This reflective article maps out the findings of a socio-legal study on language use in administrative settings in Belgium’s Dutch-language area. It explains how the author arrived at a socio-legal approach to this study object. Thereafter the article focuses on the methods used and the conceptual framework. It discusses the various methodological choices regarding data collection and the use of methods stemming from anthropology in this study. It also illustrates how anthropological literature on concepts such as discretion and multiple embeddedness provide conceptual tools for building a framework around which to structure and present the empirical data.

The last part of the article sketches the findings of this socio-legal study. Drawing on the conceptual framework, it illustrates that even when practice deviates from statutory law, the relationship between the law and the practice cannot be easily captured in a dichotomic relationship. The author furthermore deduces some relevant findings in light of general human rights. The article concludes with some reflections on research that combines law and anthropology, both as separate disciplines and as a combined endeavor.

Article 4 of the Nation State Law (NSL), entitled ‘Languages’, stipulates that Hebrew is the language of the state (Article 4(a)); the Arabic language has a special status in the state and regulating the use of Arabic in or by state institutions will be set in law (Article 4(b)); and this clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before the law came into effect (Article 4(c), the ‘validity of laws’ clause). The question is whether, how, and to what extent these provisions hinder the present legal status of the Arabic language in Israel. The legal status of Arabic had never been determined decisively before enactment of the NSL. The High Court of Israel has always been divided on this matter, particularly between judges who perceived Arabic as an official language and judges who deemed it solely as having been granted its acknowledged ‘special legal status’. Furthermore, the judges who perceived Arabic as an official language of the state were also in dispute among themselves as to the meaning, the scope and the consequences of such recognition. Considering these circumstances, my view is that the NSL perpetuates the legal status of Arabic as prescribed in the laws and case law that already existed, and that the validity of laws clause, coupled with the special status granted to Arabic in a basic law, suggests that the door is still open for the Court to further endorse the legal status of Arabic in Israel.