Campaign to save the Arabic language in Lebanon

[pampango]

Source: BBC

She welcomes a government campaign to preserve Arabic in Lebanon, called, "You speak from the East, and he replies from the West". "This campaign aims to raise awareness about the importance of protecting Lebanon's official language," says Amal Mansour, media spokesperson at the Lebanese ministry of culture. "We encourage the learning of foreign languages, but not at the expense of the country's mother tongue."

A growing number of parents send their children to French lycees or British and American curriculum schools, hoping this will one day help them find work and secure a better future. Some even speak to their children in French or English in the home.

Even with Arabic, there is a big difference between the classical, written form of the language and the colloquial spoken Lebanese dialect. The classical language is almost never used in conversation - it's only heard on the news, in official speeches, and some television programmes. As a result, many young Lebanese struggle with basic Arabic reading and writing skills, and it is not uncommon for students as old as 16 or 17 to speak only broken Arabic.

Citing the wide gap between the formal language and its various colloquial forms within the Arab world, Egyptian philosopher Mustapha Safwaan once wrote that classical Arabic is theoretically a dead language, much like Latin or ancient Greek. But language expert, Professor Mohamed Said, says classical Arabic is a unifying force in the Arab world.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/middle_east/10316914.stm

[No Elephants]

1. An official language is considered RW in the U.S What is it in Lebanon?

Interesting: In the U.S., the perceived threat to the language is from immigrants who have not learned English. In Lebanon, it's from the upper classes.

Is classical Arabic still the de facto unoficial "official" language of movies in the Middle East? It is of Islam.

[Igel]

4. It's complicated.

Arabic is the classic case of diglossia.

There are three varieties. The first is classical and is Koranic and is the same pretty much everywhere, simply because it's dialect base is from 7th-9th century Sa'udi Arabia and nobody actually speaks it anymore.

The third is colloquial, where Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, Peninsular, Maghrebi, and other Arabics are only all mutually intelligible with a lot of good will; in some cases "urban" Arabic in an area is more similar across dialect varieties than urban/rural dialects are within a dialect variety. The grammar's different, the words are different, and the pronunciation is so different that even "shared" words are hard to understand without pratice.

Then there's the second kind, which is neither classical nor colloquial. Just "standard." It has a lot of nods towards classical Arabic, but includes vocabulary and grammar that is not classical. Arab grammarians don't like to say that there's non-classical grammar in it, but some grammar is very hard to codify and you can only easily stipulate what can be codified. Standard varies a bit by region, but it's supposed to be mutually intelligible: The variation involves some pronunciation differences, some vocabulary.

The problem--or glory--of Arabic is that the borders between varieties 1, 2, and 3 are fluid in practice, so educated people have a really rich set of dialectal and standard features to draw on for purposes of expression, group solidarity, etc.

When you learn Arabic you learn classical and standard; "colloquial" is a given, but you need to learn how to shift between varieties. Then pitch in a standard Western language and it means something has to give.

The dirty secret is that standard Arabic was often ignored by those not aspiring to college. Like Spanish or French in American high schools, you learn it and forget how to speak it; you have the day-to-day language and it gets you by if you're a shopkeeper, street cleaner, construction worker, cook, taxi driver, etc. If you have a job that requires a display of education (clerk in a high-class dept. store, politician) or a job that actually requires education then you learn it. Remembering how to understand it is a much easier task.

So, oddly, two things are at play: The "classes" that always disregarded standard Arabic are becoming better educated and keeping their home language; the same kind of "educated hick" phenomenon accounts for a lot of political changes in the ME and N. Africa. The upper classes that nurtured the standard language are busy with other languages and there's fear that the standard is being eroded.

The perceived threat is the same in both cases: There's a drive to displace the study and use of the current local prestige language so that those who mastered it are not seen to have an essential skill worthy of respect. It's easy to read it into "xenophobia" because you can, even though that's into it in both cases only obliquely. The question is, Who controls the culture? You also see it in the futile tirades of American prescriptivists before the onslaught of 300 million native speakers all speaking their language "incorrectly" as well as the educated Spanish-speakers who consider Chicano Spanish to be substandard.

[K8-EEE]

5. I thought your post was fascinating

Thank you so much for all the interesting info about the Arabic language. The question of speaking "correct" anything seems to be a loaded one. My mom's family is from Spain and even though "Castellano" is their 2nd language (they are Basque) they do tend to look down their nose at Latin-American Spanish. People do forget that Spain has many languages!

[JCMach1]

2. the language of Lebanon is Franglish...

A mixture of French, Arabic and English... but with Arabic as a base.

The Djinn is has been out of the bottle far too long.

[Change Happens]

3. It is way too late for Lebanon to get back on track on this....nt