Linguistic Ideologies Research Articles

Ideologias linguísticas e regimes de testes de língua para migrantes no Brasil

Resumo: Neste artigo, analisamos o regime de testes de língua no contexto de migração transnacional para o Brasil e sua relação com ideologias linguísticas hegemônicas na construção de sistemas de diferenciação corporal. Para tanto, partimos da noção de teste enquanto instrumento formal para medição de proficiência, instituído como pré-requisito para entrada, residência e/ou aquisição de nacionalidade por migrantes em diversos países, funcionando como uma forma de barreira no controle das fronteiras estatais, conforme aponta a literatura pesquisada. Inicialmente, identificamos a existência de três tipos de testes linguísticos no Brasil: Certificação de Proficiência em Língua Portuguesa para Estrangeiros (Celpe-Bras), avaliação de língua portuguesa para médicos vinculados ao programa “Mais Médicos” e exigência de conhecimento de língua portuguesa nos processos de naturalização. A análise do corpus indicou diversas discrepâncias entre o estado da arte dos estudos sobre testes linguísticos em contexto migratório e a realidade brasileira, colocando em perspectiva a existência de um regime de testes linguísticos migratórios no país, na medida em que as articulações entre o seu aspecto linguístico e o seu aspecto de barreira são contraditórias. Os recursos indexicalizados nos documentos sobre testes no Brasil sinalizam, na verdade, a afirmação de uma autonomia no gerenciamento da língua portuguesa e a comoditização do ensino do português para estrangeiros como estratégia de mercado e vitrine da cultura brasileira globalizada, numa construção ideológica de correspondência estática e naturalizada entre língua oficial e nação, produzindo, para tanto, hierarquizações entre identidades migrantes “desejáveis” e “indesejáveis”.

The discursive pathway of two centuries of raciolinguistic stereotyping: ‘Africans as incapable of speaking French’

AbstractThis article is about the discursive pathway of grammatical structures such asy'a bon‘there's good’, documenting how, in Hexagonal France, it has become an ‘enregistered emblem’ for indexing sub-Saharan Africans and, by extension, any African as allegedly incapable of speaking French competently. I argue that tracing pathways makes it possible to unveil the intricacy of the historicities of production, circulation, and interpretations of such racially based linguistic stereotypes. One of the central questions addressed in this article is: What are the sociohistorical conditions of the emergence and maintenance of these linguistic stereotypes? I show that these are grounded in long-standing linguistic ideologies of French as an exceptional language and of African languages and, therefore, their speakers, as primitive. I demonstrate how the rise of first age mass culture in the nineteenth century contributed to both the entextualization and the circulation of these stereotypical representations. (Stereotypes, mediatization, enregisterment, language ideology, France, Africa)*

Dialogic Discourses of French and English in Acadie

Debate in the Acadian media over the quality of the French language is a recurrent aspect of sociolinguistic life in this region of French Canada. In the fall of 2012, this debate was relaunched by an incendiary newspaper column, written by a Quebec-based journalist, questioning whether the French spoken by young Acadian musicians was really a language at all. Based on twelve interviews conducted shortly after this debate, this article examines how university students in Acadie take up these media discourses about the quality of the French language. In general, the students interviewed regarded the French language as inherently rule-bound and structured, in contrast to English, which many held to be comparatively without rules, even easygoing. The author suggests that this particular view has developed in part because of exposure to discussion over the quality of French in Acadie, and that any attempt to improve what is perceived as the poor quality of French in Acadie cannot ignore the very terms in which it portrays the French language. These figurations become part of the linguistic ideologies of young French speakers in Acadie and potentially feed into the very state of affairs that commentators lament.

Maisa: The Chamoru Girl Who Saves Guåhan dir. by Michael Q Ceballos

Reviewed by: Maisa: The Chamoru Girl Who Saves Guåhan dir. by Michael Q Ceballos Kenneth Gofigan Kuper Maisa: The Chamoru Girl Who Saves Guåhan. Feature film, 36 minutes, dvd, color, 2015. Directed by Michael Q Ceballos; distributed by Guam Department of Education and Twiddle Productions Inc, Honolulu. Language: Chamorro. For more information, see http://maisa.twiddleproductions.com/index.html "Tåta, malago' yu' umegga' Maisa!" is one of the most ubiquitous phrases one hears in my household. Translated into English, what my two-year-old daughter is enthusiastically saying is "Daddy, I want to watch Maisa!" Maisa: The Chamoru Girl Who Saves Guåhan was created from a brilliant collaboration between the Chamorro Studies Division of the Guam Department of Education and [End Page 384] Twiddle Productions in Honolulu and is the first animated film to use Fino' Chamoru, the indigenous language of the Chamorro people of the Mariana Islands, as its primary language. Released in December 2015, the film retells the important Chamorro story of "I Famalao'an Ni Gumoggue Iya Guåhan" (The Women Who Saved Guåhan). In this cherished story of my people, while bathing in the waters of the village of Hagåtña, the women find a flower that is normally found only in another part of the island. This leads to the discovery of a giant fish completely devouring the island. With worried minds and brave hearts, i lalåhi (the men) gather their spears and sail into the ocean blue to kill this dångkolo' na guihan (giant fish). Unfortunately, their valiant attempt fails. With the complete destruction of the island at stake, i famalao'an gather their collective tiningo' (knowledge) and decide to trap the fish by weaving their long, dark hair into the sturdiest net one could find in Oceania. After a long struggle, the women succeed in trapping the fish, ultimately saving the island from further destruction. With breathtaking visuals and beautiful dialogue, Maisa succeeds in retelling this beloved story of i minatatnganñiha i famalao'an (female bravery). One brilliant change they made to the story was in their creation of the main character, a young Chamorro girl named Maisa who serves as the focal point through which the audience experiences the story's flow. The film Maisa is groundbreaking and a milestone of Chamorro history for a multitude of reasons. One of the most important reasons is the way it effectively breaks down the prevalent linguistic ideologies attached to the language. To speak frankly, the Cha morro language is currently in a state of crisis. According to the 2010 US Government census, only 16 percent of Guåhan's 165,000 population speaks the language, while 44 percent of households on the island reported being monolingual in English. Even more frightening is a statistic cited in a 2010 Chamorro language assessment survey conducted by the Chamorro nonprofit Pa'a Taotao Tåno': only 4 percent of Chamorro speakers in Guåhan are under the age of thirty. These statistics show that intergenerational transmission is the main challenge to language retention in Guåhan, meaning those that know the language are not passing it down to their children. Combined with this lack of transmission is the belief that the language cannot handle every aspect of our lives. Many people in Guåhan have accepted that Chamorro has social boundaries. It can be used in the church, on the ranch, in jokes/slang, among the elders, in the southern part of the island, and in the northern islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, but outside of that, there is a belief that the Chamorro language does not belong; English has been naturalized as the primary language choice in Guåhan. This territorialization of the language to particular social realms has greatly halted the language's perpetuation. Maisa offers a glimmer of hope for our language's perpetuation during this difficult period. Maisa refuses to accept this premise of language erasure and boldly states that a future of language [End Page 385] revitalization is not beyond our reach. Its mere existence shows us that tåya' chi-ña i fino' Chamoru (there are no limits...

Celestina según su lenguaje by Raúl Álvarez Moreno

Reviewed by: Celestina según su lenguaje by Raúl Álvarez Moreno Luis F. López González Álvarez Moreno, Raúl. Celestina según su lenguaje. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 2015. 472 pages. 978-84-96045-95-8 Fernando de Rojas's masterpiece, Celestina, has been scrutinized from nearly every possible angle. Raúl Álvarez Moreno's monograph, Celestina según su lenguaje, adds yet another dimension of epistemological inquiry to Rojas's work. Álvarez's overarching thesis is that readers have to read and interpret Celestina on the premise of its language as it emerges from the characters' dialogue. Álvarez's title, Celestina según su lenguaje, is a reference to Marcel Bataillon's La Célestine selon Fernando de Rojas. In his monograph, Bataillon argues that Celestina has to be interpreted as a moral work that Rojas wrote to warn his readership against the deception of "falsos sirvientes / y malas mugeres". Bataillon bolsters his argument with two problematic premises, both of which Álvarez forcefully refutes. As the title suggests, Bataillon presupposes a single author, whose name is Fernando de Rojas. Nevertheless, sole authorship has been a point of contention among Celestina scholarship for centuries. As Álvarez notes, some scholars, including Joseph T. Snow, José Luis Canet, and Ottavio di Camillo, question the idea that Rojas participated in the composition of Celestina at all (360). Bataillon also relies on the dubious hermeneutics of authorial intentionality, which may lead to deterministic interpretations of the work. Álvarez's monograph, however, goes beyond challenging Bataillon's interpretations. He explores the preponderant role language plays in Rojas's construction of characters, places, and time through the literary mechanism of dialogue. To follow Álvarez's argument, the reader has to understand three main concepts around which his work gravitates: surrogacionismo, contractualismo, and instrumentalismo. Surrogationism argues that words are merely surrogates or substitutes for other things (33). Contractualism posits that the meaning of words emerges from a tacit agreement or contract between members of a speaking community, which is enhanced by customs. Compared to surrogationism, contractualism bestows more agency on speakers. Under instrumentalism, a community of speakers creates language according to its changing needs within a social, individual or communicative situation. In this theory, "las palabras serían primero y ante todo instrumentos para alcanzar objetivos comunicativos [End Page 207] humanos más que para estar por las cosas o los conceptos de las mismas, y el lenguaje se constituiría en algo práctico que serviría principalmente para crear y hacer cosas" (35, original emphasis). Álvarez argues that from these three linguistic theories, Rojas relies on the deployment of instrumentalist discourses to fashion his work (17), while he also implements a "retórica total" that emphasizes the primacy of words (verba) over things (res) as constitutive elements of linguistic signification (175). Besides a brief introduction, in which he delineates the scope of his study and the importance of language as an epistemological locus from where conflict arises, the book has seven chapters. In Chapter 1, Álvarez notes the preeminence of a hybrid concept as the prevalent linguistic ideology throughout the Middle Ages. The author argues that "contractualismo surrogacionista" became the basis of the philosophy of language, which was linked to both epistemology and politics. The epistemological and political dimensions of language allowed social and ecclesiastic authorities to exert a rigid control over the conception and dissemination of ideas through censorship. When translating biblical texts, translators adhered to surrogationist methodologies, which advocated for the stability of the res over verba. Chapter 2 explores the limitations of language and the ways in which it fails to accomplish its objective. To substantiate his analysis, Álvarez analyzes the linguistic theories of nominalism, which entered Spain toward the end of the fifteenth century. Nominalism, however, was never unequivocally adopted as a school of thought in the Salamantine academy until 1508 (87). Álvarez, then, explores the intricate relationship between language and logic, underscoring the overarching importance that institutional entities bestowed upon language. With the epistemic field of rhetoric at the center of conflict, contractualismo and instrumentalismo enjoyed some prestige throughout the fifteenth century (124). Chapter 3 continues the same line of inquiry, stressing the linguistic tensions in Celestina. After...

Trilingual Education and Mongolian Ethnicity

Anxieties about Chinese-Mongolian-English trilingual program in Inner Mongolia reflect three linguistic ideologies, that is, the instrumental and the essentialist among Mongolian elites and the assimilationist among Han elites. Mongolian ethnicity is on trial in front of an upsurge of Chinese nationalism. Both pro and con trilingual education elites agree that the Mongolian language should be maintained, but they differ over the ways it is taught. In China, the nationwide drive to go back to “basics” has also encouraged national minorities to keep their traditional culture alive. Such surviving efforts demand a great measure of artful negotiating skills, necessary compromise, and strategic thinking. The trilingual education program in Inner Mongolia serves as a platform on which contending linguistic ideologies confront each other.

Drunkards and Singers: A Mongolian Battle of Sounds

Abstract When I conducted fieldwork among the Darhad of northern Mongolia my informants repeatedly asserted that after a good singer’s performance even the most badly intoxicated lad stands still and keeps silent. In this article, I make three points in order to explain why this claim was made. In the first one, I show that the main concern about singing performance at social gatherings is not about revealing the singer’s inner emotional realm but rather about crafting a collective feeling that has the ability to make people temporarily shed their otherness and converge. The problem with drunkards lies in the fact that they are unable to participate and even noisily impede this rite of convergence. The main reason is that they are not sufficiently detached from their own inner realm. I then put the concept of noise in context, arguing that it forms the repulsive pole of a Mongolian sonic continuum. In my last point, I stress the fact that according to Mongolian linguistic ideology, noise brings misfortune to the entire community. That is why good singers must win their battle against drunkards.

Prácticas metapragmáticas e ideologías lingüísticas en el aula. Variedades de español y gallego de jóvenes en Galicia

ResumenEn este artículo analizaremos, a través de una serie de actividades diseñadas para implementar en el aula, el modo en el que un grupo de jóvenes gallegos co-construyen el conocimiento metalingüístico y metapragmático acerca de las diferentes variedades locales del español y gallego. La exposición de su trayectoria biográfica permite que afloren diversos saberes y conocimientos metalingüísticos que los estudiantes han ido adquiriendo a lo largo de su escolarización y, además, surgen diversas categorizaciones sobre lenguas y variedades que ponen de manifiesto sus ideologías lingüísticas (Siegel, 2006. Language ideologies and education of speakers of marginalized language varieties: adopting a critical awareness approach.Language and Education(17), pp. 157–174). A través del análisis de las prácticas metalingüísticas y metapragmáticas comprobaremos cómo se reproducen las ideologías lingüísticas de estos jóvenes; por una parte, las ideologías de la institución académica y escolar; y por otra, las ideologías lingüísticas de los jóvenes presentes en el aula, en donde etiquetan, clasifican y establecen jerarquizaciones y valoraciones de su repertorio comunicativo. Finalmente, se comprueba cómo las diferentes variedades del español y del gallego actúan como índices de identidad social diferente de la reconocida en el ámbito institucional y académico, con distintos valores en el mercado lingüístico (Bourdieu, 1991.Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press.).

Czechoslovak Ruthenia's 1925 Latinization campaign as the heritage of nineteenth-century Slavism

In 1925, two newspapers, both published in Uzhhorod, advocated using the Latin alphabet in the Czechoslovak province of Ruthenia. Efforts by the Czech Agrarian party to consolidate the Republic played some role, but the plans mostly emerged from a longer tradition of Slavic thought which imagined literacy in more than one alphabet, conforming to more than one literary standardization. We trace the nineteenth-century history of Slavic linguistic ideologies from the original Panslavism of Jan Herkel, the “Slavic Reciprocity” of Jan Kollár and his successors, to the Kollárian Czechoslovakism used to legitimate the first Czechoslovak Republic. We survey Ruthenia's status within Czechoslovakia and then contrast two 1925 Latinization schemes: a proposal from Czech chauvinist František Svojše and a proposal from Rusyn journalist Viktor Barany. While Rusyns mostly remained with the Cyrillic alphabet, arguments made for and against Latinization show that nineteenth century Slavic ideals endured far into the twentieth century.

Identity, ideology, and attitude in Syrian rural child and adolescent speech

Through ethnographic investigation, this study shows that the different linguistic behavior of girls and boys in the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria is due to gendered linguistic ideologies and attitudes that are utilized in different ways to project gendered (feminine or masculine) and spatial (local or supralocal) identities. Social meanings are gleaned from the naturally occurring speech of 72 speakers aged 6–18 and 29–57 to illuminate the ideologies and attitudes that result in inter- and intra-speaker variation between and among boys and girls and highlight the importance of both the community of practice and the speech community in investigating linguistic variation. The study also highlights the growth of the children’s sociolinguistic competence and their awareness from a very young age of the ideologies and attitudes that exist in their community and their capability to build on them. The results of this awareness are highly observed in preadolescents, particularly boys.

Linguistic ideologies and the historical development of language use patterns in Jamaican music

This paper presents Jamaica as a case study of the intersections between language practice, language ideologies, and music, using a historically grounded descriptive approach spanning a period of more than three and a half centuries. It describes secular and religious Jamaican music(s) and ideologies connected to them through different periods of the country's history characterised by different social and socio-political configurations (e.g., slavery, colonial rule, Independence). These systems and the emergent socialities to which they gave rise influenced the creation of new musical genres and determined to varying extents how linguistic codes were distributed by genre, and in the lyrics themselves.

Arabicisation and the Khartoum Arabic Language Academy

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we review the historical and cultural worldliness of the Khartoum Arabic Language Academy with a focus on its linguistic ideology of operation and discursive representation. The paper has three key objectives: first, to show that Arabic language academies emerged as decolonising institutions in a context of struggle to fix the ‘image’ of Arabic through specific textual practices of representation. We inspect how the naturalising effect of the dominant institutional ideology of Arabic relies on its capacity to function through other discourses. As a second objective, we contend that since the cultural policy of Arabicisation is closely linked with institutional power and subjectivity, it dialectically contributes to the maintenance of less officially recognised linguistic resources as significant proxies in the discursive struggle for recognition. Our third objective is to compare and contrast the Khartoum Arabic Language Academy with the Higher Commission for Arabicisation in the Sudan. Our argument here is that as an effect of the contestation over what counts as ‘Arabic’, Arabicisation is always an incomplete process. Our analysis of the cultural political world of the Khartoum Arabic Language Academy draws on the insights and conceptual tools provided by historical and discourse studies.

Between ideologies and realities: Multilingual competence in a languagised world

AbstractRecent developments in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have put emphasis on the contrast between ideologies of distinct ‘languages’ and the multifaceted reality of linguistic practices. This article argues that recent usage-based reconceptualisations of the notions of competence and repertoire can help paint a more complex picture of the relationship between monolingual ‘ideologies’ and diverse linguistic ‘realities’. Drawing on data from interviews with highly proficient adult speakers of Finnish as a second language, I explore some aspects of how speakers’ competence can be understood as shaped by language use, and what role linguistic ideologies, social expectations and speakers’ environments play in this process. I conclude that, in a languagised world, the ability to keep ‘languages’ apart and to successfully display monolingual competence can be seen as part of multilingual speakers’ competence. In this way, a usage-based perspective on competence enables us to treat ‘languages’ as ideological constructs, while at the same time acknowledging their ‘real’ effects on speakers’ competence and language use.

Language ideology, space, and place-based identity formation among the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico

In this paper we explore notions of within-group language variation in a Tzotzil Maya town of Chiapas, Mexico. Integrating GIS mapping, cultural domain analysis, and ethnographic research we find that the Tzotzil of Chenalhó hold a center-diffusion model of language variation in their municipality. We show that, counter to dichotomous models of identity, people see variation between communities as continuous and use spatial distances as a proxy for estimating linguistic differences. However, contrary to our expectations, people do not estimate linguistic distances from their own community; instead, they use the presumed pre-conquest center of the larger ethnic group as a point of reference from which variation emerges. Estimations are further influenced by a notion of a linguistically homogeneous center as well as by socio-political knowledge and stereotypes. These findings suggest that spatial cognition, combined with social and historical factors, may play a pivotal role in processes of identity formation and maintenance. Linguistic ideologies inscribe both deeply buried histories as well as people's conceptualization of space and their place in it.

“We can speak we do it our way”: Linguistic ideologies in Catalan adolescents’ language biography raps

The article reports on workshops aimed at developing students’ plurilingual repertoires through language biography raps as opportunities for self-reflexivity and social critique. The workshops are part of a larger socio-educational project targeting adolescent school dropout. The audio-visual products of the workshops – raps produced by adolescents in their English, intertwined with other linguistic resources in their repertoires – are analysed for local processes of identity production and linguistic ideologies. The analysis suggests that Hip Hop, as a popular, non-institutionalised culture, allows for counter-narratives of teenagers’ plurilingualism and their everyday language experiences. The students’ raps interrogate linguistic ideologies in education as detached from popular culture and their local, urban communities. By and large, the students’ linguistic performances are non-standard, playful and linguistically fluid, contrary to the norm in mainstream educational contexts. The Hip Hop based intervention thus provided a space for transgression from traditional notions of language education compatible with Critical Hip Hop Language Pedagogies (CHHLP) and pedagogies of plurilingualism.

Grindr casual hook-ups as interactional achievements

One pervasive use of the Grindr mobile application is the initiation and accomplishment of pseudonymous sexual encounters between gay strangers based on location awareness. Not only are such encounters oriented towards quasi-immediate sexual gratification, but they are collaboratively done so as to preclude repeat encounters and relational development, with the protagonists supposedly left unaffected emotionally, relationally and socially by their meeting. This creates a rather special – and analytically interesting – interactional dilemma when Grindr users initiate a social contact with potential partners, usually through the chat function integrated into the mobile app. This article describes the way Grindr users have developed a particular ‘linguistic ideology’, which casts ordinary conversation as an interactional activity that is performed between (potential) friends and enables relational development. As such, it is unsuitable for one-time sexual encounters, the production of which is a distinctive and accountable interactional accomplishment. This article analyzes the special interactional practices based on profile-matching sequences which Grindr users have developed to circumvent the relational affordances of electronic conversation. These practices constitute Grindr users as a particular form of speech community, adjusted both to their orientation towards initiating ‘purely’ sexual encounters and to the socio-material design of the Grindr mobile application.

MOBILITY AND DISCOURSE CIRCULATION IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD: THE TURN OF THE REFERENTIAL SCREW

In this paper I call into question the referential paradigm, drawing on the conceptual framework developed by contemporary Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics. I call for the urgent problematization of the so-called referential metaphysics while arguing that constructs such as entextualization and indexicality can shake the strong representational tradition in the field of language studies – a tradition sustained by an infectious modernist linguistic ideology and authoritarian and monist models of reality. The latter have been losing ground, as an explanatory apparatus, amidst the intense mobility and complexity of globalization processes which require new theoretical-analytical tools. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Castelanismos e galeguismos. A súa relación co estándar

No proceso de estandarización do galego, o recoñecemento e substitución dos castelanismos acadou gran relevancia, tanto desde a investigación lingüística, como nos discursos de difusión e transmisión do estándar e tamén entre os propios falantes. Neste artigo poñemos de relevo o que consideramos unha sobrevaloración deste fenómeno, sobre todo na súa visión reducionista aos castelanismos de tipo léxico. Precisamente a presenza destes caracteriza unha variedade do galego que os falantes denominan "castrapo", coa que se identifica unha parte importante dos galegofalantes, a pesar de ser sancionada e cualificada como "mal galego" no discurso público. Todo isto sen esquecermos a outra cara da moeda, os galeguismos no castelán de Galicia, un fenómeno que, non obstante, atraeu moita menos atención, tanto por parte dos falantes como dos lingüistas. Levamos a cabo polo tanto unha análise destes dous tipos de fenómenos, castelanismos e galeguismos, desde a perspectiva dos falantes, pero tamén na literatura especializada. O fin último radica en descubrir as ideoloxías lingüísticas que se agochan baixo estes discursos e terminoloxía.

Indeterminate Futures and Language Acquisition Practices among Temporary and Permanent Immigrant Families

In-depth investigation of permanent and temporary families’ daily educational activities in diverse settings—home and their communities (e.g., school, after-school, playground, heritage language school, church)—creates a picture of daily bilingual discourses, literacy practices, and socio-cultural influences. As a part of an ethnographic longitudinal seven-year study, the study presented in this paper focused on two immigrant families’ transnational biliteracy practices as they relate to identity transformation, linguistic ideology, and socio-cultural influences on home/heritage language/literacy retention and development. These factors appear likely to impact heritage language retention and acquisition as they relate to U.S. immigrant families’ indeterminate residency futures. Thus, this study focused on socially-shaped and culturally-influenced bilingual and biliteracy development and the vector of residential indeterminacy related to the challenges of heritage language and literacy maintenance and development of two immigrant children and their families. Different types of immigration patterns and families’ decision making changes about their future residency affect young language learners’ ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity as they are embedded in their daily bilingual and biliteracy practices. Literacy researchers and educators can attend to young diverse learners’ linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds as they relate to each family’s own story of residential history as well as determinate or indeterminate residency futures.

Linguistic Diversity and Ideologies among the Catholic Minority in Mandate Palestine. Fear of Confusion or a Powerful Tool?

Palestinian Catholics have always played a major role in the Palestinian political, cultural and educational systems, with an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Instrumentalized by France during and even after her Protectorate of the Christians (1924), more visible for the Europeans during the growth of European institutions in the Holy Land and the beginning of an international Christian network, Catholic Palestinians (mainly Latin and Melkite) favoured multilingualism, but at the same time felt trapped between different trends that influenced linguistic ideologies and practices. They faced the centralizing Catholic interests of Rome (who first favoured French and Italian, but soon after the Mandate mostly Arabic); the national interests of Catholic European powers present in the Holy Land favouring their own languages (French, German through the German Catholics and the Austrians, and English through the British Catholics); and the Arabization promoted by the Melkite community.The present article aims to analyse the linguistic choices of the Catholic community, via its educational system, by observing the process through which a complex local reality has been simplified by colonial powers, to tackle identity and conflict through language.