Document Type : Keynote Address
Author
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University
Abstract
In his keynote speech given at the conference on Internationalizing Arabic Language, Mohamed Enani states that there are varieties of Arabic. However, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the language used in the Arabic press, in the media, in books written or translated into Arabic, and in all official documents throughout the Arab homeland. Should we then ignore the local varieties, whether regarded as dialects, pejoratively referred to as the vernaculars, or raised to levels of recognition, undreamt of in our tradition, by modern linguists? Certainly not. Local varieties, I shall argue, depend on MSA for all or most abstractions used in philosophic and scientific discourse, as well as the expression of complex thought. The real test of a living and complete language should first combine its ability to perform the daily jobs of expression and communication, for practical purposes, among people of whatever degree of education, and secondly the capacity for abstract thought, which is the hallmark of real learning, real progress, and the truly enquiring mind born in 17th-century Europe. For this, each local variety makes use of MSA whose influence on modern thought has given birth to whatever abstractions were formed, as well as the freshly coined ones. MSA is international in the sense that it is recognized at the UN as such, together with the old colonial languages (English, French and Spanish) as well as Russian and Chinese. The other meaning of international may be surprising to some of my listeners, as it is a novel meaning adopted from Translation Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, namely that of a lingua franca.
Foreword by Loubna Youssef.
Keywords
Keynote speech delivered in the conference "Internationalizing the Arabic Language" (2013) co-organized by the Departments of Arabic Language and English Language; published in the book entitled Internationalizing the Arabic Language, eds. Loubna A. Youssef and Awad Alghobary, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (2015), pp. 7-19.
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