ABSTRACT
Susan Gal (1998, p. 323) states: “Ideologies that appear to be about language, when carefully reread, are revealed to be coded stories about political, religious, or scientific conflicts.” Arabic has been in the forefront of political, cultural, and religious debates in the Middle East (see Suleiman & Lucas, 2012). Thus, like many other language contexts, the debate about Arabic has turned into a second-order indexicality expression (Silverstein, 1998). Guided by the Peircean model (1974), Silverstein (1998, p. 128) suggests that pre-ideological language use (which constitutes a first-order indexicality), can turn to post-ideological of the second-order indexicality when the users become self-conscious, self-reflexive, and typify the expression by associating it with a group. I take language ideology in the anthropological sense of “language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein, 1979, p. 193).
