The diffusion of Arabic language academies (ALAs) in the twentiethcentury Arabic-speaking world is a linguistic-cum-sociopolitical phenomenon.‘Arabic language academy’ (majmaʿ al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya) is used here as a generic term for all official consultative bodies specialising, exclusively or partially, in preserving, regulating, promoting and modernising the Arabic language in individual Arab states or the Arabic-speaking world. These duties are often considered as state-led language planning and language policy-making, of which the evaluation concerns whether ALAs succeed in affecting the actual status and use of language to serve intra-state (e.g. state building and nation formation) and inter-state (e.g. decolonisation and regional competition) agendas. This understanding suggests a direct, unmediated, to some extent mechanical causality, premising that top-down language change will induce anticipated sociopolitical change. The actual situation is more complicated. The causality, for the most part as in the case of ALAs, is mediated. It is mediated through ideology-driven and discursively realised language symbolism that projects sociopolitical concerns onto language and uses the latter as a proxy to tackle the former. It follows that ALAs are not just authoritative language planners but also purveyors of language symbolism. This symbolism is framed by a role lodged in the mission and orientation of ALAs. The formation, evolvement and routinisation of the role is conditioned by the sociopolitical circumstances of the Arabic-speaking world. This chapter adopts four perspectives – pan-Arab, LPLP, symbolic and discursive – to reveal and explain this complicated entanglement between the linguistic and sociopolitical dimensions of the ALA phenomenon.

The Arabic Language Academy Phenomenon Is Pan-Arab

The ALA phenomenon is pan-Arab because it involves and affects the whole Arabic-speaking world. The foundation of ALAs could be seen as the diffusion of an institutional model in the Arabic-speaking world. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there were sporadic calls for and experiments in ALAs modelled on the Académie française, mainly in Egypt (Chejne 1969: 104; Ḍayf 1984: 19–20; al-Ḥamzāwī 1988: 36–41; Fāyid 2002: 91–2; Sawaie 2007: 634). Although all the precursors of ALAs failed to persist, the ALA as an institutional model became well known. The first ALA, the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya bi-Dimashq), was established in 1919. Since then, a number of ALAs have been founded on both state and crossstate levels, as shown in Table 2.1.