Arabic; a Critical Language

Still on the topic of the spotlight on Arabic, I picked up this interesting article via Athena entitled "Arabic speakers still scarce"...

Hoping to make a difference in the world (and perhaps sensing the prospect of likely employment), U.S. students are flocking to newly formed Arabic classes on high school and college campuses.

Enrolling is the easy part.

First, the students learn that Arabic text reads from right to left but that numbers flow from left to right. Letters change form, depending on where they are placed in a word. Some sounds have no English equivalent.

And then the really hard part sinks in.

Classical Arabic, which is what's generally taught in U.S. classrooms, is the equivalent of Medieval English. It's fine for literature and diplomacy but virtually useless on the streets of Cairo. And Egyptian colloquial Arabic differs from other colloquial Arabic tongues.

It's no wonder the dropout rate is so high

Now here's the interesting part:

The military, the FBI and the CIA all have sharply increased recruiting of people who speak the languages used on those tapes, but the supply falls far short of the need, particularly for the most-skilled linguists.

At the State Department, for instance, only 10 of 34,000 employees are rated fully fluent in Arabic.

And yet more interesting

In his recent budget, President Bush proposed an initiative to address the shortfall by jump-starting training in such critical languages as Arabic, Farsi, Hindi and Urdu.

The $114 million program would fund experiments in language instruction and study-abroad opportunities for up to 3,000 high school students. It would pay for 300 teachers to come to the USA and study-abroad opportunities for high-school language teachers. It also would create a corps of 1,000 experts in critical languages to assist the federal government or teach in K-12 schools.

It saddens me to think of the motive behind this recent emphasis on teaching Arabic abroad, but I still think we can take advantage of that from a different angle. Athena points out that "there are only a few study abroad options in the Arab world... and too few scholarships for students who want to do so." And in commenting on the ten state department employees who are fluent in Arabic, she says "At the least, I hope those ten are of Arab heritage, because understanding cultural aspects is just as important as language translation."

Indeed it is. And this is where we cannot count on the US government to ensure this education. Our universities, academic institutes, NGOs, and embassies abroad should all start thinking of offering scholarships and interesting exchange programs for students in Europe and America to come here and better understand our culture. Private sector companies can offer internships (Just like the wonderful example Ahmad Humeid gave us of Syntax). I know UJ has an interesting program of Arabic for Foreign Speakers that draws a lot of students, and I know some other universities have similar programs, but the number of such initiatives and their impact are still not comparable to exchange programs in the opposite direction. As an example, I've always admired what the French Cultural Center in Jordan does to encourage education of French language here, and how young students are motivated to excel by being offered trips and exchanges and scholarships in France. So here's a suggestion for our ambassador in Washington to work on, and our ambassadors in Europe. I hope somebody picks up the message.