Monday, February 21, 2011

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.

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