ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a few ways in which the multilingual voice has been commercialised. The confident performance of multilingualism by a certain class, generation, and ethnic-national group of speakers is contrasted with language-purist anxieties, understood as reflective of political unease. The attitudes to multilingualism are therefore understandably anxious. Late capitalism repackages language skills as economic assets for the service and knowledge economies. The linguistic offerings of late capitalism are ambivalent, and the ambivalence causes anxieties expressed as a reinforcement of language purist positions. The language material shows that Zoabi used Hebrew borrowings for several distinct pragmatic functions and ‘double-voiced’ stances towards institutions of power. The Hebrew hegemony on institutional stages is challenged by strategies of increased audibility, and the principle of Arabic avoidance in ‘mixed’ company is skirted around with signposting, and justifications in performances of the liberal vision that is to supersede the ethnorepublican structure that has contained Arabic in ethnic-group-insider communication.
