“When you put ‘fluent in Arabic’ on your résumé”: Translingual parodies on TikTok and Arab transnational identities

This article sheds light on a TikTok trend that went viral during Arab American Heritage Month in April 2021, an initiative promoting Arab cultural heritage in the US. The trend features a group of Arabic heritage speakers parodying flight attendant interviews in which they fail to make a coherent pre-flight announcement in Modern Standard Arabic. They resort to heterogeneous multimodal resources, including their heritage culture and dialects, Arabic body language, and English to ridicule bilingual speakers’ insecurity. Through a multimodal analysis of their linguistic practices, the hashtags, and the followers’ comments, the paper argues that these parodies are solidarity-building, translingual cultural tools underlying the emergence of contemporary Arab transnational identities. The study complements the literature on language attitudes, identity, and ideology in the Arab diaspora by showing how heritage speakers capitalize on their cultural background to challenge monolingual discourses which position them as culturally and linguistically deficient. In addition to anchoring them to their Arab heritage, their translingualism erodes the colonial and postcolonial monolingual ideologies that contributed to their linguistic insecurity in the first place.