I don’t think a language becomes obsolete, its speaker do. I’ve been in so many discussions about this but the truth of the matter is: If you have power, wealth, and technological innovation your language becomes the de facto standard.

Arabic has heavily suffered in the past (1600s onwards) but I believe today a renaissance is in the making.

Then again bilingualism or trilingualism in Lebanon’s case (Jealous!) is a wonderful advantage to the people, I’m definitely not trying to deny that. My argument is that stigmatizing the 5th or 6th most spoken language in the world as obsolete is outrageous.

Arabs invented the fucking zero and “algebra” and “algorithms” are names of Arabic mathematicians. So even when you think you’re doing math in English, you’re doing it in Arabic.

Now back to read the rest of your blog post.

Morocco is very similar to Lebanon in this respect, except that the Arabic dialect everyone learns is well…a mess

Fighting to preserve our Arabic language shouldn’t get in the way of acknowledging our cultural diversity. I’ve always lived in Lebanon but I can’t do without French and English.

When it comes to Arabic, even as a child I felt confused by the fact that Fus7a Arabic as taught in classrooms, although a beautiful, rich language, is just too different from the Lebanese dialect I used with my parents (even without the foreign inserts). Maybe, instead of holding on to literary Arabic (with all due respect to Jahiliyya literature), we should try to find a way to bring modern Arabic into classrooms. Because that’s the language we really use.

I was born and bread in Sydney Australia and went to a lebanese catholic school that tought me arabic. Every summer i go to lebanon, and pple there refuse to talk arabic even if i’m speaking fluent arabic to them. They will always reply in english.