Professor of Language and Linguistics Dr. Saad Maslouh - who was a guest on the "The Interview" program - expressed his pessimism about the situation the Arabic language has reached today, as it is in crisis, and parents do not encourage their children to know it and acquire knowledge of its culture, and the labor market insists on the importance of the foreign language. .

Although the crisis of the Arabic language is linked to the level of education in general in the Arab world, the guest of the episode (26/2/2023) of the “The Interview” program denied that Arabic is incapable of delving into technological and technical fields, as some accuse it.

He referred to a lecture he had delivered entitled "The Difficulty of Arabic... Reality or Illusion?", pointing out that there is a difference between the difficulty being due to the nature of the language itself, to the problems of its teaching, or to the societal position on its teaching, and he asked: Is the grammatical system in the language difficult and complex? And not available to receive and receive?

Maslouh replied that he tried to prove that the Arabic language has a very logical and very easy system, and that in other languages ​​it is more complex, for example the cases of inflection in Arabic 3 and in the Russian language 6, and the adjective and the described in Arabic are dependents and in Russian no.

The linguistic expert said that Arabic belongs to what they call the languages ​​of the free format, which retains diacritical signs that indicate the linguistic function, meaning the nominative is the active sign, the accusative is the objectivity sign, and the prepositional sign is the addition, that is, there are vocal signs that define the grammatical functions, and therefore it can advance and delay in the sentence. Arabic remains the same function, and these things do not exist in the English language, which the expert in linguistics said also lacks the aesthetics of the free pattern in which rhetoric combines with grammar.

How much Arabs care about their language

The professor of linguistics does not agree that the Arabic language is only the language of literature, beauty and poetry, saying that the issue is related to the extent of the Arabs' care for their language and the role of the authority in taking care of it, and revealed that he wrote an introduction to the book "Dictionary of Quranic Readings" by the Egyptian academic and writer Dr. Abdel Latif Al-Khatib, in which he said, "The Language alone deserves an Arab summit."

Regarding the role of Arabic language academies in caring for the Arabic language, Maslouh - who is a member of the Libyan Language Academy - indicated that these academies, since their inception, have played a major role in caring for the language, whether in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and other Arab countries, but what befell them general climate.

It is noteworthy that Maslouh was born in Minya Governorate, Upper Egypt in 1943 to a father who fell in love with science and did not fall in love with degrees. He obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Dar Al Uloom in 1963 and also obtained a master’s degree from it one year after the setback in a phonetic study of the dialects of the people of Minya in the light of linguistic geography.

From the Russian capital, Moscow, he obtained a doctorate in linguistics, specializing in laboratory acoustics, from the Institute of Asian and African Countries at the university. He also previously worked as a professor in a number of Arab universities.

He was one of the first to introduce statistical linguistics and stylistics as a specialization within the language sciences, and he has several books, such as “On Arabic Rhetoric and Linguistic Stylistics,” and several translations.