Does qatar need a declared language policy? A virtual ethnography perspective

Abstract

Is there a language question in Qatar's diverse society? This study raises this question and suggests that there may be more than one. Through a virtual ethnography as a research method, this study investigates how the Qatari community responds to, accepts, rejects, negotiates and challenges the top-down flow of the State's language planning activities. Scholarly endeavors to modernize ethnography beyond the tradition of fieldwork as a geographically defined locality with clear boundaries, have led to the establishment of a rapidly growing body of research that shifted ethnographic inquiry from material spaces to the cyberspace. Through exploiting Twitter as a virtual ethnographic field, this paper elucidates how the Qatari community's engagement with and awareness in negotiating and challenging the state's language planning activities can be seen as a form of language activism.