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Feb 11·edited Feb 11

Muslims in the subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, West Africa, Somalia and Ethiopia as well as other non Arab countries have historically been learning Arabic in their traditional seminaries, producing scholars whose native langauge is not Arabic who can write books in Arabic... Nadwatul Ulama in Luckow India is a case in point as well as the amazing speakers of Arabic from Ethiopia, Somali and West africa ... the modern Arab educationalists need to explore all these approaches also and not just confine themselves to European language focused methods discussed in second language acquisition textbooks....

Also students should be forced to speak MSA after a certain stage in schools, with penalties for not... there are institutions in Pakistan and West Africa i am aware of who implemented a financial penalty approach (whoever speaks other than Faseeh Arabic has to pay an X fine) and produced good results...

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Found this: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/between-modern-standard-arabic-egyptian-disney-lost-eman-abdo

Looks like Disney is back to Egyptian Arabic. Can other cartoons follow?

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Thanks for this interesting article!

What about the use of Arabic varieties online? From what I read (for instance this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/128607/1/Alshutayri-OSACT3-Ready.pdf ) on social media about half of the messages are in dialect only (and the other half is in "pure" MSA and/or MSA blended with some dialect words, expressions, or grammar).

And there are initiatives to promote Arabic varieties are distinct languages online. For instance:

https://arz.wikipedia.org/ (Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia)

http://ary.wikipedia.org/ (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia)

Several scholars compare the situation of MSA today to Latin in the Middle Ages: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/145642785.pdf

New local varieties emerged from Latin (French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) but Latin continued to be the language of religion (the Bible and masses were only in Latin) + the State + the elite and the educated. And it was the prestige language and lingua franca uniting all the Christian world. Until the local languages were standardized, officialized, and gradually replaced Latin. This was a slow process over centuries: the Bible was first translated into French in 1226. French replaced Latin as the official language of France in 1539 (Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts). And the mass was allowed by the Vatican in other languages than Latin in... 1969 (post–Vatican II Mass)!

What do you think of these developments? Is "The Arabic Language: A Latin of Modernity" (to quote the above paper)?

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