SOFT POWER PROJECTION IN LANGUAGE POLICY DISCOURSE: EVIDENCE FROM THE DISCOURSES OF QATAR UNIVERSITY'S 2012 LANGUAGE POLICY

Abstract

In 2012, Arabic was re-introduced as the medium of instruction at Qatar University's Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences undergraduate programs, taking the language to its default status. This course of action comes when the internationalisation process is at its heyday at Qatar University, and the State of Qatar is increasingly leveraging its higher education institutions to expand its soft power. This dissertation employed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a qualitative research method, to analyse data collected from 15 policy actors within Qatar University through semi-structured face-to-face interviews to examine the discourse of QU's 2012 language policy. The dissertation explores explicitly the discursive contexts under which this language policy was developed. It further attempts to understand different ideological underpinnings that shaped the introduction of the Arabic Language in QU and to identify how Qatar's soft power projection in higher education through the recruitment of international students is featured within the discourse of this language policy. The collected data revealed that the development of QU's 2012 language policy is shaped by the dominant discourses embedded in the winder social-historical context of Qatar's efforts to reclaim the ownership of its national institutions, the operations of which were primarily influenced by policies of neoliberalism, which was deeply resented in the society and subsequently led to policies for the revival of the Arabic language as the national language. Meanwhile, the re-appropriation of the Arabic language in QU is, by extension, influenced by the ideological discourse of enhancing and protecting the Arabic language as a symbol of Qatar's national identity, resisting the encroachment of the English language in society, and making higher education accessible to Qatari students. The results also reveal that Qatar's soft power projection through the recruitment of international students is framed within the discourse of this policy as insignificant to the development of this language policy. However, the results identified other alternative pathways through which Qatar University is believed to contribute to augmenting a vital foreign policy goal of expanding Qatar's soft power base.