Arab linguistics, Arabic linguistics, and language ideology

Abstract

Taking as its point of departure Michael Carter’s discussion of the problematic relationship between the Arabic grammatical tradition and modern linguistics (1987), this paper seeks to outline a set of pathways for dealing with this relationship from the perspective of language ideology in so far as it relates to the notion of social identity. The paper investigates this ideologically mediated link of language to society in the Arab(ic) context by problematizing the notions of language myths, the native speaker, mother tongue and native language, speech-community and native-language community, as well as the notion of universal and middle-range theory in ways that challenge some of the received “dogmas” in modern linguistics and privilege the native linguistic tradition. The paper does not deny that similarities do exist between these two approaches, but it eschews the debate that took place about the nature of these similarities in the 1990s in favor of a perspective that recognizes the embedding of knowledge about language in society and the importance of double hermeneutics in understanding this embedding.