity. Finally, analyzing disputed elements of the Iranian state’s national narrative will underscore how one group in Iran engaged with and attempted to negotiate increased representation within that narrative.

Jan. 25, 2012 in Egypt witnessed hot debates and unfortunate violent clashes over the idea of whether Egyptians should celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution or not. The Revolution started with the youth chanting “the people and the Army are united” and one year later, mostly the same groups are chanting “down with the military rule”. This paper tries to shed light on key scenes of the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Military Forces (SCAF) during that ‘transitional’ period and tries to analyze the discourse of these scenes in the light of the history of the military in Egypt after the 1952 Revolution to make sense of that shift. These scenes start with the Army’s dialogues with the youth groups directly after the Revolution and move through taking about 12 thousand civilians to military courts in one year. The analysis will depend on the SCAF’s official statements in preparation and in response to these scenes. It will highlight the functions of the distinctions made in language. This form-to-function analysis seeks to account for the strategic arrangement of the communicative intention of these statements or ‘discourse acts’. I propose that these discourse acts may themselves form part of a temporal sequence of larger moves. The formulation offered in this paper involves both the Interpersonal and the Representational levels of these discourse acts and the historical factors that might have led to the formulation of such acts since the 1952 Revolution in Egypt that created the military status we have today in Egypt. As Butler (2004) points out, the proper relation between functionalist theories and corpora is for the former to provide hypotheses which can be tested against data. This linguistic reading of those scenes that include the Special Forces’ armed intervention to end a sit-in in Tahrir Square, the so called ‘virginity tests’ and raiding NGO’s offices tries to provide a structure for the observation of linguistic phenomena and in this way is involved in the entire cycle of research from observation to prediction, to the testing of prediction through further observation of what will come next. What is offered here is an account of the inner structure of some key discourse acts that is sensitive to the impact of their use in discourse upon their form.

In 2003, a Moroccan government committee was appointed to make a choice between Latin, Arabic, or Tifinagh script to codify Berber/Tamazight. Tifinagh was officially selected, but the debate over its choice is still ongoing, involving different groups with opposing views and complex affiliations. This paper explores how orthographies are decided based on social, cultural, and ideological factors rather than linguistic and scientific grounds, and it shows that the development of an orthography is not a neutral activity. Researchers in language ideology suggest that orthography is a sign that represents identity and a particular ideology, and that it can serve as a tool for showing differentiation, or affiliation to a certain group, community or nation. In most societies, the manifestation of more than one ideology is considered the norm, in which competing ideologies are presented as logical justifications. Informed by theories of language ideologies and discourse analysis, this study analyzes ideological motivations for the script selection for the Berber language in Morocco, and it investigates the social implications of the script codification. The data that informs this study is based on fieldwork conducted in Morocco in fall 2011, including language questionnaires, focus groups, interviews and observations. This research reveals that the script debate is far from decided, and that the script issue is deeply connected to questions of identity in modern Morocco. The outcome of this study is relevant not only to the Moroccan context, but also to other groups, communities and nations facing similar decisions with competing choices.

Language has played – and continues to play – an important role in what is commonly referred to as the Egyptian Revolution. In fact, different creative ways in which language has been put to work have been constitutive of the uprising. It is through verbal art and skilful manipulation of various linguistic resources that participants, both active and potential, are mobilised, informed, encouraged and motivated. In this presentation, I start from the premise that there is a certain correlation between the ongoing reconfiguration of the Egyptian sociolinguistic setting on the one hand, and on the other continuous expressions of dissent and resistance among many Egyptians. I particularly focus on – by default short-lived – graffiti.I situate this analysis within my broader ethnographic findings on “a changing linguascape” in contemporary Egypt where Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) constitute two theoretical poles of what has traditionally been understood as “the diglossic continuum.” The Egyptian sociolinguistic setting, however, is here understood as being redefined and reconfigured by the increasing socio economic importance of yet another linguistic variety – English. Relevant examples and linguistic details are discussed with reference to a broader socio-cultural context and local language ideologies surrounding the production and reception of written texts in contemporary Egypt. The inventory of linguistic resources variously employed by various graffiti artists is identified to contain re-combinations across three linguistic varieties, MSA, ECA and English, and two scripts, Arabic and Latin. By and large, these re-combinations and language choices are shown to be strategic, locally meaningful, yet often indexical of global flows and aspiring cosmopolitanisms. The theoretical framework which understands that language is, first and foremost, a local practice (and orthography a social practice) is here further elaborated so as to include multimodality, geosemantics and insights gained from studies of linguistic landscapes in different settings. Cairene graffiti are understood as both acts and artefacts of resistance and struggle. Simultaneously symbolic and material, these graffiti and the resultant transient linguistic cityscapes represent interventions in and on the environment; they are constant attempts at occupying and re-appropriating the urban space. Their lifespan on the streets and walls in Cairo is usually very brief, but their afterlife is often secured online through a variety of photo-archives on the Internet, testifying to a remarkable trans-/metro-lingual character of the local practice of revolt.

This paper investigates how the ideology of modernity affects language attitudes, stratification, and use among Moroccan youth. The sociolinguistic situation in Morocco offers a unique venue for investigating how linguistic codes, be they exogenous or endogenous, are continually contesting their presence in the educational domain. Results of the data from a language attitudes questionnaire, administered in four Moroccan colleges, shows that the relationship between languages and their use in the educational domain is stratified based on socioeconomic class membership. This domain provides a clear picture of a socially-divided and class-fragmented Morocco, wherein the ability to access socioeconomic prosperity is subsumed under an elitist education, regimented through the ‘perfect’ acquisition and use of French, and increasingly, English. At the heart of the stratification of languages in Morocco exists the work of the ideology of modernity. Through global capital discourses, this ideology laminates science, its powerhouse, with Western languages. The post-colonial effort to decolonize the Moroccan mind is being actively undermined by the propagation of the ideology of modernity, in a globalized context, which safeguards an elitist distribution of language use, as well as a stark polarization of language attitudes. Such a dichotomy between SA-taught and a French-taught educational spheres has reinforced the linguistic divide between socioeconomic classes in Morocco. As a result, this dichotomy, propagated by the ideology of modernity, has safeguarded privileged positions for the ruling elite, as well as those of metropolitan countries (Ricento 2000). The educational domain is “intricately bound to long-standing and continuing struggles over political sovereignty, soci-economic improvement, and cultural authenticity” (Abi-Mershed 2010: 5). In fact, language policies in Morocco are instituted to help further the divide and deepen the linguistic boundaries and social disparities between the elite and non-elite speech communities. Therefore, multilingualism in Morocco does not present us with an equitable division of labor and representation of these different codes. Given that the ideology of modernity propagates the belief in science to affect social change (Bauman and Briggs 2003), this ideology and the languages policies in ‘modern’ Morocco relegate local languages to the domain of the cultural, thus undermining their presence in vital, scientific, technological, and business sectors. With the continuous asymmetry present in the Moroccan multilingual space, socioeconomic privileges and overt prestige are constantly injected in solidifying the dominance of the transplanted code, French, and potentially, that of English.