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…

The 1948 war created a new situation in Palestine. Palestinians became dispersed across political borders that had not existed before, and these borders continued to change in different ways into the 21st century. In many respects, these political borders have had notable linguistic effects, introducing bilingualism and multilingualism for some…

This article concerns knowledge negotiations as an aspect of interactional power in three-way interaction between Arabic-speaking women, Swedish-speaking midwives and interpreters in Swedish antenatal care. The notion of epistemic stance is used to investigate how all three participants negotiate knowledge, and how this affects the ongoing…

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",…

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"…

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…

The translation of bilingual literary texts may challenge a translator when s/he needs to transfer some embedded, foreign codes from a language other than the dominant language of the source text (ST) into the target text (TT). This study analyses the way in which code-switching (CS) is transferred into a TT, looking at the translation strategies…

This study examines the communication strategies employed by Qatar's government in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The study contributes to a growing body of work on the sociolinguistics of crisis communication. We focus on the use of South and Southeast Asian languages, spoken largely by blue-collar migrant workers, which are often seen as…

This study discusses the impact of spatial, temporal and virtual mobility on how mobile individuals talk about language in their world, and how they use language offline and online to communicate over time and across space. We introduce the notion of "chronotopic translanguaging" to highlight the significance of merging time and place in…

Professional interpreters are obliged by their codes of ethics to interpret the speakers' speech faithfully, including offensive, profane or vulgar language. In order to achieve this goal, interpreters need to be pragmatically competent, so as to understand the intention and effect of the offensive remark in the source language and be able to…

This paper takes up conviviality as an analytical tool to investigate everyday language choices made by foreign residents living in Ras Al Khaimah, a small city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It draws on recent work in human geography and cultural studies to understand conviviality in terms of practices rather than outcomes. Specifically, it…

Sa'idi dialect' is a general phrase used by Egyptians to refer to a group of dialects spoken in an area that stretches from the south of Cairo to the border of the Sudan. Of all the dialects found throughout Egypt and the Arab world, Sa'idi Arabic is one of the most ridiculed, stigmatised and stereotyped in the media. Salient phonological and…

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a growing preoccupation with multilingual texts across the world. Literary code-switching is becoming significantly valuable as it allows readers access to the trans-lingual and transcultural experiences of bilinguals in monolingual majority societies. More importantly, as the recent surge in the…

Born and educated in the UK, with Arab parents and Muslims, second-generation British-Arab immigrants in Cardiff find themselves at the core of a complex web of power relations which potentiates their production of multilingual practices. However, while Cardiff is officially bilingual, English being the dominant language and Welsh becoming…

This paper examines the multilingual translation efforts of a group of university student volunteers during the COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews of the volunteer team leader, team members, and a local community health worker. Findings identified time constraints, limited language proficiency,…