Introduction

The guiding principle behind this volume is the enduring significance of language in collective identity conceptualization, whether in ethnic or national terms, in the Greater Middle East, which is taken here to encompass the Middle East proper, North Africa and the ex-Soviet Muslim republics in Central Asia and the Caucusus (cf. Chapter 8). In two studies the Middle East is conceived in linguistic, not geographical, terms to include two immigrant communities in London (cf. Chapter 7) and an indigenous one in Bulgaria (cf. Chapter 6). The results of these two studies confirm the trends in the Greater Middle East, especially the observation that the symbolic function of language is at least as important as its communicative role in signalling collective identity boundaries, both in terms of inclusion and exclusion (cf. Fishman, 1977; Ross 1979). The significance of language as a symbolic attribute, at home or abroad, is therefore as pertinent from our present perspective as its functional importance as a communicative characteristic in its indigenous environment.