Colonial Vocabularies – Teaching and Learning Arabic, 1870–1970

Language teaching and learning were crucial to Europeans’ colonial, national, and individual enterprises in the Levant, and in these processes, “Oriental language teachers” – as they were termed prior to the Second World War – were fundamental. European state nationalisms influenced and increasingly competed with each other by promoting their languages and cultures abroad, by means of both private and governmental actors. At the same time, learning Arabic became more prominent around the Mediterranean. The first half of the twentieth century corresponded with the emergence of new media; language was thought of as a cultural product to be exported into new cultural spaces. However, many blind spots remain in the history of linguistic thought and practices, including the forgotten and neglected voices of those involved in learning and teaching Arabic. This volume aims to revisit aspects of this linguistic encounter, including its vision, profile, priorities, trajectories, and practices. A discussion of Arabic teaching across a wide geographical and temporal range - Engaging case studies which add intriguing detail and colour to historical study - Siting of language study within highly topical colonial and postcolonial contexts and debates.

Sarah Irving is Lecturer at Staffordshire University, PI of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and Editor-in-chief of Contemporary Levant (Francis & Taylor). Her PhD, at the University of Edinburgh, focused on knowledge creation amongst a small group of Palestinian Christians during the Mandate period, and her subsequent research has primarily concerned the role of local labourers, especially women, in archaeology in Late Ottoman Palestine. She has taught at King’s College London and Edge Hill University and a member of CrossRoads (Leiden University). She is the author of a number of scholarly articles on the uses and operation of history and archaeology in Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and on contemporary Arabic literature.

Karène Sanchez Summerer is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern studies at Groningen University, specializing in a relational cultural and social history of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and its communities. She has published on multilingualism and language policy in Palestine during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods. Her last publications include ‘Unsilencing Palestine 1922-1923. Hundred years after Frank Scholten’s visit to the Holy Land, Contemporary Levant, 2024; ‘Orthodoxy and solidarity: Niqula Khoury’s journey to the League of Nations’ (with S. Irving) in ‘Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause. The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods, edited by Erik Freas, Routledge, 2024.

Rachel Mairs is Professor of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. She works on ancient and nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century multilingualism in the Middle East, with a particular interest in interpreters. Her books include The Graeco-Bactrian World (ed. 2021), The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014), Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters (with Maya Muratov, 2015) and From Khartoum to Jerusalem: The Dragoman Solomon Negima and his Clients (2016). Her monograph on the history of phrasebooks for colloquial Arabic and their authors, Arabic Dialogues, has recently come out with University College London Press (2024).

Lucia Admiraal is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Groningen University. She specializes in modern Arab intellectual history and literature. Her publications include ‘Celebrating Maimonides in Cairo (1935): Jewish historiography, Islamic philosophy and the nahda’, Contemporary Levant, 2023. Her monograph, Confronting Fascism in the Arabic Jewish Press. Intellectual Debates and Entangled Loyalties, 1933-1948, was published in 2024 by I.B. Tauris.