The Arabic Language

Sesame Street
(
Iftaḥ 
yā Simsim
). In the memorandum prepared by the makers of the programme, 
three categories of linguistic phenomena in Standard Arabic were distin
-
guished: indispensable features of Standard Arabic that were to be used in spite 

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The Emergence of Modern Standard Arabic 
237
of their absence in the dialect (e.g., the case endings); features that should be 
used sparingly (e.g., the passive form of the verbs); and features that should be 
avoided altogether (e.g., the superlative 
al-ʾafʿalu
, the prepositions 
ka-
‘like’ and 
siwā
‘except’). In the language of the programme, these principles have been 
followed rather closely. Moreover, the players, including the small children 
who play an essential part in the 
Sesame Street
concept, make remarkably few 
performance errors in their use of Standard Arabic. On the whole, colloquial
-
isms are used very infrequently, and yet there is a certain informal quality in 
the discourse, achieved mostly by the use of intonational patterns and interjec
-
tions rather than the introduction of grammatical and/or lexical items from the 
colloquial language.
The 
Iftaḥ yā Simsim
experiment proves that it is indeed possible to use an 
informal register of Modern Standard Arabic. It is true that in some Arab countries, 
in particular Egypt, the programme was criticised because it allegedly contained 
too many colloquial items. But on closer observation it turns out that this criti
-
cism was biased: the pronunciation of the 
jīm
as [ʤ] rather than [g] can hardly 
be regarded as a regionalism, and the selection of lexical items in any pan-Arabic 
programme will probably never satisfy everybody.
The future will have to decide whether or not the introduction of an informal 
register of Standard Arabic stands any chance. The influence of satellite television 
throughout the Arab world, in particular al-Jazeera, may be expected to lead to an 
increased use of Modern Standard Arabic because of the participation of speakers 
from all Arab countries in the programmes. No study has yet appeared about the 
language use on this channel, but an analysis of the discussions on al-Jazeera 
about the Arabic language (Suleiman and Lucas 2012) indicates that most partici
-
pants in the debates agreed that the position of Arabic is endangered, according 
to some of them because of an Orientalist or Western plot to weaken the Arab 
world. Many of them referred to the period of the 
Nahḍa
as an example of how 
the language could be adapted to the modern age and made more accessible to 
the people through simplification (
taysīr
), without giving in to the pressure of 
the 
ʿāmmiyya
.
Suleiman and Lucas make the interesting point that even though the debates 
were all held on al-Jazeera, most participants did not seem to be aware of the 
actual linguistic influence of such transnational channels and retained as their 
point of reference the debates in the nineteenth century. Their discourse made 
clear, moreover, that there is still a tight connection between language and 
identity in the Arab world, which is interpreted by most of the participants as a 
powerful motive to stick to 
fuṣḥā 
norms. 
The influence of social media, too, cannot but affect the future of Arabic, given 
the intensity of the participation, to which events during the Arab spring contrib
-
uted significantly. The 2011 report by the Dubai School of Government indicates 
that the number of Facebook users in the Arab world grew from 11 million to 

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238
The Arabic Language
21 million in just one year (2010), 22 per cent of them in Egypt alone. The 2012 
report by the same institution highlighted the impact of Facebook on societal and 
cultural change, and pointed at an interesting linguistic side-effect, the interface 
language choice. While in Saudi Arabia, 60 per cent of the users choose Arabic and 
40 per cent English, in the Gulf states less than 10 per cent prefer Arabic as inter
-
face language. In Morocco, on the other hand, about 80 per cent prefer French 
and 20 per cent Arabic. In Egypt, the percentage of those who prefer Arabic is 
roughly the same as in Saudi Arabia, but according to the report this number 
is rising swiftly. The same trend is visible in Twitter, where the percentage of 
Arabic-language tweets rose from 48 per cent to 62 per cent in just six months 
(September 2011 to March 2012).
The increased use of Arabic in social media does not mean that the use of 
Modern Standard Arabic has also increased. On the contrary, most of the Arabic 
on Facebook is of a mixed style, and when Arabic is used in tweets, especially 
when it is transcribed into Latin characters (the so-called Arabish), most of the 
message appears to be in vernacular rather than Standard Arabic (see Chapter 9, 
p. 169).