It’s a very sensitive issue, but language preservation is in fact a popularity contest. A language going extinct is a language that is being used by fewer people. On the other side of the blade, English is intercontinentally used at unprecedented rates. But English is suffering from various forms of linguistical cancers that will eventually break its momentum down to a point of no return. Without competition, English is on the path of self-destruction, but Arabic is not. Arabic is spreading, regardless of the fact that it is getting butchered, especially in Kuwait. These are my claims, and I am willing prove their validity, however controversial they may seem.
Being a graduate of English literature, I was taught Shakespeare’s English to Mildred D Taylor’s English, to Australian and even Irish English. It seems that English is abundant with a seemingly infinite vocabulary that has a great appetite to “borrow” words from every culture and community. This borrowing process is not without the cost of damaging English’s inherent grammatical structure. I insist that English is dying due to these reasons:
1. Universal linguistics taught us that there is a difference between letters and the sound each word makes, whether borrowed or not. The science of UL dictates that there are sounds – phonemes – that have a “cannon-shoot” nature. Phonemes that come out of words like “walk or talk”, that have a double O feel to them, did in fact demolish the pronunciation of silent (L) letters. This kind of phoneme is continually destroying other letters as long as people utter it, rendering a dead typographical vessel with more and more words in the future.
2. The science of UL also dictates that the presence of the “La or El” sound, such as in French and Spanish, serves as a cradle that prolongs a language’s lifespan, which English is clearly lacking.
3. English is a “zombie”. The military and logistical supremacy of both the British and American empires did force-feed English into educational systems until it became a marketing necessity for the whole globe to use as a vehicle to interact with one another, without the knowledge that this current English is the mummified body of Old English that become unintelligible during the 11th century. Old English’s death was at the hands of Middle English, that suffered the same fate as the former in the 15th century due to modern-day English that is setting itself for its ultimate doom because of the same tool that gave it its biggest push – the Internet. This West Germanic language won’t bear the future anymore without the gap between British English, Australian English and American English becoming too much to sustain.
All of these points work in reverse effect for Arabic. Every noun and verb in Arabic has what amounts to the cradle phoneme of “Al and El”, called (ÃáÝ áÇã ÞãÑíÉ æ ÔãÓíÉ), roughly translated as moon and sun Alif-Lam, which function as “the”, or in other words, the article of definition. This means that all words in Arabic begin with Al or El in their stable form to secure its root forever.
Secondly, Arabic does not include any cannon-like phoneme at all. Moreover, religiously, 1.6 billion people are obligated to utter and understand Arabic verses from the Holy Quran, an advantage that Latin did not share in its intensity and quantity. Plus, Arabic can borrow words as well, but without mutating any of its etymologically foreign words into a cancer cell. It terms of age and number of vocabulary, ancient Arabic, prior to Islam, is completely understood by an Arabic speaker with a moderate knowledge of classical word choices or poetic taste, unlike modern English that has 988,968 words, according to the Global Language Monitor. Arabic has 12,300,000 words.
All in all, the reason for the dramatically charged title that hints of some kind of a battle between the two languages is due to the state of Arabic in Kuwait and the GCC countries collectively. Arabic is not winning the “popularity contest” in the Arabian Gulf, which is why we “Khaleejis” feel threatened. Medicine and geometry and all the rest of the science fields are taught in English at advanced levels and businessmen in all fields favor applicants who are well-versed in English for these two pivotal reasons: English-speaking foreigners are everywhere – from house helpers to salesmen to doctors and nurses. Secondly, the world is a village that currently shops, negotiates, motivates, sings and films in English.
