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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Lebanon
Index
Arabic is the official language, as well as the religious
language for Muslims, Druzes, and some Christian communities. Like
Hebrew and Aramaic, it is a Semitic language. One of the earliest
recorded instances of Arabic is found in an Assyrian account of a
war fought with Arabs between 853 and 626 B.C. Arabic inscriptions
in various alphabets have been found on the Arabian Peninsula. By
the time of the Prophet Muhammad (sixth century A.D.), Arabic had
developed into a refined literary language. The Arab conquest
brought it to Lebanon.
In Lebanon, as elsewhere in the Arab world, there are
essentially two forms of Arabic--colloquial, of which there are
many dialects, and classical. Classical Arabic, uniform throughout
the Arab world, is chiefly a written language. It is also used for
public speeches, poetry recitations, and radio and television
broadcasts. A Modern Standard Arabic has been developed from the
old classical language of the Quran, the Islamic scripture; the
syntax has been slightly simplified, the vocabulary considerably
expanded, and the literary style made less complex.
The classical Arabic language is the principal unifying factor
in the Arab world. It is revered by Arabs as the symbol of their
unity, as a sacred language, and as the vehicle of a great
literature. They think of it as their original language and of
their spoken dialects as corruptions.
Lebanese colloquial developed from the Syrian Arabic dialect,
which includes the Arabic spoken by Jordanians, Palestinians,
Syrians, and Lebanese. It has been influenced by Aramaic, which
preceded it in the area. Within Lebanon, the dialect changes from
region to region, and the dialect of the Druzes is regarded as
distinctive.
Colloquial dialects are seldom written, except for some novels,
plays, and humorous writings. However, a call for the adoption of
the spoken language to replace the classical as the national
language emerged in the 1960s among Maronite political and
intellectual circles. The movement, which was championed by the
prominent Lebanese poet and political activist, Said Aql, attracted
a number of supporters by 1975, with the rise of a right-wing trend
to dissociate Lebanon from its Arab ties. Nevertheless, few took
the movement seriously, apart from a handful of writers who wrote
in colloquial Lebanese.
Proposals also exist for improving the Arabic alphabet and for
updating Arabic vocabulary to include scientific and technological
terms. In written Arabic, short vowels and doubled consonants are
not indicated but must be supplied from the context.
Scholars tend to adopt foreign words without changing them and
use them in both Arabic and Roman alphabets. The language academies
in Cairo and Damascus, apprehensive of this practice, have achieved
a certain amount of success in forming new words from old Arabic
roots.
Data as of December 1987
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