The status of the Arabic language today is subject to dispute about holding onto our heritage and identity, or engaging with the modern world and evolving. Therefore the Arabic language stands out in these discussions as the most deep-rooted element of our identity as well as the most important tool for interaction in Arabic societies on the one hand; and as a method to engage in knowledge and create modern awareness and a promising future on the other. Within this vision comes the report: “The Report on the Status and Future of the Arabic Language”, an attempt to contribute and direct the debate towards an objective vision of the Arabic language in its societies and its role in these societies, starting from field studies to building monitoring plans and strategies that shed a light on possible capabilities and developing them. This report was launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, and ruler of the Emirate of Dubai, through his directive issued on the Global Day of the Arabic Language in December 2018 to set the framework establishing the Arabic language as a language of science, knowledge, and identity. H.E. Ms. Noura bint Mohammed Al Kaabi Minister of Culture and Youth in the United Arab Emirates considers this report a cornerstone for the national agenda on the Arabic language, its objectives, and its priorities connected to the UAE’s centennial. This launchpoint makes the report a civilizational pillar in that it comes at a crucial time that Arab society and their language are living through, a watershed historical moment in which technology is holding the reins to the future. It is no longer acceptable that the Arabic language would not be present in service of its communities and in contributing to building a heritage in the humanities. Except, this moment still witnesses a lack of interaction with the Arabic language and a dearth of knowledge production, which is what has confined it to the scale of historical existence and trapped it to its past glories when it participated in cross cultural knowledge exchange and cohabitation. The reality is that today we have passed this fruitful stage and have produced Arab linguistic minds that are occupied with lamenting over a lost glorious past, when it would have been better for these minds to understand the crisis it faced and start to build a modern version of their people and communities. This charged atmosphere has created a troubled relationship between the Arabic language and its speakers who have renounced its capabilities as a production tool to open knowledge channels and connections, obliging Arab societies subject to this reality to adopt a language not their own to seek out this knowledge and face the economic, political, social, and cultural consequences of this choice. If we looked at the current status, we would find the impact of this crisis reflects on all aspects of life in Arab society, as most Arab nations still perform their scientific research and education with minimal to no interaction with the Arabic language, and despite the piling on of Arab government resolutions and summit reports, there has been no success from the Arabic scientific establishment initiatives except in a very few cases and only relatively when considered in legislative, organizational, or individual experience terms. The Arabic language is still less viable in the public sphere and in the media, where the majority of audiovisual media has seen foreign language creep in and take root over the Arabic language in both its standard and spoken forms. School curriculums are still overly modular and packages in traditional frameworks that do not allow its students to gain the aptitude or flexibility in its use, nor are they able to stay in line with the current needs of the age with its technological and knowledge updates. Additionally, our societies continue to borrow non-Arabic terminology in order to provide services to their people. At the same time, and despite the bitterness of this picture, this current status holds within the seeds of revival; the Arabic language, in both its traditional and spoken forms is still the language of social interaction, as well as the language of existential communication among members of Arab communities. It is a language handed down from generation to generation, held onto, identified with, and gathered around for social cohesion. In addition, and as revealed in this report, there is a significant number of decision makers and elite knowledge productions among members of the community who are greatly aware of the necessity of reviving the Arabic language, and applying it to knowledge-based communities to answer staggered requirements. We confidently say on the heels of this report that we must launch from this current status with a mind-set that examines the various signs of disease, diagnoses it properly, and analyzes its variables in order to search for possible treatments through the various points of light be they few or dim. This report is not directed to a specific elite within Arab communities, but is in fact presenting its wide set of variables so it can contribute in building a comprehensive picture about the status of the Arabic language, and allow for research in light of that for ways to revive the language and establish it in service of its communities. The target for this presented report is all segments of Arab society, from the highest point of the pyramid where the political and economic decision makers can be found, to the receiving public within the community, and from the active academic elite producing knowledge in universities and research centers be they professors, researchers, inventors, students, members of the media, writers, and the literati, to the receiving segment of this knowledge and these services. Indeed, the target is anyone who is concerned with the question of identity, development, and destiny, and we mean by this every Arab person who agonizes over the status of the Arabic language and seeks to make it the language of his reality as it is the language of his existence. This report approaches the current status from the perspective of the active and passive users and interactors of the Arabic language, aiming to provide them a conceptual base to propose new approaches that lead to a better future for the language and its speakers, arriving at peace, sophistication, and openness in an educated manner. This report stretches geographically across the Arab region according to what it offers of variables in the fields that it studies. It focuses on the time period of the last decade, from 2010 to 2020. In terms of content, its chapters cover fundamental issues in terms of their presence and rate of interaction during the current debate over the role of the Arabic language in building modern communities. From another perspective, these fields overlap amongst themselves to build a studied visualization of the truth concerning the status of Arabic in its communities; they also complement one another in planning a vital and effective program to invest in developmentally, intellectually, and civilizationally. To achieve this comprehensive coverage, the report handles five main fields from which branch secondary fields are covered in the chapters. The main fields are: 1) The true authority of the legislation covered in the first chapter regarding legislation; 2) the true authority of media and what impact it has on the public space, covered in the second chapter regarding the status of the Arabic language as perceived by the media, and in the third chapter concerning the use of the Arabic language in media and in the public sphere; 3) The true authority of the knowledge producer, covered in the fourth chapter which discusses the reality of publishing in the Arab world, and particularly handles the use of the Arabic language in the modern novel, aside from chapter five covering the Arabic language in technology; 4) The range of the authority held by knowledge creation, and this is the most important field in our thesis, and therefore is covered over four chapters: chapter six related to translation, chapter seven covering science education and research, and chapter eight handling the position of university students in the Arab world and their beliefs regarding the Arabic language, and chapter nine which studies the status of the Arabic language in relation to new pedagogical approaches in school curricula; and 5) the field of language spread, covered by chapter ten which discusses the Arabic language in new continents. As the chapters of the report are organically connected and interact amongst each other in terms of activities and responsibilities undertaken, as well as the scope studied in service of this report, organizing the chapters was a difficult task. Therefore, its structure was set based on a hierarchical vision, launching from legislation considering that it is a foundational pillar for any initiative to revive the ARabic language; then handling media considering it the connection between the legislative authorities and the individual, in addition to its influence and clout over the use of the Arabic language in the public sphere and among its speakers. It then moves onto the field of knowledge production which includes a review of the presence of Arabic in translation, university education, scientific research, and educational curriculum, handling - finally - the issue of the spread of the Arabic language and its interaction with the other outside of the Arab region. It is not by coincidence that we have traveled along this methodical line through the Arab communities, where the Arabic language has flourished and spread, as is reflected beyond its geographical scope, and includes the Islamic scope (as the language used to practice the Islamic faith), and the Arabic scope (as the original language spoken by Arab communities abroad). The first chapter performs a study of the legislation that was drafted to support the Arabic language and reinforce its existence in public life, and the study relies on a precise scan of the legislative and structural achievements by national and Arab institutions, organizations, and authorities that undertake initiatives and activities related to the rise of the Arabic language. The second chapter looks into Arabic speech in modern media concerning the status of the Arabic language and its future as reflected in newspapers, websites, and television programs from across the Arab world. The aim of this review is revealing the position of Arab media with regard to the Arabic language in its current form - citing the pros and the cons - and the ambitions set to face this reality. The third chapter sheds light on the position of the Arabic language in media as well, as it strives to describe the Arabic language as used in the media, especially news broadcasts, discussion programs throughout the Arab world, and in advertisements in both print and audiovisual formats of the media. This study intends to monitor the developments of the Arabic language in its communities and comprehend the diversity that it reflects, particularly as it relates to the interaction between the traditional and spoken dialects of the language. This chapter relates scenes of the Arabic language in the public sphere through the names of commercial outlets, shopping malls, restaurants, hotels, and in the language of advertising presenting products and services. The fourth chapter is concerned with publishing in the Arab world, and presents the challenges faced in this sector, focusing on describing modern Arabic in the modern Arab novel as a literary language that reflects the reality of Arab communities throughout its levels, its diversity, and its uses. This chapter depends on the review of a sample of Arabic novels in different genres targeting different age groups and release in the last decade. Technology is handled by the fifth chapter, which researches the interaction between the Arabic language and technological production from a visual framework perspective in the opinion of those active in the field. It presents the challenges as well as the possibility of overcoming these challenges, and in terms of the outcomes out in the field through a presentation of technological products supportive of the Arabic language as well as those produced in Arabic. It also looks into AI applications and machine translation, as well as applications handling natural language, reviewing the evolution of Arabic language research drivers. This chapter has found an active movement to enable Arabic in the technological field, and can be considered a positive launchpoint to correct the path of developing initiatives and enabling them in a greater way that meets the need for the Arabic language among Arab communities. As translation is a key gateway for the transfer of knowledge before launching into its production, the sixth chapter looks into studying the current state of translation from and to the Arabic language. For that, it has reviewed the fields in which translation activities are most focused, and concentrated at the level of theorizing, methodology, application, and outcomes. It also touches on the challenges that Arabization of foreign terminology faces across different fields including Islamic studies, philosophy, and the sciences, and discusses the effect of these challenges on the Arabic research movement particularly in the field of science. As for higher education and scientific research, considering they are the drivers of evolution and modernity, chapter seven looks at them in its search for the status of the Arabic language as used to teach sciences in Arabic university as well as the field of scientific research. The chapter aims to review and analyze the challenges facing Arabic researchers when writing their research in Arabic and publishing it, as well as the academic community when teaching sciences in Arabic. This includes curriculum developers, professors, and students, and one of the tools that this chapter used was a survey prepared by the task force and participated in by Arab researchers of various specialties and from different Arab nations. In addition, the team held discussion sessions, as well as study and discussion seminars with a sample of the Arab academic community to diagnose the roots of the crisis on an official, methodical, and theoretical level as well as on a practical one viewed in the field. From a more focused perspective, the eighth chapter was able to review the opinions of a wide segment of Arab students from the university level to collect their views and beliefs surrounding Arab university age students’ relationship with their language and its connection to their culture and identity. In this regard, the task force prepared a wide-ranging survey in which the many segments of students from various specializations in the Arab world participated, receiving a great number of responses. Subsequently, the ninth chapter focuses on collecting the new pedagogical approaches adopted by different Arab countries in planning educational programs aiming to develop Arabic language curriculums and tie them to modern theories and practices in teaching and learning language. The chapter sheds a light on the foundations that these approaches are built upon, as well as the Arab efforts and initiatives intended to reform the relationship between the language and its learners in a manner that develops their confidence in speaking their mother tongue, and reinforces their faith in the language as knowledge-producing, community serving language formed by an educational system. Perhaps what this chapter reflects the most is the awareness of curriculum developers and theorizers in the Arab nations of the necessity and importance of activating and renewing the methods used to introduce the Arabic language as a language of education. As for the tenth and final chapter, it expands geographically to look at the status of the Arabic language in new continents, especially within communities that don’t speak it, as in outside the two traditional worlds where Arabic is usually found: The Arab and Islamic worlds. It also studies how present and widespread it is, as well as how eager students are to learn this language, with a focus on reviewing the reasons for this eagerness to measure its global potential that it currently has as well as ways to reinforce that potential. The structure of the report is built on these ten study chapters, but another aspect of it is presenting the experiences and field analysis performed, either through articles written by guest writers interested in the activity of the Arabic language, or through studies that present a number of models and initiatives that contribute to reviving the Arabic language in various fields related to it. Guest writers - for those who contributed articles and initiatives that were studied - were chosen based on their achievements and field experience in developing the relationship between the Arabic language and its communities. The issue of the status of the Arabic language and its future is a fundamental issue in the existence and reality of all Arab communities and each Arab individual, as it relates to the issue of identity and the debate of modernity. We took every care that the members of the task force working on the report be as varied as possible, including members from most Arab nations, and that is to ensure the variety of sources, the overlap of efforts, and the maturity of its vision in terms of reviewing and analyzing the content or building predictions. This diversity produced fruitful conceptual, methodical, and research discussions that reflect its importance, gravity, and objectivity in framing the research chapters, the implementation steps, and the overall vision of the report. The methodological framework of the report is built on two pillars: reviewing our current status and variables regarding the Arabic language in the various fields viewed; and analyzing these variables to present a predictive, future-based vision that can help channel the revival efforts and help the Arabic language contribute towards producing knowledge and serving its communities. We do not claim that we have scanned ever resource available on the current Arab reality, but we have tried to broaden the sources of our samples and its diversity across the full geographic spread of the language, on the scale of the fields and specializations studies, and on the level of the various societal segments reviewed. We also do not claim that we have represented all Arab nations, but we are extrapolating based on the availability of information sources from each of these nations. The review that we have performed for this report seeks to present a comprehensive and clear picture about the reality of the Arabic language in the present, with the aim of stepping outside the framework of general impressions - which are closer to tragic, defeatists pity-pieces that are inherited from colonial ages, and do not offer tangible variables, evidence, or numbers. The difference between the documented, evidence supported review of the current status and the general impression articles is that the first can correct some misconceptions about the status of the Arabic language in its societies and shed a light on the positive potential that can be relied upon and act as a launchpoint to build realistic and effective transition models. The existential, impressionistic vision represents a short-sighted view that cannot be built upon to create any revival project as it does not stem from intellectual premises but actually begin from a defeatist, finalistic image of the language that it is incapable of overcoming. The psychological baggage that is the basis of the impression pieces are more dangerous than the challenges and “risks” that the Arabic language currently faces. The Arabic language is in crisis in its current historical context alonge, but the impression pieces create an obstacle of entrenched defeatism in the individual and community mindset of Arabs that is like a boogie man, never seen but widely shared, growing ever bigger as one person relates it to the next, and one generation transfers it to the next, building and building upon this false narrative. If, in stead, we were able to accurately transfer details about the size of the problem, the potential for danger, and the tools required, this would allow us to estimate the true nature of the risk and build a proper defense apparatus to face it, creating plans and predictive models to lessen or eliminate these risks no matter how the change or evolve in shape or method. On this basis, and in light of the absence of field and predictive studies regarding the reality of the Arabic language today, the need for such a project increases, as does the faith in and awareness of its importance. This faith formed the vision that those who set to achieve this report were guided by, bolstered by the ministerial and logistic support to the task force, as well as the community that participated in enriching the information and surveys received to create it. This report has been achieved in good faith, strong conviction, and great awareness of the major responsibility undertaken by the research team and those who supported and participated in the project among Arabic language researchers. It cannot be described as an identity alone, but also as a civilizational launchpoint that Arab society has formed an existential attachment to and uses to answer all of modernities questions, identifications, and destinies. The Arabic language revival project is an Arab world-wide project, and it cannot be achieved on the level of the individual, the nation, through the specializations of any one sector, nor partially on the level of legislative, executive, administrative, or structural vision. It is a project that requires the cooperation of an entire people, with complementary efforts and visions across time and space, and it is a continuing effort that cannot be allowed to stop, for any disruption would mean major civilizational losses in a time of rapid technological and knowledge changes. Every misestimation of the grandeur of this project and its importance is a crime against the Arabic language and its future generations of speakers. From this position, we can seek out the areas of awareness of the civilizational position of the Arabic language revival project described in this project through its viewpoints, aims, and methods. As for the viewpoints, they were not restricted to the reality of the Arabic language as existential perspectives overwhelmed by affection for a past historical moment - such as has been the case in previous decades - but instead is supported by logical justifications imposed by the social, economic, geopolitical, and knowledge based reality of Arab communities. This report was also built upon a methodology of investigation and review of motivations for the need to revive the Arabic language in the first place, as it confirmed the necessity of investing in its development that is now a crucial need for Arab communities today to manage its knowledge market, and activate in its own language and away from the shadow foreign languages cast over service production. If this project is not tied to ideological motives previously connected to most Arabic revival projects, then it will have maintained its existential and identity-based nature. In terms of objectives, this report has relied on a methodology drawn from reality in good faith, not only in terms of analysis, but also in terms of a mindful reading of this reality using a critical, analytical, and constructive eye. It is not enough to describe alone as much as it seeks to think in areas previously not considered and where hope - no matter how little or ineffective - may be invested in, in light of the charged and severe reality faced by the Arabic language in its communities. The higher, nobler aim of this report is to attempt to conceptualize an effective vision for the revival of the Arabic language in building its speaker with his identity and in service to him by offering him knowledge and services in his mother tongue with all its historical, identity-based, and social implications. The task force suggests at the end of each chapter a model vision that stems from the positives and our current state to make it a path towards achieving the desired outcome for the Arabic language. From there, the suggestions and predictive visions are the pillar this report is based upon, and foundation for its strife towards establishing a knowledge base upon which future reports may be built upon, as it suggests theoretical solutions that may not solve the actual crisis if it is not supported by guided follow-up on the executive level, and evaluative monitoring on the level of subsequent reviews. In terms of methodology, this report has opened up to a number of successful experiments that have had an effect in making the language work in service of its communities, without regard to the nature of this language or these initiatives. From there, what these experiences have shed a light upon in the Arab region is the view that it can be developed, repeated, or adapted in various structural frameworks put in service of “Arabizing knowledge and knowledge communities”. In this context, the report doesn’t cancel any channel that can be made use of, as it relies in its research on the idea of investing in knowledge which at its base is a civilizational, human inheritance. The experiences of the Arabic language - no matter how few they are or how not completely mature - cannot be overlooked because their seeds within this project are evidence of the Arab mentality’s care to achieve comprehensive knowledge self sufficiency in the Arabic language. This report is the product of the conditions that have conspired to be at the level of the ambitions attached to it, which include the care of the estimable personalities that have worked towards it, particularly H.E. Ms. Noura Al Kaabi the Minister of Culture and Youth in the UAE who adopted the principle of enriching the sense of belonging to the Arabic language as an existential link between the Arab person and his identity. She also felt that it is a melding factor for our community that forms a foundational need for our continuing vitality and prosperity, as required by the rapidly moving civilizational present. Before such expressions of care and interest, the task force would like to express on behalf of its members and the Arab individual and community their great thanks to H.E. the minister, and our appreciation for the mindful effort that has been taken towards the Arabic language and identity as we move towards comprehensive and sustainable development of the Arab individual and community. In order to properly value the effort spent on this report, we would like to direct our thanks and greetings to the research team members and the guest writers that contributed their opinion pieces and case studies. They all represent an elite of Arab researchers and academics that have come together with one Arab heart that holds a sense of belonging to this language equal to the faith they have in it. Their awareness, responsibility, objectivity, and understanding of the nature of the crisis within that they have taken care to form the purpose of the report has shed a light on what can be invested in so we may revive the language and civilization, encouraging and elevating the rise to support the Arabic language. We have every hope that the results of this report will offer continuity in achievement and the development of upcoming report projects and studies, whether through the knowledge variables offered, the field reviews performed, or the predictive visions discussed. We also ask that this report forms a strong pillar of support and solid ground from which a review of the status of the Arabic language can be formed regularly by linguists and civil societies and decision makers, and that it may be a compass to lead the way towards new plans and strategies that meet the conditions and historical moments that the Arabic language, its speakers and communities pass through. Therefore, this report is beholden to the motto: the Arabic language is a civilizational and knowledge-based responsibility; the Arabic language is our shared responsibility.