Call for papers: A Sociolinguistics of Islam: Exploring Multilingualism & Meaning in Faith, A Special Issue of the Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development. Deadline for extended abstract: 22 August 2025.
Special Issue Editors: Ibrar Bhatt (Queen’s University Belfast, UK); Othman Barnawi (Royal Commission for Yanbu Colleges and Institutes, Saudi Arabia); Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar)
Across the fields of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, literacy studies, and linguistic anthropology, the role of religion has been present yet marginalised, and often subsumed under broader categories such as ‘identity’, ‘ideology’, or ‘cultural practice’. Despite this presence, scholarship within linguistic and cultural studies, broadly speaking, has not fully capitalised on the onto-epistemic
potential of how language and society intersect in contexts where the Islamic faith serves as a defining worldview. Engaging more deeply with such contexts offers valuable opportunities to advance research on religious multilingual and multicultural development, particularly when grounded in Islamic historicity, theology, and the distinctive features of Islamic knowledge traditions.
This special issue seeks to redress this imbalance by exploring a ‘sociolinguistics of Islam’, a conceptual and empirical orientation, as defined by Bhatt, Barnawi and Ahmad (2025), that foregrounds contexts of linguistic practice shaped by Islamic traditions, whether in Muslim-majority or Muslim-minority settings, as deserving of dedicated scholarly attention. The sociolinguistics of Islam refers to the exploration of how language and society intersect within contexts where the Islamic faith is a defining worldview shaping language, literacy, and other processes of semiosis. Building on foundational work in the ‘sociology of language and religion’ (e.g. Fishman 2006; Omoniyi 2010), and drawing inspiration from sociolinguistic analyses in religious communities (e.g. Spolsky 2014; Shandler 2006; Fishman et al. 1966), this special issue invites critical, theoretical, and empirical contributions that advance the study of language within Islamic sociolinguistic ecologies.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 