The German leader Bismarck was asked about the most terrible events that occurred in the eighteenth century, and he replied: "The English colonies in North America have taken the English language as an official language," which means that he wished that these colonies, with large German communities, would take German as an official language instead. from the English in order to guarantee its loyalty to Germany.
Despite Bismarck's mastery of five languages, he remained clinging to his language, because language is the most important characteristic of a nation's cultural identity and determines the affiliation of its members.
Most nations have a single language that forms the strongest link between the members of this nation. The nation is described by its language and the language by its nation, such as Chinese, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and others.
During the French Revolution, the monk Gregoire submitted a report to the Revolution Council on the situation of the French language, indicating that more than 6 million French people living in the countryside do not speak French, and he suggested fighting local dialects and spreading the standard French language instead.
The Americans took this English lesson, forbidding the Japanese in concentration camps during World War II from speaking their own language as "the language of the enemy."
On the other hand, the Japanese rejected the conditions of the United States of America related to language in the aftermath of World War II, clinging to their language despite abandoning their army and their constitution, because the Japanese realized that the loss of the nation resulted in the loss of its language.
Today, Americans of Japanese descent still teach their children their mother tongue despite their new home in the United States.
Prior to that, and during the French Revolution, the monk Gregoire submitted a report to the Revolution Council on the situation of the French language, indicating that more than 6 million French people living in the countryside do not speak French, and he suggested fighting local dialects and spreading the standard French language instead.
In Vietnam, the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh famously said: “Keep the clarity of the Vietnamese language as you keep your eyes clear. Avoid using a foreign word where you can use a Vietnamese word.”
Ho Chi Minh was not closed in culture, he was fluent in speaking three languages, but he realized that learning foreign languages is not at the expense of the mother tongue, and that this language cannot be erased or abandoned for any reason, so abandoning it leads to humiliation, which is what ended Mustafa Sadiq Al-Rafi’i referred to him by saying: “The language of a people is not humiliated except by humiliation.”
safety valve
Therefore, the language is not a secondary matter or an ornament that nations are proud of as much as it is the valve of the security of cultures, which is what the French realized when they revised their country’s constitution in 1992 to make the French language an official language, and that revision became the compass of French politics, and one of its manifestations is its diplomatic war against the United States During the negotiations of international trade agreements, which ended with the victory of the French by imposing a cultural exception and including this rule in the unified constitution of the European Union.
We cannot forget the Toubon Law for the Protection of the French Language in 1994, which obligated television channels to dub all foreign-language programmes, as well as the position of French President Jacques Chirac at the EU summit in Brussels in 2006, when he withdrew from the conference hall after Gernst Spielberg began The President of the European Central Bank read out the report in English, and after President Chirac asked him: “Why do you speak English?” He replied that it was “the language of the global economy.” Chirac and his delegation did not return to the conference hall until Spielberg spoke in French.
Languages, like humans, have a life cycle: they are born, grow, and die.
There are languages that have already disappeared, and the twenty-first century will witness the extinction of at least 3000 languages, and statistics confirm that the world witnesses the death of a language every half month, and this means that we lose 25 languages in one year.
France was not the only country that has struggled since the 1990s to protect its national language. In 1994, the United States of America itself rejected the decision to teach Spanish in elementary schools in California.
Dead languages and living languages
Western nations were keen on their languages. The Arab nation, whose language constitutes an essential factor in the formation of its children on the cultural, intellectual and psychological levels, past, present and future, is not indispensable for its language for objective and fateful reasons.
There are approximately 300 million Arabic speakers in the Arab world, as well as those who speak it in many regions of the Islamic world, and this numerical strength allows the Arabic language to maintain the condition of circulation that prevents any language from disappearing, and Arabic comes in seventh internationally Given the number of speakers of it within the Arab region, and a better rank by measuring its prevalence and the number of speakers around the world.
Undoubtedly, the loss of language portends the loss of the identity of any nation, as it is the wedge of their unified identity, so every nation depends on its language to strengthen its existence.
And if we look at the experiences of other nations, we will realize the extent of the confusion that they are experiencing due to different languages, for example, the European Union failed to achieve linguistic unity despite its success in achieving some aspects of economic, security and political unity, and it spends more than 40% of the budget of its administrative institutions In translation, the Arab countries do not face this linguistic problem, as the Arabic language remains the language of commercial, cultural and educational exchanges.
It is useful to note that languages, like humans, have a life cycle: they are born, grow and also die.
There are languages that have already disappeared, and the twenty-first century will witness the extinction of at least 3000 languages, and statistics confirm that the world witnesses the death of a language every half month, and this means that we lose 25 languages in one year.
This seems an exciting number, but it is a bitter truth. Canadians woke up to the results of a shocking report in 1998, showing that the fate of 47 of the 50 languages spoken in the country was destined to become extinct. In use, the same situation has prevailed in North and South America and Africa, where hundreds of languages are dying, especially those spoken by a small number of people, as there are more than 548 languages spoken by only about 100 people!
In the face of these alarming numbers, the Arabic language stands firm as it has throughout the ages, because it is one of the most powerful languages in the world and has enriched it with vocabulary and literature, prose and poetry, as it was before Islam. One to all nations that embraced Islam, so the Arabic language has become a language of worship, and its Holy Book can only be understood through understanding the Arabic language, and perhaps this is one of the aspects that distinguishes the Arabic language and is not shared by many languages.
In the modern era, the relationship of the victor to the loser has changed, and the Arabs feel the need to learn the language of the conquered, technology has replaced the West, economic and political control of the Arab world, and the colonial era revealed what the oppressive powers committed against the cultures of peoples, specifically their language.
The Arab revolution..and its demise
History testifies to the spread of the Arabic language with the Islamic conquest, and I refer in particular to the position that the language acquired when the Arabs were at their height in Andalusia, where universities, literature, art, music and distinctive Arab architecture spread, at a time when Europe was groaning under the weight of the Middle Ages and suffering from decadence and domination. The church, and the king’s men, rulers and elites sent their sons to learn in Arab universities in the Arabic language in Andalusia, and scholars such as Ibn Rushd, Al-Khwarizmi and others were well-known in Europe and formed - later - a springboard for its renaissance.
But when things relapsed and Andalusia fell and the era of Western colonization of the Arab world began, the Arabic language declined, because its weakness and strength are linked to the strength and weakness of its nation, its strength is strengthened, and its weakness is weakened.
Among the most prominent signs of the spread of the Arabic language and its impact on the languages of other nations is what was stated in a study entitled “The Universality of the Arabic Alphabet” that 164 languages in the world were written in the Arabic script, including Urdu, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Pashto, Baluchi, Dari, Azeri and Swahili. 40% of the words of the Arabic lexicon. The orientalists Angelman and Dozy indicate in their book “The Dictionary of Spanish and Portuguese Vocabularies Derived from the Arabic Language” that the Portuguese language contains more than 3000 Arabic words, and it is not a matter of quantitative or formal influence, so the meaning of languages containing Arabic refers us to The tool of thinking in these languages is the Arab culture. Words cannot be extracted from their functions and their intellectual predicate. Thus, Arabic becomes a language and thought, infused into the Western mind, just as the Arab scientific heritage was the basis for many Western sciences.
Unfortunately, in the modern era, the relationship of the victor to the loser has changed, and the Arabs feel the need to learn the language of the conqueror, technology has taken place and the West has taken control of the Arab world economically and politically.
Perhaps the colonial attempts that occurred in the Maghreb to obliterate the linguistic identity is the best evidence of the colonizer’s awareness of the role of language in the westernization of peoples.
Among the signs of these attempts is what the French Prime Minister Camille Chautoun did during the colonial period by banning the use of the Arabic language and making French the language adopted in Algeria.
No one denies the consequences of the linguistic conflict in Algeria, and the impact of the French language on generations of writers and intellectuals.
Over time, the language issue became more thorny due to the rush of Arabs to teach English to their children as a requirement of employment and dealing with technology.
While the Arabs in countries with high population density, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and others, were able to withstand the challenges of the language relatively, the situation is different in countries with limited population, such as Qatar, the Emirates and Kuwait, whose citizens may not exceed 20% of the population, while the rest belong to them. To all countries of the world, so voices have risen warning of the danger that the Arabic language may face in these countries.
Arabic Revival
But the picture is not completely bleak, and let us here look at what the Arabic language has achieved in the field of media. Al-Jazeera, which is one of the most important international channels, has proven its effectiveness in the Arabic language, and has prepared the new media context for the emergence of Arab satellite channels that have influence, in addition to the many radio stations that broadcast in Arabic in The Heart of the West, the oldest of which is the British Arabic Broadcasting Corporation "BBC", Radio "Monte Carlo", and other radio stations that broadcast from Europe, America or Africa as well, targeting Arab and Islamic communities, and the Arabic language occupies the third place in it after English and French.
We in Qatar are very keen on our Arab affiliation and our association with this language, which represents our past, present and future, and we feel the state and citizens of the danger that this great language is exposed to, and we realize that we have a responsibility towards our belonging and our history to avoid the dangers facing the Arabic language, especially with the spread of foreign universities and schools that It was necessitated by the development process and interaction with the scientific, economic and political development that cannot be ignored.
Therefore, the state issued Law No. 7 in 2019, which requires everyone to abide by the Arabic language in dealings and meetings, and imposes penalties on those who violate the law.
It is an excellent law, and its implementation would contribute effectively to addressing the challenge, but it has not been fully implemented to achieve its objective.
Hence, one of the first topics that the elected Shura Council noticed was the issue of the Arabic language, and I was invited to participate in the plenary session devoted to this topic, and I stated categorically that the Arabic language constitutes our cultural security, and everyone responded to this proposition and found a great resonance with public opinion in the media in both parts. traditional and social, and is still the subject of debate and dialogue.
The Arabic language for us is not just a tool for communication, but rather it is our identity, and it is our past that stores our heritage and the history of our ancestors, and it is the language of our faith without which our worship is not complete, and it is our future, and without it we lose what distinguishes us and what connects us with our past, and it is our present without which we cannot be described as a nation. .
Despite what we have indicated that the influence of the Arabic language and culture transcends it to many languages and cultures in the world, our call today to preserve the Arabic language does not mean a state of estrangement with other languages. Languages are, in the end, living organisms that interact, overlap, and are affected by each other, so it was throughout history, and so it must continue.
The concern that we have about our Arabic language and the fear of the influence of foreign languages, especially English, is not a concern confined to us. Rather, the French, Germans, Spaniards and others have the same concern, and they take measures to preserve their languages from weakness or loss.
Since 1973, the Arabic language has gained its place as one of the main languages in the world, which obliges its people to feel its importance and preserve it.
As for the Arab communities living abroad, they have a double responsibility to realize all these dimensions of the Arabic language, and to be keen on this great language by teaching it to their children, because it represents their connection to their past, and their commitment to the future of their nation.