Linguistic Landscape in Kunuz Nubian Tourist Villages: Language Policy and Commodification of Minority Languages in Egypt

This study investigates the visibility of Mattokki, a Nubian ethnolinguistic minority, compared to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) displayed on private and public place signage as symbols of the construction of linguistic landscape (LL) in two Kunuz Nubian tourist villages: Gharb Suhail and Aswan Island. Following the conceptual framework of Ben-Rafael et al. (2006), the bottom-up and top-down LL signs are explored from political and socioeconomic perspectives. Drawing on Cenoz and Gorter’s taxonomy of the non-market values of linguistic diversity in the LL (2009), the researcher identifies the types of values attached to the non-official and official place signs in Gharb Suhail and Aswan Island. A qualitative-descriptive analysis is conducted to interpret the degree of visibility of Mattokki and MSA on place signs in the LL of private and public localities to account for language policies and benefit considerations standing behind the high or low visibility of Mattokki and MSA in the data. The findings have shown that Mattokki is highly visible in the LL of tourist localities in both villages for commercial-benefit considerations and symbolic functions related to preserving Nubians’ ethnocultural identity. The study has also revealed that commodification of Mattokki in the LL of non-official localities indirectly contributes to its revitalization and reduces the potential of ranking this language as an endangered variety. Whereas Mattokki is entirely absent in the LL of official localities in both villages due to the priority, legality, officiality, and dominant status of MSA explicitly declared by the Egyptian language policy (LP) and manifested by linguistic practices. Besides, the results give grounds for the presence of English on the bottom-up LL signs by referring to the salience of English as a linguistic aspect of globalization and a referential means of communicating information.