roundtable: a typographic journey into multilingual Beirut

roundtable is the result of a long and tedious process of self-questioning and introspection: one’s meanderings through the why’s and how’s of one’s linguistic abilities, or inabilities rather. The frontline representatives of the various Lebanese confessional groups were questioned about several issues revolving around the objective of this investigation: how does the correlation work between one’s use of language, confessional identity, and national identity at large? The interviewees were chosen from a vast array of disciplines, ranging from Education to Journalism, through Advertising, Theatre, Literature and Politics. An interesting pattern was worth being noted then: the opinions and lines of thought that were voiced fell into the identitarian framework stood by everyone’s confessional group, regardless of how ‘secular’ some of them tried to be. This series of interviews proved to be very efficient in that it turned out as a virtual roundtable about the questions discussed in this paper. Needless to say that most of them were not always keen on being in the same basket as their fellows.

Most studies on multilingualism tend to neglect the visual manifestations of the phenomenon in favor of the psychological, social and pedagogical dimensions of the problem. This project used the method of “visual journalism”, whereby the typographic tableaux that resulted were planned to meticulously report, as faithfully as possible, the various ideologies encountered.

“roundtable”, the typographic journey, is an attempt to visualize the various opinions on the subject, as recorded during the interviews mentioned above. The methodology followed is based on a long research into the educational system and the usage of languages, which lead to outlining a spectrum of opinions that stipulated for some French as the mother tongue, and marginalized Arabic to a redundant language in a country that takes pride in its allegiance to France. For others, French was only the language of a self-proclaimed cultural elite, an elite that had no real national grounding, and Arabic was the sole mother tongue, being the sacred language of the Coran, the Muslim religious book. In the middle, one came across pragmatic English speakers, that did not need Arabic or French to define an identity for themselves, but were a by-product of families that had lived all over the Gulf region mostly, studying under American or British educational systems in places such as Dubai, Saudi Arabia or Cairo.