Linguistic landscaping the discourse of neoliberalism and globalisation in Dubai’s posh JBR and Dubai Marina areas: Official policy, translation, juggernaut of English, ‘fake’ Arabic

Previously under the colonial influence of the British empire and now a global business hub in the middle east, Dubai in the UAE represents a salient case of micro-cosmopolitanism and superdiversity with immigrants and temporary workers outnumbering the local Arabic-speaking Emiratis. Framed within a globalised, post-colonial and neoliberal context, this linguistic landscape (LL) study examines the (multi)lingual and translation practices in Dubai. To this end, a corpus of authentic LL data were collected in Dubai’s two popular commercialised, affluent and upmarket areas: (1) Jumeirah Beach Residence (JBR) and (2) Dubai Marina. The empirical study points to an emerging phenomenon involving the ubiquitous presence of English transliterated into the Arabic script on Dubai’s LL. That is, what appears to be inscrutable information written in the Arabic script is often not authentic Arabic but phonetic transliterations from English (pseudo Arabic in disguise). Despite the common belief, expectation and policy that sees Arabic and English as two distant and diametrically different languages and ‘two solitudes’ or ‘two pure forms’, this interdisciplinary study highlights how the linguistic/translation practices on the ground (e.g. bottom-up signage) tell a different story from the top-down policy. Such prevalent use of transliteration and the privileging of English sounds (as opposed to authentic and pure Arabic) is fascinating. The more decorative, symbolic and aesthetic use of Arabic seemingly blurs the boundary between named languages in a purist sense, begging the question what Arabic and English are in the twenty-first century. Such linguistic creativity and translation practices in multilingual Dubai are discussed against a backdrop of globalisation, neoliberalism and the juggernaut of English.