Arab(ic) Language Anxiety: Tracing a “Condition”

The essay explores Arab(ic) language anxiety in modern discourse on the language. The conceptual starting point is the distinction between the instrumental and symbolic roles of language in society. The essay further distinguishes between language fears and language anxieties, linking the former to the instrumental role of the language and anxiety proper to its symbolic role. These distinctions are further related to corpus planning and status planning in language policy research to create a web of interrelated concepts that, while recognized as conceptually autonomous, are difficult to sharply separate from each other in practice. To do this, the essay identifies a number of domains from which data on language anxiety can be culled and the terms and metaphorics that are employed in discussing these data in a number of domains. The essay makes two further observations. First, language anxiety is a universal phenomenon. To make this point, the essay refers to language anxiety in English and French. Second, recent language-teaching reforms in the Arabic-speaking world have not succeeded partly because they offer instrumental, corpus-based solutions to symbolic and status-linked concerns.