Chatter on social media cannot be used to determine the value of any language, since most of these exchanges answer to no scientific standards, and most users of these platforms cannot even spell correctly, let alone observe the rules of grammar.
Every language in the world has changed, as young people everywhere have devised their own tools of communication, built from symbols and numbers.
For this reason, no computer on earth can fully translate and bridge the various dialects of a single language. This is not peculiar to Arabic; most of the world's languages face the same fate, dialects and all, when algorithms try to link and translate among them. Arabic is simply one of these global languages, and its essence has suffered no distortion.
Some writers have taken to be a problem between Arabic and its dialects on Facebook, and in truth, they are mistaken. The fault lies neither in formal Arabic, nor in its dialects, nor in the mixing of the two.
The issue is the limitations of those who design the databases and algorithms behind online translation dictionaries, above all those of sites like Facebook. What some imagine to be a flaw peculiar to Arabic and its dialects can also be identified in French, English, Italian, and their dialects too.
The size and value of a language (and how closely bound they are to dialects) cannot be assessed by scribbles riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. They are assessed by studying literary output in poetry, short stories, and novels, and by how flexibly the language can absorb the new sciences through translation, carrying them into the mother tongue by derivation.
Arabic outperforms other languages (some of which lack even the dual number and the distinction between masculine and feminine) to say nothing of spoken vernaculars that have pressed dead, buried letters into service in a bid to rival Arabic, all while wanting for the most basic rules of grammar.
Chatting in spoken dialects has not harmed Arabic alone. Having a conversation in English with someone in Scotland is not the same as speaking with a South African, though the language is the same. This owes to the profusion of dialects that have drifted from the parent tongue. The British dialect, or accent, is full of colloquialisms and unsounded letters.
Britain has more than 100 accents, and these have in turn spawned new variants.
The United Kingdom is home to Welsh English, Scottish English, Estuary English, Mancunian, Yorkshire, Ulster English, and more - and within each of these sit further accents, foremost London's Cockney. Yet walk into London today and you hear a jumble of them all, Cockney only rarely.
In and around Newcastle there is the demanding Geordie, and the still more demanding Scots; that is no surprise, given how close the two lie. There is Liverpool's Scouse, Birmingham's Brummie, and others past. For all that, the English of the BBC (so-called "posh English," or Received Pronunciation) remains the standard. So it is with us: our dialects are many, yet Modern Standard Arabic remains the sanctioned form, because it is the one that unites.
Language is not merely words; it carries a cultural freight that mirrors ways of thinking and communicating. That is why chatting with a Scot differs from chatting with a South African- or with an Indian, or an Arab from the “Mashriq” or the Maghreb (even when the shared language is English): the variety of dialects and accents accounts for it. English is not uniform in pronunciation or vocabulary; it is shaped by local culture, by history, and even by the other languages it has mingled with.
The BBC website once ran a feature titled "Native English speakers are the world's worst communicators." This puts paid to the claim that the linguistic crisis is Arabic's alone. On the contrary: the cohesion of Arabic and its closeness to its dialects have been plain for centuries - through the age of colonialism and cultural estrangement alike - and its unity has held.
Perhaps the literary critic Edward Said was not mistaken when he said that language dwells at the heart of a people's identity and its resistance to colonial projects. Yet Arabic is marked by a peculiar duality between the classical language and local dialects that are at times mutually unintelligible. Can we turn this duality into richness and strength?
The late thinker, who in exile remained an Arab nationalist and never shed his identity as others did under the sway of the "foreigner complex," raises a major question.
The spread of faulty writing online, left uncorrected, makes errors feel familiar, as if they were correct. Likewise, the spread of writing in the colloquial, and the reliance on spoken dialects in place of standard Arabic, erodes the practice of proper language if it goes unchecked. Even so, Arabic's dialects are now edging closer to one another through the give-and-take of these very platforms, to their credit.
Arabic and its dialects remain more tightly knit than many of the world's languages that have splintered, died out, and fallen from use, their very names fading from the major books. Some arose in the same era as Arabic, yet vanished. Meanwhile Arabic lives on, with its speakers still growing in number.
