I am a native Arabic speaker. It is an awful language. As the article points out, the dialects are just too numerous for it to gain any kind of critical mass of adoption. But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly. edit: I also wanted to mention that written Arabic differs from spoken Arabic, and the dialect factor multiplies this problem.
It also encodes ideas very inefficiently for multiple reasons. 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages; 2. Due to geographical and cultural separation from the West, the vocabulary is just not adapted to modern life, so "workarounds" need to be used to refer things that have become common in our daily lives. I can recall a humorous TV ad that made fun of this, which involved a wife asking her husband for "the thing" and him being confused about what she was referring to.
If we're to compare it to a programming language, I'd describe it as PHP ecosystem/stdlib/development practices combined with Rust syntax.
I'm native arabic speaker too, and can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french (I love/speak french :D).
There are only 3 tenses:
Also it's derivational language which mean once you learn about a verb you actually learn about the whole lexical family of the verb.
In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library
In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously
The big problem of arabic as language is arabic societies/people/... but the language itself is a gem.
> In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b) and with simple rules you can discover all those words or even invent them if not used previously
I don't see why the word for "author" has to be derived from the same root as "book", logically speaking. There are a great deal more things than books that have authors.
The reason why this particular root that you've picked produces differences between "book" and "library" in most European languages is because they had two major sources from which their roots were borrowed: Latin (where "book" is "liber") and Greek (where "book" is "biblio"); and both roots were borrowed and used in this case. However, for most roots, the principle is exactly the same in European languages - a single common root produces a whole family of words, and new words are derived as needed. It's not something that's unique to Arabic.
> There are a great deal more things than books that have authors
And those things all have their own words for their authors, as well.
poetry - sha3r
poet - shaa3r
composition (the noun of the verb) - ta2leef
composition (the thing written) - mu2allaf
composer - mu2allef
letter, correspondance - resala
messenger - rasool
correspondent (like a news reporter) - murasel
You can also use kaateb for the author of a letter or perhaps a poem, but not really a symphony. Just like you wouldn't use author. Pardon the use of the numbers in words - it's how people represent letters that aren't in English in Arabic.
Note, by the way, that your examples showcase the same pattern in English - the author of "poetry" is a "poet", the author of a "composition" is a "composer" etc.
Yes, kaateb can be translated as "author" or "writer" or "scribe" etc.
I was more replying to your comment than continuing GP's argument, but I believe what they were trying to say is that the system used in Arabic is very regular and predictable. If I didn't know English, I might say that the person who writes poems is a poemer. Or a poetrier. I might try to use "to poetry" as a verb.
I wouldn't really make that argument because through learning Esperanto I realized that a truly logical language would make nearly no sense. You can't just invent any word you like in Esperanto, although it is sometimes billed that way, and you can't in Arabic. But at least it's very predictable and, at least, you can derive the meanings of an already-written text fairly easily.
The problem (touched upon in the OP) is that each dialect has its own domain of vocabulary, so even apart from foreign/native language influences, the classical vocabulary that sticks around in each dialect varies widely from one place to another. Some people use the verb for "work" to mean "work" and some use the verb for "preoccupy oneself" to mean "work."
Indeed, many languages have a concept of root from which words must be derived. In Arabic, it’s much more pronounced, because knowing the root of a word is essential to being able to use the language effectively.
2 of may favorite things about the language:
1/ fun fact is that the vast majority of verbs have only 3 letters in them
2/ Pronouns make a distinction between one, two or more people, and even indicate whether the subject is present or absent. I find it extremely powerful.
The concept word is not clearly defined. As a programmer it seems natural to assume that a word is a short series of bits. Anything else is composition. Why is of a word but -ed isn't? ab- is from the same origion, as in aberrant. The difference isn't completely arbitrary. Bio Logy might as well be two wods. The keyword is lexicalization and how words are learned. Obviously, shorter words are easier to discover.
I'd argue that Arabic is simpler than English. It might have been simpler for you as your were the native :)
For me Arabic and English both are foreign and I can definitely tell you that English was much simpler to learn.
While words "transformation" might seem cool and convenient, there is no common rule on how to predict final meaning.
Also the pronunciation is very (VERY) important. One tiny mistake and you will end up telling your girlfriend that you have a gift from deep of your dog (كلب/ Kalb) instead of deep of your heart (قلب / K'alb).
you're right ! and a little bit biased because pronunciation is important for all languages out there I see the same issue with french foreign speakers too.
In Arabic pronunciation is straight forward, in english pronunciation depends on each word (a,u,o) can have a different sounds (depends in which word used) and the emphasis also is a dark magic :D there are no such exceptions in Arabic
Arabic can be difficult but simple. English can be easy but complex.
I agree with you, I even think that Arabic speakers are the best at understanding foreigners speech.
As he pointed, you might tell your girlfriend this is a gift from your dog (كلب) instead of heart (قلب), but I'm sure that if she is a native speaker, she'll understand correctly.
I've seen the same mistakes happen in other languages, but the native speaker usually miss the meaning.
I think this relates to the fact that Arabic spoken language has a vast number is unique dialects, and they mostly understand each others dialects, unlike other languages that differs between dialects mostly in spelling sounds.
I don't speak Arabic, but my understanding is that someone from Morocco can't necessarily hold an easy conversation with someone from Qatar.
Whereas, I can name very few varieties of English that aren't easily mutually intelligible with basically all of the rest of the English-speaking world - patois and gullah, for example.
In my work, I have colleagues from all Arabic countries among others, I talk to people of Morroco and my Arabic is more Levante, with no issue at all. Syrian dialect, along with Egyptian, has gained a lot of ease in the region due to popular tv series and movies (more Egyptian than Syrian ones)I predict that the variations will be reduced since the differences grow out of old geographical barriers that gave distinctions and differences. There is a lesser strict everyday language that is very simple yet formal Arabic, as in the news, be it TV or online. So please look further before jumping to conclusions, as in the region you would read the news regardless of the geographical aspect of the source. If an Arabic website in Morroco has a compelling news story, or article speakers of Arabic in the whole region and abroad will read it very comfortably.
The difference is that English words don't really change meanings based on pronunciation. Words do have many pronunciations, but the meaning remains the same.
This is often true, but far from universal. Oftentimes there are differences in verb and noun (as with "lead" and "lead"), or transitive vs. intransitive verbs ("seconded"), but occasionally we have problems with two nouns or two verbs with the same form:
"I read that magazine": do I mean regularly, or that I have done in the past?
"The messenger wrote down Lincoln's address": was that his home, or his speech?
The context would need to be quite explicit to work around problems such as this.
You are thinking of the written language as the fundamental thing. Actually spoken language is fundamental, and writing is an imperfect representation of it.
The verb "lead" and the noun "lead" (i.e., the metal) are two different words, pronounced differently. The fact that they are spelled the same is just an example of how the English writing system doesn't encode the English language perfectly accurately.
I love learning languages and learning about languages. I considered seriously learning Arabic but I eventually decided against it mainly because, as the parent points out, there seem to be many variations between countries and also between formal, literary arabic and the spoken dialects.
Given that learning the language (in any form) is probably going to be a huge challenge the prospect of spending years studying the idiom only to end up in an arabophone country and not being able to fluently converse with anybody felt discouraging.
I eventually decided that I would focus on learning Russian instead, an other very difficult but obviously completely different languages (although it also features declensions and relatively simple conjugations minus the aspect thingy).
Even though there are many dialects, nobody will misunderstand you. And, beyond that, it’s easy for everyone to shift to using a more formal Arabic in order to communicate with you.
yes but you are judged based on the dialect you speak, i have experienced cases where i wasn't taken seriously by businessmen coz i spoke a turkish variant of arabic in saudi arabia
True, but North African dialects in general are not understood at all by Middle Easterners. Further, some of the Gulf dialects (e.g., Iraqi, Omani, Yemeni) can be hard to understand.
But even within these dialects, there are regional dialects that might be difficult to understand even for native speakers from that same country.
For example, Tunisian Arabic can (roughly) be divided into northern and southern dialects. I've met people in the north who think I'm from Libya because of some words that are shared with southern Tunisian Arabic. Tunisia is a relatively small country, so imagine the variation in dialects in Egypt!
If you're interested in learning Arabic, don't let this scare you! The "generic" Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian dialects will easily be understood by most Middle Easterners and a fair chunk of North Africans.
Definitely! I was just pointing out that these three dialects are the most universally understood, primarily due to their domination of Arabic music and film/TV.
> Arabic is far more simple language with fewer exceptions than english or french
Would you say this is true of spoken english as well? By that I mean, a large amount of the difficulty involving english involves our train-wreck of spelling rules, spoken english on the other hand tends to be reasonably easy to become functional in (apart from idioms). Would you say that Arabic is simpler than purely spoken english as well?
I would say that English is somewhat hard, mostly because of the exceptions in the past participate, words that are NOT - edit - spelled phonetically, making it hard to learn new words, and there are many tenses - not as many as in French, most of which are misused when casually speaking.
English spelling is a feature, not a bug. You can tell the origin of nearly any word by it's spelling, and knowing that gives you clues to pronunciation and grammar. If you're ignorant of latin and more modern European languages it might be difficult though.
Do you know of a resource that shows pictograms for Polish like the one the parent shows? My partner is Polish and I’m slowly acquiring the language, butI have always struggled to visualise the meanings of the Polish equivalent prefixes
yeah sure at an academic level arabic is tres beautiful just like french but realistically none of that translates to everyday spoken arabic to the point where you have to learn a different dialect based on who you want to sound like - a denizen of a country, a foreigner or a bedouin.
arabic is one of those languages where there are so many local modifications going on it's insane amounts of effort to be known as "fluent" and "understandable". people in arabia even use emojis differently for crissakes
"In english for example you have : Book, Author, Library In Arabic (kitaab, kaatib, maktaba) which is the same root (k,t,b)"
I see might not be difficult for me to learn it since I know Swahili (the most commonly spoken language in East Africa, which has Arab influence) since those words are pronounced respectively: Kitabu(book), Katibu(secretary), Maktaba(library).
Arab is not really complicated. Trust me, I'm accustomed to more troublesome dialects in Africa.
You might think that but I decided to major in it in college and it led to many crazy life choices I sometimes regret, but I go to the Arab world often as a result of them.
I'll never regret what Arabic has taught me directly and indirectly about the world.
I have seen a lot of the contrast of the myopic sheltered culture of middle class Northeast US I grew up in. And I learned Europeans borrowed and saved a lot of important knowledge for safe keeping with the Arabs in Arabic. I see certain artistic themes go so far back even beyond classical Arab history and they give evidence of that. Ditto for math and science.
Ugly is beautiful too, man.
من يعلمني حرفا فصرت له عبدا!
For he who teaches me a letter, for him I become a slave. I saw this old trope on a classroom board studying in Cairo and it has stayed with me all my life.
I'm also a native arabic speaker. I also speak french and English fluently. What you say is utterly false. I think that trying to evaluate a language based on it being similar to western languages simplicity for it to be good/bad is plain nonsense. Arabic having many variant local dialects is not an awful thing but a richness. I will not fall into the trap of saying such language is better or worse. What I can say is that Arabic as a language is complexe and that is why it is a very much powerful language to express ideas an emotions then other languages I know.
> 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages; 2. Due to geographical and cultural separation from the West, the vocabulary is just not adapted to modern life, so "workarounds" need to be used to refer things that have become common in our daily lives.
This is exactly the situation with Hindi (and I'd venture to say all Indian languages). The colloquial (or at least urban) vocabulary seems so much smaller than English that it's just faster to code-mix in English words and phrases in a lot of situations. And insisting on speaking in Hindi would require a lot more metaphors and indirect expression than seemingly how the same thing would be said in English.
Even if a Hindi word exists for a very specific concept, and the speaker knows the listener probably knows it, it's considered less pretentious to use the English equivalent than to use the ten-dollar Hindi word.
No it's not anti-intellectualism of any kind. If anything, Indians have a high regard for education. It just comes across as artificial because usage of those words is now mostly limited to literary contexts.
These days using a difficult Hindi word (especially one derived from Sanskrit, or one that sounds Sanskrit-ish) in place of a common English term also signals that the speaker supports the political right wing.
I'm a polyglot, and what keeps me from trying to learn Arabic is precisely that.
Back in the day I worked in a very international environment, two Tunisian colleagues spoke Tunisian to each other, but when the Moroccan or Lebanese guys from the other teams came to ask some questions, everybody switched to French. If was small talk, they would stick to Arabic with the Moroccan though.
It's pretty amazing that Arabic, technically spoken in a contiguous region from Morocco to Saudi Arabia isn't mutually intelligible with itself, whereas English, French or Spanish, separated by oceans for centuries, even if they grew different variants, stay intelligible.
> It's pretty amazing that Arabic, technically spoken in a contiguous region from Morocco to Saudi Arabia isn't mutually intelligible with itself, whereas English, French or Spanish, separated by oceans for centuries, even if they grew different variants, stay intelligible.
Language is political.
If a different political situation had come about you could see French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian dubbed one language named Neo-Latin, this language wouldn't be very mutually intelligible either
The Quran and its language ("Modern Standard Arabic") may be what binds the "dialects" together under one umbrella label "Arabic". Chinese is in a similar situation, whose writing system unifies the mutually un-intelligible "dialects" like Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese as one "language" called "Chinese".
Such is an advantage of separating written and spoken forms of a language: as the spoken form inevitably mutates over time and fractures over space, having a stable written form means people who would otherwise consider each other foreigners may (1) share a common understandable set of historical and cultural documents, (2) communicate with each other at least in letters, (3) identify each other's language as but a "variation" of the standard written form.
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese remain largely uniform across the Oceans because they are spread across the Oceans only recently, that is, not long before centralised nation states, compulsory education, sound recording, radio broadcasting, and YouTube.
The parallel to post-Roman Europe is interesting, where Latin lived on for quite a while as the language of writing. It gradually gave way to written forms of the various spoken languages, derivatives of Latin or others. During this time of parallel usage Latin, just by being there as an alternative for the elites to show off pedantry, may have helped establishing a tradition of keeping the new written languages continuously aligned with their permanently changing spoken counterparts.
Keeping Latin while it was helpful as a shared language when the scholar density was low and then moving on once local intellectual networks became stronger and mass education required efficiency may have been one of those "guns germs and steel" factors where Europe just happened to be lucky.
Your anecdote is also mentioned in the article [0] linked somewhere in this thread:
"The one thing not mentioned in the article is the idea of registers, which is the vertical transition between intermediate stages between full dialect and full MSA depending on the socio-lingiustic context of a conversation or other language production opportunity."
Would it be comparable to, say, Dutch and Afrikaans? They sound similar and up to a point people from those countries can have a conversation in their respective languages, but there's just so many differences that it's easier to switch to English.
Dutch and Afrikaans is probably in the top three most similar language pairs among Indo-European languages along with Spanish-Portuguese-Italian (a three way) and Danish-Norwegian bokmål. The fact that people switch to English is more a reflection of how good English language education is than the difference between the languages. If you are in Italy and you speak Spanish and English you’ll get more benefit from your Spanish outside tourist traps.
The spreading of English and Spanish across oceans is much younger than the spreading of Arabic. Arabic had many centuries more to diverge than English or Spanish. The regional separation of Arabic is only few centuries younger than that of Latin if we pretend for simplicity that the empire somehow had uniform language.
Up till about 100 years ago, most of today's Arabic speaking areas were at least nominally under Turkish suzeranity, Turkey also was the centre of the Islamic world for so long, I wonder if the Turks did not try to replace Arabic with Turkish?
> It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages
I definitely disagree on this. Sure, for some concepts, that might be true, but Arabic vocabulary and verbs are so diverse that there are many things that are much easier to say in Arabic.
Combined with the fact that written words are much shorter, you can easily see why Arabic Twitter is thriving so well. Before the tweet limit was raised, Arabic tweets could hold about the equivalent of a paragraph of information. Now that it's been increased they're essentially blog posts.
I am a native speaker. I have no idea what language you are describing.
1) Arabic is highly expressive, the number of ways a root word can be morphed is astonishing. In fact, I would guess it’s unmatched in expressiveness.
2) grammatically speaking, it’s very simple. A little kid can tell you when something is off in grammar. Why? Because Arabic is a language where the semi-vowels indicate the grammar. And because of this, a grammatically incorrect statement will just sound weird. This ease is why most (educated) native speakers have learned grammar at a young age. They will have poetry memorized and understand grammar in a fundamental way.
You know, and I don’t mean to question the veracity of your statement, I don’t think you are a native speaker at all. I think you grew up hearing enough Arabic to understand it and speak it. I would bet you speak and think in English and not in Arabic.
First rule of languages: Languages are not logic. If somebody tells you that their mother tongue is more logical than language X, it's in most cases just bias of the native speaker who is not aware of the difficulties.
Second rule of languages: There are no easy or hard languages. Whether a language is easy or difficult to learn, depends entirely on the languages you already speak (and, of course, the environment, e.g. whether you have access to learning material).
(edit) Big exception: Writing systems. Learning 5000 Chinese characters is objectively harder than learning how to read Spanish. Unfortunately, a difficult writing system has also a negative impact on speaking skills because it hinders you from quickly extending your vocabulary by reading books etc.
> a difficult writing system has also a negative impact on speaking skills because it hinders you from quickly extending your vocabulary by reading books etc.
True enough. I learned two of the languages I know by reading books (after starting with magazines etc). I never used a dictionary - not once. Because when you finally associate a word with its meaning, through understanding, you don't forget it, unlike with a dictionary (which can't give you the exact meaning either - just the nearest translation). But I can't use that method with languages with a different writing system, not in the beginning at least.
I can't honestly remember how long it took. Not that long, possibly. The first book took a while, but at the end of the book I had decoded what I first didn't understand (by seeing the words used in various contexts), and reading books after that became easy. New expressions and phrases were quickly understood.
Before that I had been reading a magazine about stuff I was very interested in (I for one need more motivation than just 'learn the language'. I believe my interest in what I was reading was crucial, without that it wouldn't have worked).
Then I read a couple of relatively short books about science, again not too difficult. At a later time I picked up a book in the international section in a book shop while travelling for work (lots of hotel time..), and since then I just continued.
And yes I think it does help a lot with my speaking proficiency too (I think that was what you meant by your last question), although it does absolutely nothing for my pronunciation..
I have to disagree. Past a certain age, you will learn a lot from written material, and the difference between a language that is orthographically regular and one that isn't, is like night and day.
I too speak four languages (one of them very poorly).
Each of them has its own infuriating challenges, but they all share one big characteristic: Native children learn to speak them well around the age of seven. After that age, most children just add advanced vocabulary. Each of the four languages is by far the worst in some regard, but in a real, practical sense all four exhibit the same overall difficulty for a comparable group of learners.
I've heard that the age is the same for most languages, not just "my" four. For Arabic too, or is it one of the exceptions?
I've dabbled in Arabic, Spanish and Urdu. When it comes to this:
>But beyond that, I'd say the biggest problem with it is that there are just so many exceptions that knowing the rules of grammar is nowhere near enough to speak it correctly.
My experience was that English and Urdu are much worse grammarwise. In the latter, it's not so much that there are exceptions to rules - it's that the rules are the exception. Most of the language doesn't follow grammatical rules. It's not as bad in English, but the problem exists. When I used to help people learn English, I could see how frustrated they would get whenever they'd ask a question and they'd be told "yeah, this is just how it is".
IIRC, most of formal Arabic is covered by first level grammar rules. The thing I found interesting about it is that the exceptions themselves have rules. So it wasn't a case of "just memorize that this is an exception" that you'd have for other languages. It was "Here's the exception to that bigger rule, and you know if a word/phrase should follow the exception based on these rules". I think the challenge you speak of is that sometimes even the exceptions had exceptions.
I'm not a native speaker, so I may be wrong. Overall I found it the most structured language amongst all of these. It's not simple, but it's not haphazard.
If everyone spoke Lakhnavi Urdu I’d get it, but my impression (heritage speaker) is that Urdu in Pakistan today at least is less grammatically demanding in comparison because people who don’t speak it as a home language have had to learn it. I would think reading and writing would be the problem compared to English. Can you give an example besides memorizing genders where there’s a noticeable lack of grammar that impedes learning?
Hmmm...not sure I agree with you. I also used to speak 4 languages, and native Arabic (Lebanese) being one of them. Terrible at Spanish now, Advanced French, Average Lebanese, but English is tops.
I'll just put this out there, I find Arabic very descriptive. Think about the food! Lahm w Aajeen (Meat and Dough) is a meat pie that you have for breakfast. So many food items have names that are just the ingredients!
Also, while yes, the written form differs from how you speak, I speak Lebanese to any other person whose dialect is is different, and they will understand me. Whether Syrian, Iraqi, etc.
And for the record, I've been to Yorkshire, England and I had so much trouble understanding what the heck they said. I'm confident this problem occurs in many other languages, and not just Arabic.
Also, depending on where you come from in the country, you will have a different accent e.g. North Lebanon vs. South Lebanon.
In Canada, if you're from Newfoundland, you will definitely have an accent and people from anywhere in the Country would notice it.
No language is perfect, you just have to roll with the dice.
Can't deny that; same with the eastern languages. Latin script on the other hand appeals more to the engineering side of me, simpler 'instructions' so to speak. RISC vs CISC?
Sounds to me like arabic is an equivalent of evolved latin. It is kind of the situation that would have happened if no languages had evolved from latin and we would still have regional interpretations of latin. Am I correct? Is it possible that arabic continues to evolve into completely different languages with grammar, lexicon and all?
I mean I guess I don't know, and some people have disagreed with you. But how do Arabic dialects compare to all the English dialects. I mean U.S., U.K. and Australians can all understand each other mostly, but there's all those little differences too (that I personally enjoy). And even within English speaking countries there are dialects.
So are we talking almost different languages, or minor differences?
As for your other criticisms, I mean they sound a lot like English criticisms. Because English has a lot of those problems too, at a greater or lower scale I can't say. But I wonder.
Well that's a stretch. I am also a native speaker and given Arabic(s) has its quirks it can be extremely fluid especially when politics leave it alone.
Nonsense. Arabic is Arabic. It is not convoluted. It is sophisticated and powerful.
You are mixing dialicts with languages. Go to rural -middle of nowhere- villages in Scotland. Good luck understanding a single word.
I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute, where young men and women learn how to eavesdrop on the nation's enemies, provided that the enemies speak slowly and limit their conversation to hobbies and the weather.
Thanks for the link, it is an excellently written article, which manages to poke fun at Arabic's various weird quirks, and convey author's enthusiasm about how cool the language is, both at the same time. Very good read!
As a typical American who mostly just speaks English, the #1 most useful language I wish I also spoke is Spanish. It's pervasive, both in the US and elsewhere. I'm currently in Barcelona for a conference and this is the third time in 1.5 years I've been in a Spanish-speaking country for a conference.
The only other language that can have a similarly credible case for learning it would be Mandarin, but unlike Spanish, that's only good for one country. For anyone living in the Sinosphere, that would obviously be the best choice, but for someone living in the US, Chinese isn't nearly as important. Plus, Spanish is way easier to learn, given that it shares an alphabet, similar pronunciation, and through casual exposure you likely already have a start on a basic vocabulary.
As for Arabic ... yeah, that's far down the list. I've only ever been to one Arabic country (the UAE), and more people there speak English than Arabic. Obviously that's atypical for Arabic countries, but way more westerners are likely to go the UAE than to, say, Egypt.
As a typical Brit who mostly just speaks English, and have over 50 countries on 6 continents under my belt, I've never been to a country that had Spanish as an official language.
In a given year the languages that would help me are Russian, Mandarin, and Arabic. French in some parts of Africa (and France/Belgium of course).
In places like India and Kenya, I follow conversations with the locals as they generally speak English, but then they throw in borrowed phrases (Hindi, Swahili, etc).
Just because Spanish isn't an official language in the US doesn't make it less useful. The US is the second largest Spanish speaking nation in the world, behind Mexico. There are a number of careers in the US where speaking Spanish is very useful, especially when you interact a lot with people (e.g., medicine & sales). Every major US market is served by at least two Spanish speaking TV stations over the air. And if you speak Spanish fluently, there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility that lets you communicate with Portuguese speakers (for Brazil). It's an extremely useful language for North, Central, and South America. It also gives the average American much more opportunities to make use of their Spanish skills in every day life when compared to French or German.
Seconded. The emphasis on countries with Spanish as an "official language" is misplaced; the US famously has no "official" language (though let's not pretend this is the result of magnanimity, rather than just a peculiar quirk of legislation), and Spanish-speaking enclaves are all over the place.
If you're outside the US you might think that Spanish is relegated to the areas near the border, but no: I have driven through towns in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania and seen stores with signs exclusively in Spanish; I have hitchhiked through Aurora, Illinois and encountered wandering mariachi bands making their way to a quinceañera; the alley behind my apartment in Massachusetts is filled nightly with the excited Spanish exclamations of children at play.
By no means is Spanish strictly required to enjoy the US, but it will give you insight into enormous US subcultures that many won't ever appreciate.
Spain
Gibraltar (which is painfully British)
Andorra
It makes sense for Americans to take Spanish as a second language, but for Europe; Arabic and Russian are in countries that are far closer, French and German are more widely spoken in Europe. Spanish is only useful if you go to Spain on holiday, and then not in the normal resorts.
I'm frankly amazed that you've never been to a Spanish-speaking country given your homeland and travel propensity, and that are 20 of them (plus Puerto Rico). It's almost like you've gone out of your way to avoid Spanish-speaking countries.
Do yourself a favor and buy a cheap flight to Barcelona and make it 51.
In the last 10 years (had to do this for an Indian visa recently so have them on file), I've been to
New Zealand, Austrailia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Russia, Qatar, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, St Lucia, USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, Gibraltar, Italy, Vatican City, Switzerland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden
Before that they were only places like Austria, Lichtenstein, Finland, etc
I've never been to Spain. Never been to Slovenia either, just hasn't come up. I can't think of any other non-american countries that have Spanish as the official language.
I've come close to visiting Chile, Mexico and Cuba at various points, but never had the dots fall into place.
Correct, I've traveled to US, Canada and Brazil :)
(And St Lucia)
The Western Hempisphere is mostly water, there's not a lot there compared with the eastern hemisphere. Far East is my favorite long haul destination, but both SubSaharan Africa and Middle East have their charms.
If you live in the Americas Spanish dominates as the main language. In the rest of the world it isn't so significant, which is what they were describing.
That's a rather US-centric worldview. Looking at the official languages of countries, French and Arabic are probably the most useful worldwide, with Spanish third and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.
The top 10 list is, in order, English, Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, French, Malay, Russian, Bengali, and Portuguese.
English we already speak. Mandarin is primarily useful in China and not so much otherwise. Hindustani has the same problem but for India, and there's also a good amount of overlap with English there too. Spanish is the next language in the list, above Arabic and French. Incidentally I speak some French, and didn't find it that necessary for navigating the two French-speaking countries I've visited so far. English was widely spoken and understood.
And I have to point out the irony here of being accused of being US-centric when I'm talking about Spanish, and of visiting other countries where Spanish is dominant (Spain and most of South/Central America).
The interesting statistic is to look at languages with much higher L2 speakers than L1 speakers. English, French, Malay, and Swahili are the main languages in this category, with Russian and Hindi having roughly as many L2 as L1. What these statistics are telling you is which languages act as lingua francas among non-native speakers. By contrast, languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese are spoken by a large number of natives but don't have much use for non-native speakers. It's less useful to learn those kinds of languages unless you specifically want to talk with those speakers.
China is a large country with many regions so that’s a pretty big handwave, like saying ‘English is useless outside of North America.
Not to mention the huge economic and culture importance of it in the future give that vasts amounts of culture products are produced in China.
There may be more countries speaking it, but many of those countries are practically speaking, not as important as China because they don’t produce much exported culture.
Even Korean and Japanese IMHO arguably have greater use dur to Kdrama/pop And Anime. Whereas Arabic would only be useful during tourist trips and practically speaking it’s easier for people to consume exported culture than to travel to dozens of countries.
Measuring the utility of a language by number of countries in which it is spoken, or number of speakers worldwide is pretty meaningless. It's not dissimilar to the argument that children in SE England should all learn French because most of the ferries go to Calais and Boulogne - planes go everywhere.
The utility of a language is a personal thing. CydeWeys makes professional visits to Spanish speaking countries at a rate of 2x per year. That alone makes Spanish more useful than French or Arabic.
If you visit Riga with that kind of frequency, then Latvian is a far more useful language than Spanish, French or Arabic.
> Looking at the official languages of countries, French
Countries with french as an official language only have a total population of 434 million people. And a few of them, like canada, has english as an official language as well. Also, most of the francophile countries are small former african colonies which may one day give up french as an official language and move to english or a native language.
French language's geographical and population reach is smaller than china's. The same applies for arabic and spanish.
> and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.
Which is true, but greater china accounts for a significant amount of land and people.
French, Arabic and Spanish account for 1.3 billion people. China alone has 1.4 billion people.
But this is a moot point since the french, arabs, spaniards and chinese are all desperate to learn english since english ( for the time being ) is the language of culture, science and business. I don't see chinese, french, arabic or spanish unseating english as the world's language.
> Also, most of the francophile countries are small former african colonies which may one day give up french as an official language and move to english or a native language.
That’s not happening outside of a war. It did in Rwanda because of a war where the side that eventually won spent long periods outside their home country and hated French as a symbol of the Belgians. Ditto for Algeria with the French though French is still a lingua franca so pervasive it might as well be official.
Why would an entire country that’s not undergoing a war or revolution stop speaking a language basically all educated people speak? Where is the political benefit in doing so?
Also, it takes a good and organized educational system to get everyone to learn a new language. Without that people only learn the languages that are already spoken around them. I'm struggling to imagine these listed African countries pull it off in the same way that, e.g., Germany did with English post-WWII, or China did with Mandarin.
> Why would an entire country that’s not undergoing a war or revolution stop speaking a language basically all educated people speak?
Usually nationalism and self-interest. It's why england switched from norman french to english a few hundred years ago. It's also why kazahkstan switched from cryllic to latin alphabet recently and has been pushing for kazakh and english education to the detriment of russian.
> Where is the political benefit in doing so?
To get rid of their former foreign masters' language? As france's power and influence continues to wane, what incentive is there for africans to hold onto a language forced upon them by colonizers? The french language is a symbol of humiliation for a lot of african and asian countries and their elites. Especially the nationalists.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it could. Especially if france declines further and the political and financial incentive to stick to french disappears.
This article was hailed by Language Log as being mostly right in its scientific treatment of language[1], which is unfortunately pretty rare in journalism.
Interesting that he says MSA is further from region arabic than Latin is from Spanish. Provides useful context for people familiar with European languages.
It's a somewhat misleading comparison because nobody uses Latin today. MSA however is the language of the news, media and academia so everyone can understand it.
As someone who has studied and mastered Classical Latin and several Romance languages, as well as studied and learned some (but not mastered) MSA as well as an Arabic dialect, I disagree with that assessment, at least to some extent:
Golden Age Latin is incredibly far removed from modern Romance languages. Even a Sardinian or Romanian (said to be the closest Romance languages to Latin) requires years of study to learn to fluently read Golden Age Latin. Vulgar Latin, on the other hand, is much closer to the modern Romance languages. An educated modern Italian or Sardinian could learn to read Vulgar Latin fairly quickly (and sometimes they do know it, from reading the Vulgate Bible).
I'd say the difference between MSA and the North African dialects of Arabic is tantamount to the difference between modern Romance languages and Golden Age Latin. But the difference between MSA and Levantine Arabic is less, and more akin to the gap between Vulgar Latin and Romance languages.
Overall, I'd say the MSA/dialects + Latin/Romance languages is a great analogy.
Duolingo only teaches vocab and shows you example sentences to teach grammar. It doesn't have any explicit teaching, which means it's less effective the further the language is from English. But, they just like advertising their 30 or however many language options.
I disagree. I'm using it to learn another language that is far from English, albeit one with much simpler grammar. I find it more effective than a grammar heavy course. You can know every rule of a language and still not be able to speak it at all. What you need is internalization of those rules via practice, which Duolingo provides.
It depends heavily on the language course. Duolingo's Italian course actually manages to teach grammar and usage through their standard translation setup, while their Japanese course does nothing of the sort. It does not work very well for the latter, I've been through most of it by now and it's just translation-translation-translation, which doesn't teach you much at all, because the translation to English really doesn't work with Japanese. For example, they keep translating 'itadakimasu' (いただきます in Hiragana) to "Let's eat!", but that's not what it means. Otherwise the taxi driver wouldn't ask you '1980 yen itadakimasu'.. :)
(and that's just one, there are so many.)
Are you sure you don't mean "gozaimasu" in the taxi driver example? I learned what little Japanese I do know from Duolingo and it was somewhat useful on a recent trip to Japan. Our tour guides were mostly impressed and certainly didn't point out any glaring issues with it (although that could be Japanese politeness).
I'm absolutely sure - I've lived in Japan, and my wife is Japanese. 'gozaimasu' is a word you add to a sentence to make it (even) more polite. E.g. 'Arigatou' - thanks. 'Arigatou gozaimasu' 'Thank you very much' (or whatever way you want to think about it). Same with phrases for 'good morning' etc.
As for the taxi driver phrase, it goes like this: Normally when you ask for something in Japanese you would use for example 'kudasai' (=> 'give me', to the extent that it can be translated). But the taxi driver is serving the customer, and then that word is out of the question. Instead he is thanking for being given, which is basically what 'itadakimasu' means. And that's why that word works as something you say just before eating, but also why it does not translate to "Let's eat!". And working through phrase after phrase in Duolingo with only that kind of translations just doesn't work very well. And then months of comments and questions from users where they take the translation literally and figure they can use the same word as a metaphor in Japanese, the way the English translation can be used as a metaphor in English.. sigh. You don't learn how the language works that way. It can work as a (small) supplement when learning the language with other better tools, but I will state that you can't learn Japanese through only Duolingo. While you can actually learn Italian that way.
An easy one is to start with Human Japanese (Windows, Android, or iOS). The 'light' version is free on Android and gives you the first chapters (seven, IIRC) to give you a taste of it. After that there are lots of resources.
Language buffs should also check out Maltese, which is basically a form of Arabic written in a Latin script with a heavy admixture of (mainly) Italian and English loan words
"But Western students who sign up for a class in it soon discover that nobody speaks this “standard” as a native tongue; many Arabs hardly speak it at all. "
This is not completely true! I'm a native Arabic speaker and MSA is the official language of newspapers, news segments, and legal documents, governments speeches even wedding invitations and not to forget the Quran and the Arabic bible. So it's spoken and written widely but people tend not to use it that often because it's easier to use shorter words that most of the time sum longer sentences.
There are many places on the margins of the Arabic world where people lack an active command of MSA (as opposed to a merely passive understanding), and where newspapers may well be in French instead of MSA. After all, an active command is learned through formal schooling, and regrettably there are places in the Arabic world where children do not get much formal schooling.
I'm turkish and because of hidden arabic imperialism and assimilation rooted deep in islam, I refuse to use even arabic words which are common in turkish.
this is not a fair comparison. arabic words when spoken, are always assumed to have religious connotations first whereas english is always assumed to have contextual connotations first. it is a huge distinction
Fanfare is surely related to latin fanum, temple, whence fanatic, but good to know there's an arabic connection.
Edit: Some nationalist tendencies would even try to find a turkic root, for everything, and there might be some reason to it with the prominent location of anatolia, but historical location and language is hard to trace, of turks and of whoever else stayed there.
As someone coming from an Arabic Muslim country, I'm really interested to understand why you have this view.
In my country (Egypt), Turkey is actually seen as being a huge part of Islamic history, and it's often cited as a proof of the diversity of the Islamic and Arabic world that it was hugely impacted by the Turkish culture (Words, Foods..etc).
Because Turkey is a very heterogeneous country with different people mostly deeply disliking each other (sad but true). Diversity != tolerance. I lived in the Bay Area and Boston area for years, and for example, these cities are more ethnically and racially diverse, but in my experience Istanbul is much more culturally rich (i.e. there are more heterogeneous groups). Inside this group there are "secular" and "religious" Turks who are roughly half of Turks. Due to years of politics and other stuff, these groups deeply hate each other. They try to live differently, act different, eat different stuff and even talk different languages. I grew up in a "secular" middle/upper class Turkish family (my family was also non-practicing Muslim) and when I met more religious people in my high school years it was clear even the language we speak was different. For me, I grew up in a bubble and never had any contact with any culture other than mine (except some Jewish people who were majority where I lived). Anyway, pretty much all groups had a similar experience, but when one of them has the power, they basically try to control everyone and this brings insane amount of frustration to other side. The entire political history of the Republic is all about seculars trying to make conservatives secular and vice versa. This is so crazy it affects things like language, education, art etc... I was very frustrated of this whole mess and luckily (thanks to my family's wealth) I went to US for undergrad to restart my life.
>I'm turkish and because of hidden arabic imperialism and assimilation rooted deep in islam, I refuse to use even arabic words which are common in turkish.
Ahem, but I think most Arabs complain about Turkish imperialism. I don't think Turkey was ever conquered by the Arabs, but the reverse is true.
They can complain whatever they want to but here are the facts.
Turks brutally were murdered almost 70-80 years to turned to be a muslim and start believing arab god to survive.
Turks adopted all the arabic culture/traditions as part of islam. Turks used arabic alphabet along with the bunch of arabic words. Even nowadays current government is pushing more islamic/arabic values to turkish people as part of islamization process.
I’m not surprised Turkish is simpler. It was “reformed” so much after the foundation of the republic that modern Turks can’t understand Ottoman Turkish. It was written in Arabic script and had a great, great many Arabic and Persian words.
> Owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic or Persian origin, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is considered particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his lengthy speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used a style of Ottoman which sounded so alien to later listeners that it had to be "translated" three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995.
Of course it worked, now we can easily understand other turkic people from Kygrzystan, Uzbekistan, Uyghur, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan.
It’s one of the most important and critical reform, Ataturk did.
Somehow the sound of Arabic accents are quite harsh among all languages I know to my ears. Only German is somewhat harsh - I have a lot of pleasure with Rammstein the metal/rock band sound in German. I always thought metal music would sound quite nice in Several Arabic accents as opposed to let's say a softer language like Italian. In short metal/hard rock in Arabic would sound wonderful whereas in Italian not.
I would disagree with the articles analogy of MSA to arabic dialects is like Latin to Romance languages. The difference is not quite that stark with Arabic.
It's pretty stark. I speak Laventine and I struggle to communicate with my North African friends and often end up supplementing with english.
I'm not sure I'd go this far but some scholars make the case that the dialects are not really dialects, they are there own language that were influenced by Arabic.
Historically it makes some sense because North Africa and the Laventine didn't have much in common with Arabia before Islam so they must've had their own local languages (say Berber or Aramaic) that was influenced by Arabic.
I live in Algeria, you need to know that France colonized Algeria for more than 130 years so like 25% of our words are French when speaking Algerian dialect that's why you struggle. without mention there tons of words from Berbers tribes before Islam that still in use. but the official language is still Arabic Fusha and its used in every official document not dialect.
Plus you get the influence of colonial powers like France in North Africa. Tunisian for example is... challenging if you come at it from the perspective of something like Kuwaiti Arabic.
I only took issue with the analogy, not the starkness. Which I suppose is maybe a different argument since you need to understand the Latin languages relationship to Latin.
But one thing I can say is mabrook (congrats) on the fund raising. Really cool stuff you're doing. At least that word is common across the region.
Urdu is a language which I speak and admire - for the reason that the Hindi-Persian mix along with the Persian syntax/alphabet gives it the ultimate flexibility.
You can capture any sound/accent in Urdu. What I mean is you to take any word in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do so with 100% accuracy.
> What I mean is you to take any word in any language and if you wanted to write it as-is in Urdu syntax, you can do so with 100% accuracy.
Well, except for all the tonal languages, such as Chinese (Urdu has no tonal system). And the various Caucasus languages such as Ubyhk, which has over 80 phonemes (Urdu has 48).
But your point is well-taken, which is that Urdu is a phonetically-rich language.
Disagree. I am a native speaker of Urdu, and Urdu is effective only with significant English loan words. The Persian alphabet also makes little sense - we pronounce seen and suad the same way but write them differently thanks to the Persian alphabet being forced on a language that wasn't meant for it.
And as for the using persian script for urdu, without going into political stuff, I think it is a huge advantage - Persian script is not only used for Persian and Urdu, even Balochi, Daari (Afghanistan), and Pashto uses Persian script. Moreover, by virtue of knowing Persian script, it becomes immensely easy to pick up Arabic (at least reading it).
Then there are few other languages such as Sindhi (Pakistani Sindhi) which have a Persian-based script (few other characters on top of Persian which are specific to the language).
Which means, if you can read Urdu, with little effort, you can start reading Arabic/Balochi/Sindhi which means you can read literature from Pakistan all the way to Morocco.
Chinese also had the same "issue": it is more of a family of languages rather than a language. But the Chinese government has been pushing pretty hard for Mandarin over the past 100 years, such that it has now become the Chinese language. It has cost them a lot of linguistic diversity, but they probably think it pays off in the long run.
- Florentine Italian displaced Sardinian, Napolitan, Romanesco, etc.
- Ille-de-france French displaced Provencal, Occitan, Breton, etc.
- English displaced Scots, Gaelic, Welsh, etc.
Even countrires traditionally considered "nation-states" in a linguistic sense such as Portugal went down this route to some degree, with Mirandese and Barranqueno all but gone nowadays.
Agreed, however in the case of Wales and Portugal there are some ongoing efforts to keep Welsh and Mirandese alive, which of course depends on the willingness of the local population to actually care about it.
Didn't knew that main Italian came from Florence, thanks for the hint.
Nowadays yes, Galician, Basque, Catalan, Valencian and Maiorquim share their status with Spanish on their regions and have newspapers, books, radio and TV shows.
I know my Iberian friends might have an argument about the last three ones, but I opted to list them as such anyway.
Then there are tiny ones like Leonese, which the government provides support for learning and still have small communities speaking it.
The introduction of the radio and the television played a big part in the shift to Italian and French becoming the normal languages for their respective countries over the multitude of regional languages.
Sicilian is still spoken a bit in the New York Metro area - a lot of New Jersey Italians that speak fluent Italian have trouble communicating with people in Italy, because it's Sicilian!
Fortunately for french children that currently aren't forced to learn five dialects to communicate the same thing in five different french cities. The opposite way is leading to a few very bizarre and unfair situations.
It's not exactly the same situation as Mandarin, the French dialects have generally not much to do with each other, it's not really a family of languages like Chinese.
They [the Chinese Communist Party] think suppression of local languages “pays off” in the form of political consolidation/control. Which it certainly does, at the expense of Chinese citizens and their regional cultures.
The Chinese government is by no means unique in this approach. Violent suppression of minority cultures has been a common occurrence in world history.
> Children taken to such institutions were trained to be assimilated to Anglo-Australian culture. Policies included punishment for speaking their local indigenous languages. The intention was to educate them for a different future and to prevent their being socialised in Aboriginal cultures.
> Nearly every modern state promotes a national language.
While I agree that many states engage in implicit or explicit suppression of minority cultures (often worse in the past than today), and many (most?) states have a legally declared official language, your brief summary is a false equivalence. There are many places in the world where e.g. media in local languages is allowed, children are allowed to attend schools speaking their native languages, official government documents are translated into all of the most common minority languages, there is institutional support for cultural preservation, minority religious faiths are allowed to freely practice, etc.
I grew up in Shanghai from 1994 - 2013. To go through your points: 1) media in local languages is allowed and state-funded in Shanghai, 2) Kids did speak Shanghainese in school, though official instruction was in Mandarin, 3) Official documents can't be translated into Shanghainese since it's not written, 4) there is institutional support for cultural preservation - as I write below TV shows are in Shanghainese / Wu, announcements on buses and subways in Shanghainese, there are free Shanghainese classes you can attend, radio shows (all state-backed) that are Shanghainese only or have Shanghainese / Wu radio shows, 5) Shanghai's Religious Bureau was pretty good, I went to 3 Catholic churches in Shanghai growing up, they had Masses in Mandarin, Shanghainese (harder to do now since most priests in China come from smaller, extremely Catholic Villages, not as many from Shanghai), and English. The city gov't gave money to help restore / renovate the Shanghai Cathedral (if you're there you should go visit, it's in Xujiahui) - unclear about other ones but I've been to Protestant churches, been to one Mosque. There are 80 million Catholics in China now, so I think it counts as a minority religious faith.
So to your points, the only one that Shanghai did not fulfill would probably be the "allowed to attend schools speaking their native languages" part. I'm not sure I think Shanghainese should be, maybe it should have a formal class? There are free classes you can take (usually by District), and everyone spoke Shanghainese at home, so I'm not sure it's necessary.
If you go to Shanghai, buses and subways announce in three languages: Mandarin, English, and Shanghainese. I was just there beginning of October and yes, not all buses had this but it was prevalent enough. This means they are promoting the Shanghainese language (a subset of the larger Wu Chinese dialect). There are TV shows in Shanghai / Jiangsu / Zhejiang that are solely in the Wu dialect - and this is not recent. I remember watching shows with my aunts and uncles 15 years ago. XinMin Evening News always had some cartoons (think New Yorker cartoons but not as highbrow) with Shanghainese dialect subtitles (as in Chinese words that most mimic the Shanghainese dialect).
If you go to Guangdong or Guangxi, many people still have trouble speaking Mandarin, especially outside of bigger cities like Guangzhou. In 2010 I was doing some volunteer work in a tiny village a few hours from Guangzhou and the kids we met literally did not understand Mandarin. The CCP struggled really hard to make schooling in Guangdong province taught in Mandarin (but succeeded by the 80s-ish, again, only in bigger cities). Now though, more and more schools are starting to do Cantonese classes with their own textbooks, alongside the standard Mandarin education.
Thanks for chiming in with your direct experience.
I am not an expert, but my impression as an outsider is that Shanghai, as one of the richest and most politically influential cities (and main media centers) in today’s China, can accomplish quite a bit more along these lines than most other cities.
It’s great to hear that there is significant support for continued use of Shanghainese. In your experience, has the government’s approach changed over time? Would you say that support for the Shanghainese language is increasing or diminishing? What about popular awareness/activism?
In your experience do most kids in Shanghai today end up using Shanghainese as their primary language when talking with their peers? I have heard from multiple Chinese immigrants that the younger generation in their home cities now primarily use Mandarin.
> Now though, more and more schools are starting to do Cantonese classes with their own textbooks, alongside the standard Mandarin education.
Until around 1990, they promoted it brutally, fitting the description of the GP. IIRC the history, in the first free elections in Taiwan in the early 1990s, one appeal of the winner is that he spoke the local dialect.
It is a great language to learn. I speak a bit of Khaleej Arabic, and maybe twenty years ago, could read the characters (I'd struggle a bit now) so could read anything that was transliterated.
But it's logical and very easy. Well worth learning even just the fundamentals. There are a few sounds that us English speakers don't necessarily use natively, but on the whole, it's a lot easier to learn (I find) than say a tonal language.
Kaif halach? As a Muslim who gets to hear Arabic several times a week in the mosque and who lived in the Khaleej, too, picking Arabic has been a not so easy thing for me. I think any other language not formally read would still be difficult for me. However, I can read Arabic though still can't speak.
Peter Hessler wrote a wonderful New Yorker story about Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, mixing history and language history, politics, and his personal history in Egypt. It goes into much more detail.
> Over time, Arabs came to associate any encouragement of vernacular writing with colonialism. By the nineteen-fifties, allegiance to fusha was critical to pan-Arabism, because the language created a bond across the Arab world.
> At public universities, math, medicine, and some hard sciences are taught in English. Centuries ago, Europeans needed Arabic to learn medicine, but nowadays even Egyptian medical students don’t use Arabic texts. “What happens is that you reserve Arabic for traditional knowledge,” Doss said. “And it becomes more conservative.”
> After the Chinese, textbook Egyptians seemed remarkably uninspired by development. There were no production quotas, no economic plans, no infrastructure projects. The word “factory” did not appear in the book. People said things like “Ya hag, I’m an engineer and after five years of university, I’m working as a waiter in a restaurant.”
> The language is wonderful for Wanderwort. Arabic imported “shah” from the Persians, and then the phrase al-shah mat—the king died—was introduced to English as “checkmate.”
> Translation into fusha can clean up a politician’s words. For example, in April, 2016, President Sisi discussed political reform with representatives of different sectors of society. Speaking Egyptian, he stumbled: “The ideal shape that you are calling for, that idealism is in books, but we cannot take everything you think about with paper and pen and then ask the state for it, no, it won’t happen . . . but we are on a pathway in which we’re succeeding each day more than the day before.” In Al-Ahram, the quote appeared in fusha as: “Idealism exists in books, but we’re walking the pathway of success, and we will succeed day by day.”
> During the last century, publishers sometimes rejected books that used Egyptian, and even novels about everyday life, like Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy,” featured fusha dialogue that no Egyptian would ever speak. Egyptian Arabic still lacks a standardized orthography, but its use has become more common during the past fifteen years, in part because of the Internet and texting. Nowadays, a writer like Rakha can publish in Egyptian, but to some degree it’s too late, because people rarely read Arabic books of any sort. For Rakha’s third novel, he’s writing in English, primarily because he wants to attract readers.
Arabic's grammar system should also be fascinating for any computer scientist. The majority of MSA vocabulary is generated by predictably transforming "root strings" of 2, 3 or 4 letters. Beyond just English style conjugation, this means that every verb can predictably be transformed into a set of nouns, every noun can be traced back to to its original root verb (the same for adjectives and adverbs).
For example
Root: KTB
Kataba (he wrote)
Kitaab (book) [thing you write]
Maktaba (bookshop / library / office) [place you write]
Kateb (clerk, writer, author) [writer]
(and so on for words that don't translate directly into English)
Root: AML
Amala: (he did / worked)
Amal: (~action) [thing you do / make]
Mamal: (factory) [place you do / make]
Amel: (~worker) [doer, maker, worker]
So on for words like (kitchen = place where you eat, pilot = person who flies).
The previous comment arguing that Arabic is too rigid for new vocabulary overlooks how this rigidity allows for a very well structured grammar, that ability to express thoughts and ideas thag just fall out of a result of the combinatorics.
Similarly, this means that contrary to previous comments, Arabic is also /very well/ encoded for many tasks. Once you know your roots, is very easy to reverse engineer what a lot of commonly used words mean. What's more, you can (and people have) exploited this to write very efficient semantic compression algorithms for Arabic text.
You can't see it in the English letters but these transformations are super algorithmic, you do them by just doubling consonants or adding vowels and it's very intuitive for native speakers.
There are only about a total of 6000 lexical root words in Arabic, so on a computer you can represent each word by encoding it's lexical root, and the grammatical transformation on it. This results in compressed text which is also still very easy to analyse for meaning and sentiment.
You can check out the literature on Arabic natural language processing to see more like this, and a lot of them double as helpful tools for learning Arabic. Google once made an API which would take written Arabic text and infer the locations of all the pronunciation marks from the context and vocabulary, so you can turn text into a form that's easier for beginners to read. Yamli is a popular tool which automatically transliterates Arabic that has been written phonetically in Roman characters back to correctly spelled Arabic letters, so if you've heard a word but don't know how to spell it you can still Google it. I'm sure there are many other cool things I don't know about too.
There may be a lot of spoken dialects, but written Arabic is potentially one of the most standardised and carefully encoded languages there is.
It's certainly interesting in theory. But in practice, how do you distinguish between a bookshop, library, office and desk when all of those things can be referred to by "maktab"?
And does inferring / generating words this way actually work? For example, can I say "makra" (مقرأ) for "Library", a place where you read? Based on the verb "yakra" (read).
I learned MSA and some Egyptian and there really are things you can say in it that are almost impossible to express in English (or the other European languages I know). This is true of any pair of languages of course but structurally the root system allows much more nuance and overtone than more workmanlike languages like English. I believe Hebrew (which I don't speak!) has a similar structure though I've been told by Hebrew+Arabic speakers that Hebrew in practice is less so.
It's a real shame the contemporary literature is so small.
No offense, but this might just be an issue with your command of English. If you can't communicate nuance in a language with north of 600,000 words and an incredibly rich literary tradition, it might not be the language that's the problem. English has aggressively adopted loanwords, which gives it such breadth.
I have very limited knowledge on the topic so take what I say with some skepticism, but one thing is that most words are formed by a variation of a three or four letter root word. So this gives a lot of flexibility and subtlety to the language. Context is everything. A root word for example made up of the letters d - r - b in its most basic form means to hit. But that same root can be used to mean depress (as in a pedal) or separate things (sort) or ring a bell or to agree on a time and place for a meeting, to be unrealistic, to make and example or analogy. The dictionary entry is multiple columns. And this is common in the language.
Further to the competent speaker this results in no difficulty understanding the language give the next point which is its grammer. Words and therefore phrases and scentences have their grammatical role signified by Vowels.
This isn't exactly an unusual concept; you can see the same thing in earlier English, preserved in different forms like "rise" (present) / "rose" (past) / "raise" (causative).
This was once considered significant enough that a distinction was drawn between "strong" irregular verbs that inflect through a vowel change (rise / rose; grow / grew; swim / swam...), and "weak" irregular verbs that derive their irregular past form from the regular one (bend / bent; sleep / slept...).
Yea it goes further than that in Arabic. In the example of r s e only vowels were modified for tense in Arabic you will add consonants to radically change the meaning. Same in hebrew as another commenter showed much better than I did
The root properties of Arabic go far beyond the example you gave of schwache Verben in germanic languages or the historical PIE/PIG roots that give us names like Rhine/Rhône (i.e. Fluß).
For example the word (as written) k-t-b (كتب) means "write" but could just as much mean letters, writer, books etc; these stems are really how you think of the word at a much deeper level than you get out of English etymology[+] or (IMHO) Hanzi radicals. Arabic has some limited case, but the grammar is quite different from PIE languages, lacking a "to be" verb and adjectival/adverbial distinctions (a fast car and a car that was swift are differentiated only by the article).
[+] I really love that English is pretty conservative in spelling so that you can often tell the meaning of the word by looking at how it is written. Languages like German that reform their spelling periodically to match pronunciation shifts snip those connections away (while French goes the other way...there's a reason why a spelling bee can be prime time television in France).
Just off the top of my head, in Hebrew the G-R-L root gives you both fate (goral) and lottery (hagralah). The grammatical form of hagralah connotes causing something to happen, and in that sense the word for lottery has a deeper meaning, that it determines your fate.
Same for the S-V/B-R root - you get clear (savir), explanation (hesber), and what's usually mistranslated as propaganda (hasbarah - Google that transliteration and you'll get lots of political articles). Hasbarah is when you're trying to explain something to somebody so that it will be clear to them.
These words are all completely independent and come from disparate sources in English, but the Semitic root system ties them together.
It is on my list of languages I want to learn! Because I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe. But as others already wrote: the dialects are very strong and different.. So, not sure which one to learn :)
Any advise? Or maybe prediction which will win the "language" war in Europe?
> I think it will be the second most spoken language in Europe
Arabic has 4-12 million speakers in Europe depending on how you count. If we take the most generous estimation (12 million) which compares 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants to native speakers it's at best the 13th most spoken language in Europe[2].
Why do you think it'll displace all the languages that are currently ahead of it?
Such an extrapolation doesn't make sense. You could also assume that all of New York would be speaking Italian by now given historical immigration rates.
Foreign languages only tend to have staying power until the 2nd or 3rd generation. All these immigrants are going to public schools in their respective countries where the official language is spoken, it's expected that they speak it at their jobs etc.
You are overestimating the numbers of Arabic speakers migrating to Europe. (Even during the big wave of 2015, a considerable portion of those migrants were Dari or Pashto speakers.) And even within Europe’s Arab-migration enclaves, the second and third generations usually lose touch with the Arabic language and only know the local language; something the first-generation parents often bemoan.
I would love an answer to this too - Arabic always sounds beautiful to me and I would love to learn at least a little bit. It seems like learning both MSA and a dialect (perhaps Egyptian) might be the way to go, at least from what I can infer from this thread, the article, and conversations I've had with people in the past, but it's probably not as simple as that. It would perhaps be an easier question to answer if there were a specific region you were interested in living in / communicating with people in (but at least in my case, my only goal is "learn some Arabic because it sounds lovely", not "move to Syria and be able to communicate with people there").
Having learned Arabic because my ex girlfriend was Jordanian I can say it is a difficult language, but anything gendered is frustrating and difficult. Its the writing that gets me, the right to left thing is entirely a new way of thinking.
As someone who studied elementary Arabic as a child temporarily living in an Arab country, the only bits that are left with me is the script.
25 something years later, I can still read elementary Arabic words I see on the internet or in TV, but I have forgotten most of the vocabulary and grammar.
No, it's a fairly widespread misconception. People also think Turkish is also somehow related to Arabic and/or Farsi whereas Turkish belongs to a yet another language family (Turkic Languages) and is genealogically entirely unrelated.
Farsi has adopted the same alphabet and has some Arabic loan words but it's a very different language. Farsi is an Indo-European language while Arabic is Semitic (Afro-Asiatic).
> nothing with importance is being produced in Arabic
That crosses into some sort of racial (or whatever) flamewar. Please don't. It leads to destructive dynamics that are just what we're trying to avoid here.
The discussion has been polite so far and it's not an unfair point.
Earlier in the 20th century, German was the language of engineering. Before that, French. Before that, Latin. Before that, something else. Languages and their significance in different fields wax and wane.
That's why I said "some sort of racial (or whatever) flamewar". There's a grey area between commenting on a language and slurring the people who use it, and you stepped into the latter, which is unacceptable here. Please don't do it again.
Almost all of science and philosophy was done in Arabic during the middle ages so "1.4k years" is an overestimate. Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost.
> Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost.
I've just been on a holiday in Venice and Florence, which made me question that standard wisdom, as I learnt more about Venice and Constantinople.
The most important effect of those texts, I guess, was the Italian Renaissance. Petrarch seems to have found his books by hunting through old piles in attics, and the Venetians got (looted?) theirs directly from the Byzantines. It isn't clear to me that the Arabs had a major role.
The Spanish got their classical books from the Moors. But what did they do with those books, and why does that matter?
As a muslim myself, this is not a religion war. It simply is the case. There is no reasonable budget for science in most/all of muslim dominant countries, and the budget that exists is not used effectively. Private sector support for technology is very limited, and medical research especially genetic research is very limited.
I wish this was not the case.
I do not care who produces the science, we all are one and the same. Science benefits all.
Imagine if during the height of the Greek golden age most of the largest cities were razed to the ground and their populations systematically exterminated. That means Athens as we knew it would have been reduced to rubble.
That's what happened during the Mongol Conquests. The fall of Baghdad alone caused at least several hundred thousand people to be killed. The main library, which had collected countless works over the centuries, was gone.
Baghdad was rebuilt, of course. Economically and politically it bounced back since it was still right on the silk road. But scientific study never really recovered there.
One might, on the other hand, wonder what might have happened if the Mongols hadn't been infected by Islamic schism and dynastic troubles and completed their push through into Mamluk Egypt. As pivotal as Ayn Jalut was, the groundwork for that failure was laid in the religious conversion of [1]Berke and the Golden Horde to Islam.
[1] Initially listed his brother Batu, rather than Berke, the first Muslim Khan.
Very true! Egypt was able to continue mostly unscathed. Perhaps this indicates that the Arab golden age was in its twilight? Maybe the Mamluks didn't invest in the sciences as much as the Fatimids?
And even further west Andalusia was still chugging along. That was definitely an important source of knowledge for the first universities in the rest of Europe.
I am hoping israel is giving the kick the region needs in terms of scientific progress. They are kicking ass, pushing boundaries. For them, it might have more reasons beyond scientific curiosity and capitalism, it might also be existential.
Definitely. Iran already has more in publications in total than Israel, although they're still way behind when looking at the per capita number. Hopefully this trend continues.
Those "muslim" scholars were mostly not arab,, and were constantly being accused for heresy.
It is smart people that produce science and not Islam.
The only science Islam has produced is the magical benefits of drinking camel urine and Hijama.
No thanks.
1.4K years is certainly an overestimate. 150 years maybe a better timeframe since the Industrial revolution started going in full swing.
But your same logic applies to any non major Western European language too.
But past 150 years -> don't think any major scientific discovery was done in the Japanese/Korean/Chinese language. All of them was first written down and communicated and published first in the English language.
Not quite - the academic world wasn't Arabic up until the industrial revolution.
The height of Arabic intellectualism was short lived, basically the early middle ages, not even into the Renaissance, let alone the enlightenment.
However PC it is or not - it's true that not much has been done in the Arab world for a long time, say 700 years. Muslim Golden Age: "This period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258 AD" from Wikipedia.
Up until 1950, something like 5% of the Arab world was literate. Very sparse population, very little industry. Without Oil ... most of us would know nothing about 'Arab' - it'd be on our radar as much as Morocco is today (a nominally Arab country without Oil) which is to say not at all. Basically not hugely important to us.
Computers speak voltage, not binary. Come on. Do you write software using binary ?
Technology speaks English.
In theory, you can invent the wheel and use Arabic for programming. Good luck finding resources and finding users who are willing to use your new programming language that uses Arabic alphabet and use your Arabic javadoc.
Using multiple languages to achieve the same goal is stupid. Pure overhead. English dominates the world, end of story.
Calling it the Arab Golden Age is pushing it. It was a Golden Age of the Islamic world but the high culture, science and philosophy was often communicated in Persian and most of the great thinkers we remember were not Arabs.
With the multiple rants about "sharia" here I think it's safe to assume that your original comment wasn't made in good faith. It's no real surprise that people will get offended when you attack their language, it's an integral part of their culture and identity.
Would you please read the guidelines and then stop trolling? Your comments in this thread don't meet the standards of civility and substantiveness of this site and we eventually ban accounts that don't fix that.
Turkish is regular and straightforward. Arabic, not so much. As for speaking, you have to speak like something stuck in your throat and it doesn't sound that pleasant to be honest.
I think Turkish lacks consonants so it was tough for me to learn it with vowels flowing freely like there is no tomorrow. That throat sound, they call it glotral and it is there in many languages such as Spanish German and Irish and Scottish. kh' as in Scots 'loch' or German 'mach' but the Ein sound is toug: Ayin the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿayin Phoenician ayin. Hebrew ʿayin ע, Aramaic ʿē Ayin.svg, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع
> And as for Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf, Arab or rest of North African Arabic -- those are more or less the same.
This is very wrong. The is a massive difference between North African and the gulf arabic. So massive that the speakers will have to revert to the standard arabic to be able to communicate.
You think Iraqi, Syrian, Gulf arabic is the same as Maghrebi arabic? As an Algerian I have yet to meet anyone east of Tunisia who can understand the Maghrebi dialects without us heavily modifying our speech to mimic MSA.
Invention isnt the same as adoption. They were spread to the west, becoming the scientific standard, through muslim/arabic scholars. Had they not done so, the numbers might have stayed in india for centuries, or roman numbers (I V M etc) be adopted into a base-ten system instead.
I've been struggling some to describe numerals and Mikey's to my small children, and it often feels like they area backwards. As you describe this I wonder: are we literally writing them backwards?
Yes, everyone writes the tens to the left of the ones on the page.
Most of their names (at least in Hindi) are recognisable from enlish/latin/greek. Looks like that's not the case in Arabic, unsurprisingly really... unless 7 = سَبْعَة = sabʿä = sabbath counts, but I suspect we got that from semitic.
Yes we are! I first had the same thought when I was reading about Galley division: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_division and then I think I found a website that could switch between english and arabic translations and found a number to compare.
It also encodes ideas very inefficiently for multiple reasons. 1. It's very convoluted and it takes many more words to describe things accurately than latin and/or germanic languages; 2. Due to geographical and cultural separation from the West, the vocabulary is just not adapted to modern life, so "workarounds" need to be used to refer things that have become common in our daily lives. I can recall a humorous TV ad that made fun of this, which involved a wife asking her husband for "the thing" and him being confused about what she was referring to.
If we're to compare it to a programming language, I'd describe it as PHP ecosystem/stdlib/development practices combined with Rust syntax.