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.