Episode 83 - Sarah Hopkyns and English in the Gulf

Welcome to episode 83 of Lexis, another student-led episode, which this time features Oli, an A Level student at the Dubai British School interviewing Dr Sarah Hopkyns, with some help from Dan. Sarah is a Lecturer in TESOL and International Education at the University of St Andrews, Lecturer (Teaching) in Intercultural Communication at the Institute of Education, UCL and Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

We talk about: 

• What we mean by ‘The Gulf’ and the Gulf nations

• What makes them interesting from a linguistic point of view

• The types of English spoken in the Gulf and whether we can talk about ‘Gulf English’

• The role of Arabic in the region

• Translanguaging, multilingualism and reconceptualising how we think about doing language in the world

• Translingual practice as a real world manifestation of how people use language resources to communicate

• Attitudes to English use and English as a threat to local language and identity

You can find Sarah’s university page here: https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/persons/sarah-hopkyns/ 

Her ResearchGate profile is here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah-Hopkyns 

We discuss some of the following:

Nizar Habash and David Palfreyman’s ZAEBUC corpus of Arabic-English: https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.9/ 

‘The Pact We Made’ by Layla AlAmmar https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-pact-we-made-layla-alammar/82be48b15ed150fc 

Blair Fussell’s 2011 work based on ‘Gulf English’: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231752461_The_local_flavour_of_English_in_the_Gulf 

Thanks to Oli and his teacher, Sumayya Kazi for making this episode happen and for all the work put into it. 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys