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Home  News Colloquial Arabic holding back development in Arab world
Colloquial Arabic holding back development in Arab world |
Written by AdNation Editor, Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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 Last week saw the digital marketing conference Click 4.0 take place in Dubai. The event was sponsored by media monitoring company Mediastow, whose managing director, Mohamed Elzubeir, spoke at the conference and called for Arabic web developers and other online content creators to stick to standard Arabic.
"Arabic is the language of government, media, education and businesses for many countries in the Middle East and North Africa," he said, according to a press release. "We were pleased that Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE are among the first to get internet addresses in Arabic, following final approval by ICANN. This represents the first major change to the internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s. However, the real issue lies in using a standard Arabic that everyone understands in the Arab world so that our content on the web becomes bigger in size and usage."
The current lack of Arabic web content, he suggested, creates a 'vicious circle' as it discourages searching for Arabic content, resulting in a lack of incentive for people to create it in the first place, if it's just going to be ignored.
"There is a paucity of native Arabic content in the web. It is not acceptable anymore that Arabs use English alphabet to write Arabic in their chats and social media websites. Adding salt to the wound, the lack of Arabic support in software is a big stumbling block in enhancing the Arabic web presence. We need to encourage people to write in real Arabic terminology and preserve the Arabic alphabet which will result in more Arabic content on the web," he continued. "On the other side, colloquial Arabic will hinder the development of the Arab web by having 22 versions used on the web, instead of having one language used by 22 countries, reducing the impact of our language with the outside world."
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