Writing between the Lines: The Politics of Language in Pre- and Post-Ottoman Lebanon

The fin de siècle Ottoman world was a multilingual landscape that included Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, an array of other minority languages, as well as Russian, French and English. As the empire entered unchartered waters in the early nineteenth century, when reformist and nationalist rumblings were on the rise, the question of language became one of political importance to the Ottoman state, reformists, regional provincial elites, and foreign powers stationed in the empire. Influencing which language was dominant became a tool to guide the empire’s uncertain future into contesting directions.

This paper takes Lebanon as a case study for the way in which language was rendered political during the transition between the Ottoman and post-imperial periods. In the latter period, language continued to be used politically for state-building purposes in Lebanon. For example, bilingualism, which included both French and Arabic, was promoted by Christian elites as it bolstered a Christian Lebanese identity, whilst only Arabic was the focus for Arab nationalists, as monolingualism would lead to a more monocultural and standard notion of Lebanon as an Arab nation with Arabic citizens.

However, another aspect of post-Ottoman Lebanon’s linguistic makeup, often overlooked in scholarship, is polyglossia, or language mixing. Allocating importance to polyglossia in Lebanon’s state-building history brings to light an alternative narrative to a static formation of nationalist identities. Using newspapers and sources of cultural production, this paper connects the politics of language from the Ottoman to the post-Ottoman period. Identifying a continuous trend in polyglossia between these periods shows that there was less of a linguistic rupture between the imperial and state-building periods. The multilingual landscape of the Ottoman period was not, therefore, something that vanished with state-building and the nationalist projects of the Lebanese elites, but retained at the core of everyday life and cultural production.