Linguistic Dissent on Jordanian Radio: Implicature and Stance as Ambiguous Subversion

This paper examines the mobilisation of linguistic ideologies as a form of dissent from dominant discourses of identity in contemporary Middle Eastern media. As part of my broader doctoral research on non-government Jordanian radio today, it takes a linguistical anthropological perspective focused on the notion of indexicality: the non-referential meanings that are invoked contingently in language use, and thus articulate links to broader social and cultural ideologies, including stereotypes of identity categories such as gender and geographic origins.I examine two case studies in which speakers problematise and reframe such stereotypes. The first involves the indexical mechanism of implicature, whereby a talk show caller mounts a challenge to dominant discourses of urban linguistic refinement through the ironic use of a ‘sanitised’ pronunciation of a local Jordanian dish (ča‘āčīl / ka‘ākīl). The second, from a programme in honour of a Jordanian pilot executed by the Islamic State (IS) in Syria, exhibits the performance of an evaluative stance towards Jordanian military activity as a form of patriotic nationalism, through the use of the [g] pronunciation of the sound /q/ (qāf) by a female broadcaster – a usage that defies gendered linguistic norms Jordanian radio, which require female speakers to use the [ʔ] (glottal stop) pronunciation instead.While these contingent uses of implicature and stance form challenges to certain dominant discourses, they are nevertheless ambiguous in that they draw on other problematic ideologies, including localist linguistic ‘authenticity’ and patriotic Jordanian nationalism. Thus, while details of language use provide important potential for dissent, this paper also problematises this potential – asking whether (1) subversive linguistic practices always need to draw on other dominant discourses in order to be meaningful, and (2) whether such references necessarily make dissent compromised or illegitimate.