Language as a lecture topic

Professor Yasir Suleiman, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Sa’id, gave a lecture Monday night titled “Language, Conflict and Inter-cultural (Mis)Communication” to a crowded audience in the Indiana Memorial Union Maple Room.

Suleiman is a professor of Modern Arabic Studies, a Fellow of King’s College and a professor at University of Cambridge.

Cigdem Balim, faculty member of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, introduced Suleiman.

“I think of studying language as the underdog, and I consider myself an underdog so I thought, ‘Why not put two underdogs together?’” Suleiman said.

He said we not only need politicians talking about conflicts, but also linguists.

Suleiman talked about the Great Hyphen Debate, a conflict between using the name Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia.

“If you can track names, you can actually track many ideological movements in societies,” he said.

Following Sept. 11, the presence of Arabic in the U.S. seemed to cause fear, he said.

“When fear takes hold and turns into phobia, rational responses may be stopped,” he said.

Suleiman discussed language as a national identity.

“There is a lot of anxiety about language between Middle Eastern peoples also,” he said. “But there is also anxiety about language in France and America.”

Suleiman quoted Amin Maalouf’s “On Identity” when he said, “France herself had global ambitions as regards language; she was the first to suffer on account of the extraordinary rise of English.”

The third limitation of language, Suleiman said, is how it reflects reality.

“The saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’ does not reflect the meaning of the words,” he said. “Speaking Arabic, in the beginning, was thought of as an ethical act.”

Suleiman showed a slideshow of road signs in Jerusalem to show how language conflicts appear in common places. On a certain road sign, Arabic and English were on the original plaque and then Hebrew was added later. That sign was replaced by a new sign including all three languages.

“We need to track conflict between cultures through the symbolic and instrumentality of language,” he said.