It was the end of the final day of our workshop on the outskirts of Cairo and we were all feeling that curious mixture of inspiration, energy and exhaustion that follows those meetings where a world of ideas and people and things are thrown together in a concentrated few days. Mark Graham asked each of us if we’d like to say a few parting words and the participants spoke about how they enjoyed meeting Wikipedians from so many places in the Middle East, that they were happy to come to an event with academics and that they were excited about doing something to make a change in the real world. The majority of participants spoke in English – what was for many of them a third or fourth language – while some had their Arabic translated on the fly by other participants.
I was surprised when we got round to Mohamed Amarochan, Wikipedian, Mozilla hacker and blogger from Morocco, when he said that he would like to speak in Arabic. I knew that Mohamed had a really good command of English because I’d spent a fascinating ride with him from the airport on the way to the workshop where we commiserated with one another about visa hardships. When he chose to speak in Arabic and allowed others to translate into English, I realized that Mohammed was making an important statement about how small decisions like which language you choose to speak in a conversation like this one has big consequences.
As Clive Holes writes, ‘How we speak is an important part of who we are: in a sense, speech is the oral counterpart of how we dress. Both are intimately linked to our sense of self, and of how we prsent ourselves to, and are seen by, others.’ (Holes, 2011) Continue reading “Language, identity and Wikipedia: Some perspectives from the Cairo “Wikipedia in the Arab World” workshop”
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