The organization of the first edition of the Arabic Language Summit is a translation of the directives of the wise leadership, in respect of promotion of the Arabic language as an inherent component of the UAE national identity and preservation of its societal standing as a tool of communication and a speech language. This Summit is held for the second consecutive year and in association, again , with Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center to emphasize our keenness to keep focusing on the Arabic language as a knowledge vessel accommodating the developments of civilization and technology at all times, within the context of clear strategic vision that yielded a report on the status and future of the Arabic language in 2020, the inaugural edition of the Arabic Language Summit in 2021 and the UAE Arabic Language Declaration in 2021.   

Over centuries, the Arabic language has been the language of our forefathers, and it will remain the language of the children and grandchildren for ages to come based on our efforts to promote its presence in our world and the new worlds that open up today more than ever to learn Arabic language and explore its sciences and arts, which has fascinated the world with its wonderful calligraphy, eloquent speech, well-structured architecture and eloquence.

Arabic language is one of the significant global modern languages that millions of people worldwide speak. Therefore, it deserves a lot of exceptional and extraordinary action to be done, in order to be able to consolidate a unified institutional effort, which brings together the local, regional and international bodies in new scientific research courses and approaches that shed light on the areas of improvement and development in the curricula of various types of academic education, from the university till the stages of early childhood, and arts, particularly in calligraphy, diacritical signs and reading as daily habit revealing the aesthetics of our language and celebrating it at school and home and among the family.

The significance of convening the Arabic Language 2022 Summit lies in all of the above and also in providing innovative mechanisms for whoever interested for raising and addressing the language issues, starting from its relation with identity itself in the context of entrenching and making of identity and foreseeing the challenges, the relation of the language with the life in arts, literature, poetry, drama, music and calligraphy to the paramount importance we pay to foreseeing the future of our native language and its challenges and opportunities and exploring the nature of the relation between the worlds of the non-Arabic speakers and our identity, in the context of our openness to the world and our positive citizenship with our values of coexistence, peace and human fraternity as a path to build bridges of never-ending civilizational communication.

The significance of convening an annual summit for Arabic language on the territory of the United Arab Emirates stems from its close relevance to the vision of our good leadership with regard to the standing of Arabic language in the civilizational structure of the UAE as the main pillar of identity and one of its prominent components.

Convening the Arabic Language Summit in the UAE is a unique event that makes us confident that this Summit will be able to make tangible positive impacts on the local, regional and international levels for being a well-fitted link in the chain of the high quality initiatives, which are concerned with serving Arabic language that was the language of a civilization wherein sciences, arts, literature and contributions to the areas of thought, philosophy and values highly flourished in a manner that can be rarely repeated in any other civilization. 

Nevertheless, we do not exaggerate when saying that the approach pursued by the UAE since its establishment by the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and the founding fathers has enabled it to be the contemporary extension and the active heir of the great intellectual, scientific and human heritage left by the Arab civilization in its eras of glory. The UAE has kept building on this heritage in light of the great wisdom, awareness and sound understanding of our good leadership in cooperation with the sincere people of the Arab World and the stakeholders as well as whoever concerned in the world. Therefore, the UAE has become a model country for building on the great cultural pattern of the Arab civilization, in the heart of which language constitutes the central pillar that makes the identity, accommodates science, maintains the efforts and endeavors and protects the values. 

The Arabic Language Summit, the inaugural edition of which launched on the margin of the events of EXPO Dubai 2021, comes to embody the achievements of the first 50 years of the life of this young Union State, in respect of making of the identity with its genuine components, and to serve as  an entrance to new 50 years filled with serious action, controlled scientific research and openness to all ideas, insights and currents of thoughts with our deeply-rooted values and our ambitions for the future that our hands and minds prepares for and creates to be up to our ambitions and determination.  

The theme of this year edition is "Language and Making of Identity", and there is no doubt that the most effective means for making and preserving identity is to keep the spark of language ignited and present inside the minds of its native speakers. This is because the most prominent common factor in identity is the system of the language through  which the people communicate.

We have been accustomed to use the term "Language" to make a reference to speech, whether heard or written. But while talking about identity we have to keep in mind that arts are also an aspect of language and the body of values and traditions with the behaviors stem from them are another aspect. As Derrida says "Nothing outside the text", there is also nothing outside the language, where all the acts done by the man is a language that is put in an abstract form to express the same verbally by sounds, then the same is represented in letters to be a written material.

As much as we care for the grammar, syntax and morphology, about which the Arab civilization produced leading literature and works that inspired the languages of the world, we recognize our duty to pay attention to the Arabic language in arts, literature and sciences. This is the objective for which efforts of this year edition of the Arabic Language Summit are combined. 

The two-day program of the Summit will bring together an elite of innovators in several areas of art, most prominently drama, poetry, literature, music, singing, diacritics  placing, calligraphy (Hurufiyya) and other innovations and creative industries, in order to think together how to make use of all of these expressive artistic fields to promote and enhance the Arabic language and purify it from the communication impurities, in order to activate its role in supporting the framework and components of identity that tells about the authentic Arab culture and its value, intellectual and human system in dealing with other cultures and identities.  

Moreover, an elite of academics and researchers in the various branches of sciences, the language, its literature, science and teaching curricula, arts and their philosophy and other fields, including technology, programing, economics and other sciences that should necessarily be included into the thought process to serve the future of the language, will also participate with us in thinking.  

We would like to thank the Ministry of Culture & Youth for the knowledge effort it has exerted to convene this Summit on the territory of the UAE. We, at Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center, are pleased to be partners in making these efforts successful. We are also proud of being the official body concerned with the application of the approach of dealing with the Arabic language as the language of the Arab civilization, which the UAE represents its brilliant contemporary extension. In all of ours initiatives and projects that are conducted in cooperation with the major institutions concerned with language and culture at the local, regional and international levels, we are keen to present language as the main pillar of identity and one of its genuine components, through a balanced mixture of interest in musical arts, such as signing and placing of diacritics and literature, as well as thought and philosophy, in terms of authorship, translation and publication, the body of values, bravery (Sana’), ethics and traditions, the heritage as an extension of the creative human existence over time, the cuisine and food culture that reflect the human endeavors to add taste and flavor to his journey for survival and development as well as the other human details that we are keen to have them represented in all of our projects, in an attempt to enrich the features of our culture through the language that is the maker of identity, as the theme of the Summit expresses with accuracy in expression and drafting.

We are always pleased to welcome you to the UAE where creative ideas intersect and minds and cultures are combined together.