Destructive or empowering?

With the introduction of technology into our daily life and amid an identity crisis which faces the new generations, the emerging of Arabizi left the Arabic-speaking nations torn between two major approaches: to keep up with the trend or to maintain the original language.

The newly invented language, mostly used by teenagers through online platforms and texting apps, was faced with bitter criticism by those claiming to defend the Arabic language who warned of dangerous consequences if generations neglect their mother language and replace it with an inadequate version.

Those who oppose argue that using Arabizi, which basically combines English letters and numbers to write Arabic words, is seriously harming the Arabic language as it neglects grammar, dictation and syntax, which may eventually lead to forgetting them and, therefore, to the extinction of the language.

And as language is seen as another side of identity, they warn against slowly losing one’s language, which ends up wiping out the entire individual identity.

Arabizi users, on the other hand, defend their ways, stating the easiness and quickness in using it.

Some also say it serves as a code understood and passed among users and a trend they follow.

Despite the majority’s strong favouring of the first party’s argument, there is always room for a different opinion.

The Arab nations’ long years of defeat and lagging behind made every act involving the use of a Western element seem a sign of weakness, including language and culture.

The introduction of an English-letter-dependent language served as a perfect example for this argument and gave opponents one more reason to
refuse it.

However, there is a different perspective in this. The very act of using language elements that leave the average speaker of the language confused and lost to the point of not being able to understand his/her own mother language is a very powerful move.

To decompose and break the language, to alter the rules, and to use letters and numbers in the same word to create a new language only understood by those who created it is very smart and cannot be, in any case, categorised as a weakness.

The key in this is to change the perspective on this matter and stop the self-destructive theories that only limit creativity and kill any chance of reaching out to the other, which is an attempt to enforce our existence as a powerful nation in the new world order.

One’s mother tongue is very important and should never be neglected; learning every aspect of it is crucial, no doubt, but it should never stop us from using other languages and finding out what our intelligent minds are capable of.

Duaa Saif,
Amman