The Routledge Handbook of Arabic and Identity

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic and Identity offers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of studies that relate the Arabic language in its entirety to identity. This handbook offers new trajectories in understanding language and identity more generally and Arabic and identity in particular.

Split into three parts, covering ‘Identity and Variation’, ‘Identity and Politics’ and ‘Identity Globalisation and Diversity’, it is the first of its kind to offer such a perspective on identity, linking the social world to identity construction and including issues pertaining to our current political and social context, including Arabic in the diaspora, Arabic as a minority language, pidgin and creoles, Arabic in the global age, Arabic and new media, Arabic and political discourse.

Scholars and students will find essential theories and methods that relate language to identity in this handbook. It is particularly of interest to scholars and students whose work is related to the Arab world, political science, modern political thought, Islam and social sciences including: general linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology, literature media studies and Islamic studies.

Reem Bassiouney is a professor (and chair) at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She has eight linguistics books to her name. She is the author of Functions of Code-Switching in Egypt (2006), Language and Identity in Modern Egypt (2014) and Arabic Sociolinguistics (2009; second edition 2020). Her edited volumes include The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (co-editor with Benmamoun) and Identity and Dialect Performance (2017). She is also the editor and founder of the Routledge Studies in Language and Identity series. Bassiouney is also an award-winning novelist.

Keith Walters is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA. During his career, he also held positions in the English Department at the Ohio State University and the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas–Austin. He has taught English as an additional language in the US, Tunisia, Guinea and the West Bank and helped train teachers in those countries, Morocco, Egypt and Vietnam. His research interests include codeswitching, diglossic switching, language ideologies, and language and nationalism as well as language and the law. An award-winning teacher, Walters is co-author of two widely used composition textbooks, Everything’s an Argument (8th edn) and Everyone’s an Author (3rd edn).