# data[].attributes.body
Professor Crystal confirmed what we were all trying to guess: it is impossible to gauge how many people speak English. Firstly, because it is impossible to keep worldwide statistics; and secondly, because it is extremely difficult to define what exactly ‘English speaker’ means

David also points to the Internet as bringing not one set of changes but many style changes. The changes blogging brings to language are different than the changes texting brings to language, for example. David finds that English has become expressively richer because of the Internet.  But the changes to spoken language are minor style changes, not significant changes.

# data[].attributes.body
(https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-of-Palestinian-Multilingualism-Speaking-for-Citizenship/Hawker/p/book/9781138563315#)

The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.  Nancy Hawker (DPhil University of Oxford 2013) has finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, UK. She is a research fellow at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Arabic-speakers who also know Hebrew resort to a range of communicative strategies…

# data[].attributes.body
In The politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking of Citizenship, Nancy Hawker provided a discursive overview of multilingualism where Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, as speakers of a marginalized and contained mother tongue, through their multilingualism, manage to engage in the political system of Israel, maintain their Arabic identity on different contexts, and create spaces to practice Arabic.

# data[].attributes.body
Hawker preluded key concepts, theories and schools of thought to build a quintessential epitome to ground the sociolinguistic aspects of her book. Vividly and accurately, she harnessed and managed the social context to provide a rich portion of political and social life with excerpts and records from her field research to convey the complexity and dynamism in Israel.

# data[].attributes.body
Chapter 1 elaborates on the different norms and practices that suppress Arabic, and on the double standards in treating Arabic vs. Hebrew on different political platforms, while mentioning the limitation of the formal inclusion of what the author calls ‘the diversity’ of Palestinians and other Arabs. The conceptual base of the Palestinian political sociology centering around the concept of one-nation-one language, its direct and indirect applications in the construction and maintenance of Arab identity are yardsticks of this diversity.

# data[].attributes.body
Chapter 2 observes how bilinguals can control or struggle between two lingual variables/linguistic variants of the “insider-Arabic” and “outsider-Hebrew”, which analogously are not clear-cut in daily or political life. Here, the author discusses a major and tacit principle that she calls “the principle of Arabic avoidance in ‘mixed’ company”, which controls selecting the preferable language in line with the context for each sociolinguistic variability.

# data[].attributes.body
Chapter 4 the author examines, “Anxious attitudes, confident practices” of the multilingual identity which have been commercialized over the course of time. Thus, she introduces us to a real-time issue of language attitudes in late capitalism. These issues confidently mobilize multilingualism as a resource and a solution vs. explicit language attitudes that express anxieties towards the Arabic situation. The former revolves around how the expressed ideologies betray monolingual anxieties towards bilingual language contact, and how different practices are confidently displayed in alignment with multilingual aspirations. Expressions of anxieties, on the other hand, are related to multilingualism’s fluctuations between the ideological language purist attitudes towards reinforcing Arabic caused by late capitalism ambivalence and real-life multilingual practices.

# data[].attributes.body
Having established a sound base for reviewing the key organizing principles of politicized social life in Israel, Hawker expertly weaves in the coverage of game-changing events and incidents in the form of field research to retrieve first-hand data. Her comprehensive and representative records have been analyzed discursively even with attention paid to different cultural-and language-specific demeanor. For instance, to facilitate English reading comprehension, the author provides a localized translation of Ahmad Tibi’s name, (The original sentence translates literally as: This alif for Ahmad, I want to put hamza on it. For an English reader, the author renders it as follows: this T in Tibi, I want to cross it properly.) This style of writing is seamless and simple without a hint of self-indulgence admitting that Hawker references her own previous works as relevant, but these are never allowed to distort the overview she wants the readers to contemplate on.

# data[].attributes.body
Hawker’s work is “the institutional suppression of Arabic and reactions to that suppression, the principle of Arabic avoidance in ‘mixed’ company, and the sociolinguistic practices of recourse to multilingual repertoires when agentic discursive space is created” . For example, that the democratic Israel has been practicing an institutional suppression of Arabic since its existence, with emerging challenges to these policies started from 2010 by multilingual Palestinians.

The author conveys essential settings for all incidents of the book to prepare the reader for the rather special contexts of each analyzed record. These include the different phases of Arabic since 1950s including ‘the Arabic silence’ and ‘Arabic avoidance’, even conducting her own experiments on Arabic language perception and avoidance. Throughout her work, she also draws on different resources to provide a comparison between various case studies and a currently topical issue. Hawker’s work provides an external and neutral lens of observation to the complicated and challenging political-sociolinguistic reality of Arabic in Israel for the multilingual Palestinians.