Over the centuries, the most widely spoken language of Jews is Arabic, although few Jews speak it today, Rabbi Mark S. Glickman notes. In the past, Jews and Arabs in many lands spoke, laughed and bickered in the same tongue — as friends should.

Source: The SeattleTimes

(Reuters) - The further integration of Arabic language capabilities in internet and other technological architecture will grant millions access to the digital world, Microsoft and Google executives said.

One of the business sites of Internet search engine Google Inc is shown on a computer screen in Encinitas, California April 13, 2010.

As devices and applications become more ubiquitous in less developed countries, their content will grow and an embryonic e-economy should flourish, they said.

“(Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer and I a few years ago talked and believed Arabic would be an increasingly important language,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer. “And yet, because of the way the internet was evolving, it wasn’t a language that was getting a lot of use.”

But while Arab world internet use since 2000 has grown faster than anywhere else and access costs have shrunk, content still punches below its weight and ad spending remains tiny.

Arabic content is less than 1 percent of world totals though speakers constituting 5 percent of the global population.

The Arabic portal of online encyclopedia Wikipedia carries less words than its Catalan site, Google’s regional marketing manager Wael Ghonim said.

“There is a lot of Arabic content but it is not well structured,” he said. “We want more structured content. We want more of the professional, niche sites, more businesses.”

“One of our biggest missions is to enable Arabic users to find the right tools to enrich Arabic content,” Ghonim said. “It would be great to see more e-commerce in the region, more publishers, more news sites. We are committed to help them.”

Asked how Google could aid such regional growth, Ghonim said: “We have a very ambitious plan in the next few months, we are working on many initiatives.” He did not elaborate.

Regional spending on online advertising was around $90 million in 2009, up from $66.5 million in 2008 and $38 million in 2007 but still miniscule compared to Britain’s $5.3 billion.

Ghonim said Arabic speakers have historically engaged in poorly organized and difficult to archive forums, citing a message board used by 400,000 teachers in Saudi Arabia.

Both Google and Microsoft place Arabic in their top ten languages in need of prioritized attention.

Microsoft’s Mundie was visiting the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center, a regional hub launched in 2006 that released Windows extension Maren, which converts Arabic written in Roman characters into Arabic script. It is Microsoft’s second most popular service by page views after Internet Explorer 8.

ARABIC WEB ADDRESSES, MOBILE ACCESS

Egypt and Saudi Arabia registered the first domain names written in the right-to-left Arabic script late last year, after global internet regulator ICANN voted to allow non-Latin script to be used in web addresses in November.

In Egypt, internet access is becoming cheaper and use of internet on mobile devices is blossoming. Egypt plans a $1 billion upgrade to its broadband capacity over four years to quadruple penetration to 20 percent.

“The next few million Egyptian internet users will be people who don’t really speak English,” Ghonim said.

Such users will likely not foray deeply into the internet’s marketplace initially, but will no longer be hindering from creating part of the fabric of the web by language constraints.

“Think of the guy running a very small one-stop shop in (Nile delta industrial city) Mahalla,” Ghonim said. “You should facilitate for him a complete experience in Arabic, from the way he registers his domain to finding a hosting company to communicating to his customers.”

Mundie said the Arab world was well-placed to skip PC-dominated use and go straight to mobile internet.

“The arrival of a very low cost form of computing coupled to the mobile network creates an alternative entry point into the world of computing and internet usage,” he added.

Source: Reuters

Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

Egypt’s Ministry of Communications is amongst the first live web addresses

Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.

The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

It said the new domains were “available for use now” although it admitted there was still some work to do before they worked correctly for everyone. However, it said these were “mostly formalities”.

Icann’s senior director for internationalised domain names, Tina Dam, told BBC News that this has been “the most significant day” since the launch of the internet, adding that “it’s been a very big day for Icann, more so for the three Arabic countries that were the first to be introduced”.

Icann president Rod Beckstrom described the change as “historic”.

Read right

The introduction of the first web names using so-called country code top-level domains (CCTLDs) is the culmination of several years of work by the organisation.

Previously, websites could use some non-Latin letters, but the country codes such as .eg for Egypt had to be written in Latin script.

The three new suffixes will allow web addresses to be completely written in native characters.

The first country codes:

• Egypt: مصر
• Saudi Arabia: السعودية
• United Arab Emirates: امارات

Source: Icann

“All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left,” said Kim Davies of Icann in a blog post.

One of the first websites with a full Arabic address is the Egyptian Ministry of Communications.

Egypt’s communication and information technology minister Tarek Kamal told the Associated Press that three Egyptian companies were the first to receive registrar licenses for the ‘.masr’ domain, written in Arabic, a development that he called a “milestone in internet history”.

Masr means Egypt in Arabic.

Some countries, such as China and Thailand, had already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language.

However, these were not internationally approved and do not necessarily work on all computers.

Ms Dam explained that the change was “not about shutting non-Arabic or non-Chinese speakers out of the internet.

“It’s about including that large part of our world into the internet today.”

She said there had previously been a risk the internet might have started to split.

“The chances are people would start creating their own internets, where it was only in Chinese, Arabic, Thai or whatever,” she said.

Icann warned that the internationalised domain names (IDNs), as they are known, would also not work on all PCs immediately.

“You may see a mangled string of letters and numbers, and perhaps some percent signs or a couple of “xn--”s mixed into the address bar,” said Mr Davies. “Or it may not work at all.”

Previously, Icann has said that people would have to update the software on their computers to view the domains.

“Computers never come with the complete set of fonts that will allow it to show every possible IDN in the world.

“Often this is fixed by downloading additional language packs for the missing languages, or specifically finding and installing fonts that support the wanted languages.”

Global access

When Icann first announced its plans for non-Latin web names it said it was the “biggest change” to the net “since it was invented 40 years ago”.

“Over half the internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as their native language,” said Mr Beckstrom at the time.

“IDNs are about making the internet more global and accessible for everyone.”

Icann said it had received 21 requests for IDNs in 11 different languages, including Chinese, Russian, Tamil and Thai.

Website owners in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will now be able to apply for web addresses using the new country codes.

Source: BBC News

DOHA // Abbas al Tonsi sees something wrong in a future where citizens of Gulf countries wear dishdashas and abayas but are unable to speak Arabic.

Abbas al Tonsi fears that in 20 years, Arabic will be reduced to a language of religious ritual. Abu Nadha for The National

“How can you say ‘I am an Arab’ if you don’t know the language?” said the professor of Arabic at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
For Mr al Tonsi, who has written several Arabic textbooks and has been teaching the language for almost 40 years, the crisis is personal. “I am afraid that after 20 years,” he said, “Arabic will just be a language of religious ritual.”

The native tongue for more than 300 million people and used regularly by 1.6 billion Muslims, Arabic is in no danger of extinction. But because of the dominance of English, its usage in everyday life is under threat in several of the Gulf’s smaller states.

A senior official at Qatar’s ministry of culture, arts and heritage recently acknowledged Arabic’s decline and underscored the seriousness of the problem. “Language is the key issue for the identity of a society,” Marzook Basher Binmarzook said last month.

Mr al Tonsi’s forthcoming study of Arabic instruction reveals how Qatari schools are helping to erode that identity. Standards are vague and not communicated well to the teachers, he said.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Meet this level of efficiency’. But how do you guide the teachers to get the students there?” said Mr al Tonsi. “What exactly are the main ideas? In these standards, there are no indicators of intent, no uniform lesson plans or content.”

Secondly, he said, most of the Arabic teachers were inadequately trained and relied on outdated methods.

“The teachers mainly teach grammar, and it’s mainly teacher-centred,” Mr al Tonsi said. “They lecture rather than engage the students.”

Finally, schools use a wide variety of textbooks, which complicates proficiency testing. They also lean too heavily on grammar, according to Mr al Tonsi, and use simplistic drills that fail to develop critical thinking. Further, most books are overly proud and authoritarian, he said.

“‘We are the best, we are the bravest’ – you feel this is nonsense if you’re a young person,” said Mr al Tonsi, who co-authored Al Khitaab, an Arabic textbook used in about 700 universities worldwide.

Similar problems exist in the UAE. Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority recently found that Arabic in private schools was poorly taught by underqualified teachers using inadequate resources.

In addition, fewer Gulf nationals are opting for teaching careers because of low pay and a lack of cultural respect. And a major reform programme in Qatar has instituted a more westernised curriculum.

“Westernising the curriculum, per se, is not necessarily bad,” said Hatem Samman, the director of the Ideation Centre, a think tank based in Dubai, where Arabic has also lost ground in most primary schools. “But if you bring in English in mathematics, geography and science, that definitely has an effect on Arabic, on the language and the culture as well.”

Gulf culture has in recent decades shifted towards the West. Arabs represent a minority population in Qatar, as in the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain. English dominates business, and is more common in many public places, such as malls.

Many schools now favour English as the primary medium of instruction. And Education City in Doha, American University in Dubai and Sharjah and New York University in Abu Dhabi point to a higher educational system that is embracing English.

Many students and their parents see it as the best route to success.

“Many Arab families now want their children to learn English before they learn Arabic,” said Jinanne Tabra, the founder of Araboh, a producer of contemporary Arabic learning materials. “There is this ridiculous impression that English is somehow superior to Arabic.”

But instead of becoming bilingual, most students in Qatar lack fluency in any language. In the past four years, only five to seven per cent of primary and junior high school students in Qatar achieved acceptable standards in national tests for Arabic and English.

“Unless you have a very solid system of your first language you cannot progress in a second language,” Mr al Tonsi said. “Learning Arabic is important for learning English well – it’s very clear.”

As a result, the cultural winds may be shifting again. Last month the UAE announced a new national plan to help Arabic “re-emerge as a dynamic and vibrant language”. Qatar has organised seminars and festivals to celebrate Arabic language and culture.

Mr al Tonsi has more concrete recommendations. He would like to see all courses from preschool to middle school taught in Arabic and English. He cited the example of Lebanon, where most students were fluent in three languages by the time they reached their adolescence.

He urged schools to improve teacher training and create extra curricular activities in which students could converse in Arabic – book clubs, speech groups, drama clubs and poetry readings. He also thinks schools should use audio and video as the main texts, and teach an Arabic that is challenging, enjoyable, respectful of young minds and develops critical thinking.

Maybe learning Arabic could even be fun. “You will never learn a language unless you are willing to learn it,” he said. “No one learns a language by force.”

dlepeska@thenational.ae

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Fears about the demise of Arabic are misplaced

Apr 22nd 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THE Arabic language is dying. Its disloyal children are ditching their mother tongue for English and French. It is stagnating in classrooms, mosques and the dusty corridors of government. Even such leaders as the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, and Jordan’s foreign-educated King Abdullah struggle with its complicated grammar. Worse still, no one cares. Arabic no longer has any cachet. Among supposedly sophisticated Arabs, being bad at Arabic has become fashionable.

That, at least, is an opinion prominently aired in the National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi. It reflects a perennial worry in the Arab world about the state of the language. Classical Arabic, the language of the Koran, and its modern version, Modern Standard Arabic, known in academia as MSA, are a world apart from the dialects that people use every day. Spoken and written in the media and on stuffy occasions, this kind of Arabic is no one’s mother tongue. It is painfully acquired through hours of poring over grammar textbooks and memorising the Koran. Could it one day become obsolete?

Arabic certainly faces competition. Clive Holes, a professor of Arabic at Oxford University, concedes that learning formal Arabic tends to be undervalued by students in the Middle East, many of whom increasingly see it as divorced from success in the real world, especially in the international sphere, where English prevails. A lack of investment in education by Arab governments means it is often badly taught. In the Gulf countries Westerners and Asians, neither with much Arabic, far outnumber native speakers.

But that hardly means the language is dying. Arabic is the essence of Arab identity. Arabs are inordinately proud of their linguistic heritage. Handed down by Allah, many believe the Koran must be read only in the classical mode in which it was written. Even non-Arabic speaking Muslims force themselves to learn enough of it to read it. Stumble though they may, Arabs from different countries are enabled by MSA to communicate.

The popularity of a recent television programme beamed from Abu Dhabi in which people competed to see who could best recite traditional Bedouin poetry suggests there is plenty of appetite for Arabic in all its forms. In the absence of an authentic Arabic word, people may instead use an English word like “zip”, as the writer in the National laments. But such changes and borrowings are inevitable and may be quite healthy. Arabic will evolve from the prescriptions of the grammar book, taking in new words and discarding obsolete ones. But as Mr Holes points out, this is a sign of dynamism rather than demise.