Linguistic inclusion and exclusion on Abu Dhabi coronavirus signage

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has cast a spotlight on inequalities across many sectors of society around the globe.Clear communication in a crisis is vital, and such a task can be made more challenging in multilingual contexts.The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is characterized by both cultural and linguistic diversity, with almost 90% of the population being transnational workers who collectively speak over 100 languages (UAE Fact Sheet, 2019).Labour migration in the UAE follows a 'dual employment structure' (Malecki & Ewers, 2007) of unskilled/ low skilled labourers juxtaposed with 'professional transients' (Castells, 2000).The former group is much larger in number and tends to include workers from South and Southeast Asia, resulting in the four largest foreign communities in the UAE being Indians (2,600,000), Pakistanis (1,200,000), Bangladeshis (700,000), and Filipinos (525,530) (The Media Lab, 2019).The latter group, in contrast, tend to originate mainly from neighbouring Arab countries, Asia, Europe, and North America.The number of expatriates from inner-circle English-speaking countries (Kachru, 1992) is comparatively high globally, with 28,760 from the UK and 15,390 from the US (UAE Population & Demographics, 2020).In addition, a wave of approximately 13,000 Koreans recently relocated to the UAE (Amed, 2019), due in part to growing business connections.Due to such diversity, commonly spoken languages in the UAE, in addition to Arabic and English, include Hindi, Farsi, Urdu, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Tagalog, and Korean, amongst many others.Despite the UAE's multilingual population, not all languages are 'textually present' (Ahmed, 2021) in the linguistic landscape.Textual visibility is heavily skewed in favour of the official language, Arabic, and the nation's de facto lingua franca, English.This is particularly apparent on public signage, where it is rare to see third languages (Ahmed, 2021;Hopkyns & van den Hoven, 2021).As a result, minority languages and dialects remain 'linguistic outsiders' (Smakman & Heinrich, 2018, p. 44) in public spaces.An exception to the monopoly of Arabic and English on signage can be found in strategic settings where particular speech communities are predominant, warranting the display of a third language.For example, Piller (2018) found that South Asian languages were prominent on signage in Dubai money exchange booths, where many migrant workers gather to send remittances back home to their

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