Arabic- a dying language?

One of my Arabic teachers told me that Arabic is the only language that could never die because muslims would always read the Quoran and therefore would have to know Arabic. This article disagrees and gives details about one aspect that I want to cover in my paper: What are the effects on the Arabic language that result from its diglossia?
Originally I thought that an Arab unification movement was pushing for one language based on readings in earlier articles, however, it became apparent that there is no strong pan-arabism movement but rather a pan-islamist movement.
This article explains that it is neither of those movements, but a group called "Fill Amr" or "Act Now" that is leading the campaign against the loss of Arabic language.
The campaign group puts up signs and places yellow crime scene tape around large arabic letters on the sidewalk. The tape reads "Don't kill your language".
There are several reasons that it is dying. The youth of the nation don't think it is cool to speak in Arabic and they insert foreign words into their sentences. For example: "Hi, keefak, Ca va?" Only keefak is Arabic, while french and english are added to sound "chic". Arab CVs are never sent in Arabic and Arab theater and poetry is less and less common. The problem starts in schools where students don't know the mother language and often write phonetically in english script.
A comparative example of this situation is in France. They spend large amounts of money promoting their language and culture. This is something the Arab world cannot afford and most Arab nation (besides Syria) have submitted to english.
Some further research I would like to do is finding out how Syria has done this.
This article has given me some reasons why the language is dying, the name of who wants to save it, and the idea that the real loss from diglossia's inevitable disintegration of a language is the culture.
The author calls for a "second Arab resistance, the first being the Nahda in the 19th century led by Egypt and Lebanon. This is something I would like to research more as well.

Arabic Dialect History and Historical Linguistic Mythology

In Jonathan Owens's article, Arabic Dialect History and Historical Linguistic Mythology he reflects on the flaws with previous studies of the Arabic language and applies his own method, mapping, in a sense, the spread of three different dialectical forms from the eastern dialectical regions to North Africa and even isolated dialects of Arabic in more central Africa. He states first that historical linguistic principles have not been used frequently to analyze the Arabic language. In the past, most studies have been done on individual dialects. Two problems he identifies with studying Arabic are, 1: reconstructions of Arabic based on dialects eventually have to come back to one language. However, identifying variations is extremely difficult and the researcher always must consider whether the dialect is pre or post diaspora or is reflecting pre existing diversity on the Arabian peninsula. A second problem with studies is that they revolve around linguistic feature attributed to a specific historical region. The problem is that they are based on contemporary dialectical distribution rather than historical.
Owens goes on to map the differences between regions using the Arabic first person singular and plural imperfect verbs: I/we write 1) bektob/mnektob 2) aktib/nikitbu 3) niktib/nikitbu.
His study will be useful for the aspect of my project studying the origins of arabic dialects and it does contain specifics about certain dialects that I could use. I also learned that it is more complicated to find these origins that I originally thought.

Murder In Amsterdam Reaction

In Murder in Amsterdam, Buruma gives and interesting, thought-provoking and complex account of the events that led up to the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the people involved. It is an excellent account of a clash of cultures in Europe because of an immigrant population that is not integrated into Dutch society. He uses the murder of the unfiltered van Gogh by radical Islamist, Mohammed Bouyeri to ask questions about tolerance and freedom of speech. I believe that his murder was inevitable but unjustified. Even in such extreme cases with obvious repercussions I stand by van Gogh's freedom of speech. Someone was going to  end van Gogh's life because of how angry he made the Muslim population with his movie, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to make it. This is something especially interesting since it is set in Holland, which has been viewed as an incredibly tolerant and enlightened region throughout history. Yet, the new immigrant population is giving the land of the "red light district" toleration problems. I enjoyed reading and discussing this book in class because of how complex and controversial the issue is. From the perspective of an American, we value the freedom of speech and religion and before reading this book it was clear to me that these freedoms were absolute and untouchable. However, this book gave me doubts about this idea. I think the most important idea that Buruma leaves is that tolerance is much more complex and difficult than it sounds and is certainly not a black and white idea.

Variation and Change in Arabic urban vernaculars

This article acknowledged that education, social class and gender were all factors of differing uses of Modern Standard Arabic and mixed dialects, however, it states that most of these studies ignored dialectal diversity. Many of these studies were done in cities with established Educated Spoken Arabic languages, not representative of the entire Arabic world. This ignored vernaculars that have been brought by non-urban groups. This ‘Bedouin factor’ or the influence of tribal and communal affiliations is a factor. Things like idiomatic expressions, poetic devices and musical choices must all be investigated instead of just phonological variables. It also brings up youth languages, which could be analyzed as we know nothing about them in Arab cities and they are very important in other countries. This article gave me other theories about the changes and development of the Arabic language into multiple dialects. While before my reading had been mainly focused on phonological aspects, this article brought up the fact that culture is also a relevant factor.

INTER-DIALECTAL AND INTER-INDIVIDUAL VARIABILITY IN PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION: A PRELIMINARY STUDY IN JORDANIAN AND MOROCCAN ARABIC

In this article, titled: INTER-DIALECTAL AND INTER-INDIVIDUAL VARIABILITY IN PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION: A PRELIMINARY STUDY IN

JORDANIAN AND MOROCCAN ARABIC by Jalal-Eddin AL-TAMIMI and Melissa BARKAT-DEFRADAS the variability in vowel production and perception for 20 Arabic speakers of each Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic dialects was studied and observed. It is clear from the field they are studying that the language and content of this article was very technical and focused, some of which was difficult to understand without knowing what some of the words meant. The article explained that in this type of study there are lots of variables such as physiological differences, speakers' emotional state, and sociolinguistic differences. So the study had to be done very carefully. The differences between dialects of the Middle Eastern region and the Maghreb region are apparent.

The vocalic dispersion in the dialects of Maghreb was previously known to be much more centralized than in Middle Eastern dialects. The rhythms of dialects of Maghreb have been described as more speed and halting than their Middle Eastern counterparts.

The studies confirmed this. “Cross-gender differences”, “long vs. short vowels distribution differences”, “effects of pharyngealization on adjacent segments”, “cross-dialectal comparison” differences and differences in relation between production and perception in both regions were all apparent from the study.  This article never actually explained the sources of the variation which is what would be useful in my paper, and much of it was too technical to be relevant in my article. However, some of this information could be incorporated when explaining the differences to provide background knowledge on what really is different in the Arabic language.

Article 1: CHOOSING ONE DIALECT FOR THE ARABIC SPEAKING WORLD: A STATUS PLANNING DILEMMA by Robert A. Cote

My project is designed to investigate the origins of different dialects as well as looking at the options for the future of the increasingly linguistically and culturally separated Arab World. “CHOOSING ONE DIALECT FOR THE ARABIC SPEAKING WORLD: A STATUS PLANNING DILEMMA,” by Robert A. Cote, will be very helpful for me when researching the second part of my project. His paper discusses the problems with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and possible solutions for unifying the region or at least individual nations. This tells me that, MSA is not a viable solution, and that one solution could be the changing of the official language of each individual nation to its vernacular rather than maintaining MSA. Some problems with MSA include: MSA is not taught until school starts, leaving 120 million Arabs without the option of learning it, MSA is no one’s mother tongue, illiterate adults will find it nearly impossible to learn. Cote then describes a survey that was conducted. Randomly selected Arabs from around the world were asked to give: A. The Arab region they understand the language of the best, B. The Arab region they understand the language the worst, C. The Arab region that has a language that would be best to unify the region with. The best was Saudi Arabia (half the participants in the study were from there). The worst was by far Morocco, followed by Algeria. As for the one to unify the region, the gulf dialect and the Egyptian one scored 29 and 26 votes respectively, so no one language won. From this the researcher concluded that possible solutions could be a mixed urban dialect, or each nation developing its own national vernacular, which would help unification and nationalism within each nation. This source provides two viable options for me to look into and eliminates the solution of using MSA for the whole region.

Rise of the Rest Reflection

It is hard to hear from a Western point of view that your time will soon be up and that the Asian century has begun. However, Mahbubani makes a strong case, showing the hypocrisies and injustices entertained by the West, while Judt does the same for the United States specifically.
The first thing that struck me upon starting Kishore Mahbubani's "The Case Against the West", is the fact that European nations do still dominate the U.N. As Mahbubani points out, the U.N. Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G-8 are all controlled by the West. China is not even a member of the G-8, while countries with declining populations and less military power like Russia and Italy are members. This is clear evidence of Mahbubani's point. Mahbubani does not mention China's violations in human rights that it has failed to address, which could keep it from taking on a bigger role. Mahbubani goes on to describe and make evident the U.S.'s mistakes in the Middle East and the Iraq War. Another concrete example of Western hypocrisy that Mahbubani bring up is that of nuclear weapons. Not that the U.S. possesses WMDs while preventing other countries from obtaining them, but that they did nothing when Israel, a close ally in the Middle East, violated the NPT agreement. As a result, India and Pakistan felt no need to follow it. However, they were met with much opposition and sanctions upon testing. Global Warming is another point of failure by the U.S. Accounting for 29% of the emissions of Carbon Dioxide, the U.S. is by far the greatest contributer (China is only at 8). The greatest resistance to stopping Global Warming is coming from the U.S. government. Mahbubani's point is that the West is holding back progress by failing to accept that the Asian century has come, and because of this they are not the greatest liability on the world.
Mahbubani makes a very convincing argument, many of his points undeniably show the West holding back the rest of the world in resistance to a shift in power.
Judt focuses more on the U.S. specifically, rather than the entire Western World. He compared this recent transformation to the French Revolution, saying that the difference is that the unsettling changes during the French Revolution were the result of the Enlightenment. He lists different tragedies of the twentieth century such as Munich and 9/11 and states that these create a "Chamber of Historical Horrors". These things leave the message that all of that is behind us, which is a mistake according to Judt. Judt also criticizes the U.S.'s glorification of war, resulting from the fact that the U.S. has never felt the full consequences of defeat. For example the U.S.  lost 120,000 troops in WWI while France lost 1.4 million. Judt points out that the new fear of terrorism in the U.S. is the only thing new about the terrorist situation. There has always been attacks on the presidents and monarchs of countries, terrorists have been with us for well over a century. We create "Islamofascists" as a terrorist enemy to hate. He also points out our hypocrisy in the field of torture. Judt makes a very strong case and argument for what the West does wrong. He is different from Mahbubani in that he isn't suggesting that the U.S. is holding back the Asian century. He focuses more on the U.S. avoiding and pretending that the 20th Century is full of history that will never repeat itself. Even so, Mahbubani's critique of the U.S. is much harsher because of the implication that it is holding back progress and an inevitable happening in the world.