Arabic is not going anywhere

Arabic will die out if it is locked up in classrooms, warns Achraf El Bahi of The National, a government-owned newspaper in Abu Dhabi. Fortunately for Arabic-speakers, El Bali has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

I was surprised to see the above article posted on the Angry Arab's blog; you'd think he would know better. (Though I suspect he only posted the article in order to make fun of Saad Hariri).

Mainstream journalists are notorious (to linguists, anyway) for making major blunders nearly every time they try to write about language; browsing the archives of blogs like Language Log or Language Hat will turn up dozens of articles pointing out serious errors in mainstream reporting on linguistic issues. Non-specialists usually don't feel entitled to write about sciences like biology or chemistry, leaving the predictions to the scientists, but when it comes to the science of linguistics, just about everyone seems to feel that their ignorant analysis merits attention. El Bahi here is no exception. He presents enough linguistic inaccuracies and sheer falsehoods to make his entire argument invalid.

The crux of his argument centers around this idea:

"It is an obvious, if little known fact that modern standard Arabic is no longer anybody’s mother tongue. No one in the world speaks it as a native language." (emphasis mine)

Actually, throughout history Modern Standard Arabic has never been anybody's mother tongue (with the exception of very few eccentric individuals who have chosen to raise their children speaking it at home). That's just the point: it never mattered that Modern Standard Arabic wasn't anybody's mother tongue. Throughout its entire lifespan of over 200 years, Modern Standard Arabic has managed to grow into a vibrant literary language with many millions of speakers, and produce an impressive corpus of everything from novels to newspapers to poetry, without having any native speakers. El Bahi laments that

"Latin has almost died out precisely because it was locked up in church bookshelves. Arabic, with its elasticity, rhetorical treasures and axiomatic wealth may suffer the same fate if its use is restricted to the classroom, the mosque, and the halls of government."

Yet he neglects to mention that even today, Modern Standard Arabic is not limited to those arenas; it's also the language of nearly all Arabic written literature as well as Arabic news broadcasting on television and radio.

Throughout the article, the author refers to Modern Standard Arabic as "true," "proper," or "pure" Arabic, juxtaposed with colloquial Arabic (which must therefore be untrue, improper, and impure). This is as silly as suggesting that North Americans don't speak "true" English, because they don't use the same vocabulary and syntax as is used in newspapers (though to be fair, the differences between the colloquial and the standard language are greater in Arabic than in English). More importantly, the notion of Modern Standard (or for that matter Classical) Arabic as "pure" is false, anyhow. It's full of words from foreign languages, including ديمقراطية (democracy, from Greek), قنديل (lamp, from Latin), صابون (soap, from French), فردوس (paradise, from Persian), بنك (bank, from English), and hundreds more.

El Bahi goes on to say

"Countless Arabs find that their friends from Morocco and Algeria may as well be speaking Greek when they speak in their native dialects. True, these derivative languages bear a close resemblance to Arabic, but they are not, strictly speaking, Arabic.

Now, this is just wrong. Some linguists have argued that contemporary Arabic vernaculars (like Egyptian colloquial Arabic) should be viewed as separate languages, but no linguists claim that they aren't Arabic, any more than Cantonese is not Chinese.

Possibly the silliest part of the article comes at its very end, where the author closes with what I'm sure he thinks is a provocative question:

"If you’re an Arab, ask yourself: how do you say “zipper” in your supposed mother tongue?"

I'm not an Arab (and to be honest, my command of Arabic is quite poor), but I can tell you that the word for "zipper" is سحاب in Modern Standard and سوستة in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. More to the point, it's completely irrelevant whether Arabs know how to say "zipper" in their mother tongue, or just use the English word. Zippers are called "zíper" in Portuguese and "jippā" or "fasunā" in Japanese (from "zipper" and "fastener," respectively). German, Italian, French, and Spanish all have official, native words for "zipper," yet a variant of "zipper" or "zip" is popularly used in those languages as well. Are they all also in danger of dying out?

The fact is that most major world languages, including Spanish, French, and yes, Arabic, don't have a native word for many such everyday items as "telephone" and "television." Instead, they've simply borrowed the English word, and they're no worse off for it. More than 60% of English vocabulary is of foreign origin (including such basic words as "table," from French), yet somehow English appears to be surviving.

On that note, I'm a native speaker of English, but that doesn't automatically make me an expert on William Shakespeare. I read a couple of his plays in high school English classes, which I vaguely remember, yet I'm aware that I know basically nothing about him or his works. For that reason, you won't find any Shakespearean commentary on this blog. People like Achraf El Bahi need to realize the same: just because he may be a native speaker of Arabic, doesn't mean he knows anything about the language (and certainly not anything about linguistics), and should therefore avoid making boldly ill-informed predictions about the fate of the Arabic language.