THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT WITHIN A LIBERAL ARTS FRAMEWORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF EGYPT’S TECHNOLOGY ECONOMY.

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to discuss an issue that is elemental, yet crucial to Egypt’s success or failure as a member of the global technology economy. It will affect the country’s ability to foster a competitive workforce, and if fostered will allow Egypt to take advantage of its rich human and intellectual capital.

This paper is meant as an exploratory document to examine afresh the validity of popular social and cultural notions of language development as it applies to education and technology development. It is not intended to propose specific curricular solutions. It is our goal to provoke response and begin a frank dialogue on the subjects discussed. Before we get started, let’s briefly define “language development” as meant in this paper to mean a person’s grammar and vocabulary development for the purpose of expressing, sharing and developing concepts and ideas.

Language

Language is both the method for conceptual development and the tool to exchange concepts with others. If a person’s language skills are weak, that person will have a limited conceptual grasp, and his ability to reason will be limited. The stronger the language skills a person possesses, the stronger his conceptual grasp and the finer his understanding of the world around him.

The development of one’s personal language skills is not only an individual issue. The future of Egypt’s economy depends on abandoning the culture of memorization in its educational system in favor of a liberal education based in language development and fostering critical thinking, analysis and deduction.

Egypt’s Technology Push

In 1999 President Hosny Mubarak signed the National Technology Initiative. In the same year, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) was formed to help promote technology growth and development in the country. In 2001, the same year that saw economic growth shrink to just over 2% (down from 4% in 1999) the IT sector grew at a rate of 17% . Arabic technology development and localization saw even higher overall growth rate.

Egypt is positioning itself as a regional hub. By the year 2002, the country had spent $75 billion building its infrastructure to accommodate growth and attract investment. More than 250 U.S. companies are in Egypt. The country has more than a decade of free trade with Europe, and is a member of the World Trade Organization.

Egypt’s population exceeds 70 million, 65% of which are under 25 years old. One million high school and two hundred and fifty thousand university students graduate each year. The country needs to create fifty-thousand jobs per annum, just to maintain the current employment rate.

For the country to be successful in the course it has chosen to take, it must cultivate a workforce that can compete in global terms. To compete in a global economy, business people need strong decision making and analytical skills. They must be able to express themselves and their position effectively and be able to understand the position of others. The basis for these goals which is often overlooked is strong language skills. In any liberal arts education, reading, comprehension and analytical writing are stressed.

Language Education vs. Language Development

Foreign educational institutions and local language schools are very popular today in Egypt. There are a wide range of foreign language high schools and universities, English, American, German, French, Canadian, etc. There is no doubt that knowledge of foreign languages will be crucial for the country’s success within the global arena. Knowledge of a foreign language, and more importantly proficiency in that language is a powerful tool for success. It must be stressed however, that one’s grasp of a foreign language can only be as strong as the grasp of his native language.

The social attitude towards the Arabic language in much of the Middle East today can be characterized as important in a religious, literary and historical context, but irrelevant for personal and commercial success. The approach used in schools to teach Arabic doesn’t help to foster fondness. You can almost depend on a ubiquitously monotonous voice, reciting words to convey well-worn thoughts. Who thinks of Arabic as the language of change and innovation? The mind dulling educate-by-rote-memorization-and-recitation-no-room-for-creativity-and-innovation approach and lack of engaging Arabic teaching materials, coupled with the widespread cultural belief that foreign means better (read: freer, prettier, higher quality, richer, elite, smarter, modern, etc.) reinforce the concept that the Arabic language is unsuited for technology development, while thinking of the English language as the language of science and advancement.

The Arabic language lacks many of the developments and refinements needed for dealing with modern business and technology. In this sense it may be termed a technologically under-developed language. At the same time technology has yet to make as significant an impact on Arabic culture as it has in many other areas of the world. Arabic therefore, lacks many linguistic developments needed to deal on an even basis with more technologically developed languages. As a result, localizing from a language like English, with abundant vocabulary for dealing with technical subjects, into Arabic entails not only translation and cultural adaptation of content, but also overcoming the linguistic barriers between technologically developed and under-developed languages.

-- Yehia A. Yassin, EBM (Egyptian Business Machines Co.)

A language which is not highly expressive and logical is ‘Ammeyah. The ability to express one’s self is limited to a narrow vocabulary range. Words are recycled to have multiple meanings. It is easy for a foreigner to express himself in ‘Ammeyah by learning a small amount of words. It is much harder for a speaker of ‘Ammeyah to move from a language of semantic ambiguity to a language that requires precision of expression.

On the contrary, Arabic as M.S.A. is highly expressive, descriptive, precise and logical. Reading the above quote, you would never guess that mathematical treatises were written in the courts of Baghdad in Arabic, which greatly advanced the computational abilities. The Arabic language introduced the use of the Zero to mean something other than null, allowing for our modern decanal number system, decimals and more recently binary system – the numerical system of Zeros and ones that computers understand – and, ironically allowing Europe to advance itself by getting rid of the cumbersome Roman numerals. You would also never guess that Arabic treatises in the sciences and mathematics were the basis for many extolled European architectural gems and the advancement of pharmaceuticals and medical science. Chemistry, mathematics, architecture, engineering are even more relevant to human advancement today as they were then.

A language in itself is not the determinant of its use. If a person with strong linguistic abilities writes a poem that will make his language poetic. If a scientist writes a technical paper, his language will be scientific. As Arabic speakers, scientists, engineers, innovators, our capacity to understand and our language proficiency will determine our capacity for knowledge.

Language Proficiency and Scientific Advancement

• Science and technology are based in reason.
• Reason is based in logic.
• Logic is based in understanding.
• Understanding is based in concepts.
• Concepts are rooted in language.
• The wealth of a language is in the strength of its vocabulary and syntax.

In the area of technology, where new concepts are the most apparent, the current trend is to import foreign terminology instead of using terminology that will take advantage of the innate flexibility of the Arabic language and expand its expressive ability in the scientific arena.

Scientific advancement, by nature, requires understanding. A culture of scientific and technological advancement cannot grow through an “off the shelf” approach, or grow through adoption. Consumers can adopt new technologies and adapt their behaviors to use them. Innovators cannot adopt. They must cultivate. They must think, analyze, develop, deconstruct, reconstruct. The language skills must be there to play a supporting role.

To understand and work in science and technology today, English is crucial. To develop a technological economy, native language skills are crucial. Egypt must do one of two things. It must either foster English as a first language to play perpetual catch-up with the English speaking world, or position itself as a center for Arabic technology research and development.

Localization and the Value of Developing Local Resources

In a global village, every locality has a value to the investor. The value of a region, of a nation, of a people is not in who they are, or even in what they can provide. The value is in their potential for growth.

It used to be that everyone talked about the global village and global business. Now people are talking about localization. Localization in the marketing sense means adopting a cultural familiarity to a global brand. Where globalization means making the distinct palatable to all, localization means transforming the soulless into the familiar.

Global brands embrace cultural familiarity until they become “one of us.” Microsoft is us. IBM is us. We are them. There is no imposition if the transition from being ‘global’ to ‘local’ is done correctly. In technology, localization means creating and adapting technologies to allow users to interact naturally with it in their own language, and according to their business norms.

Arabic Technology Development

In October of 2003, Alawy attended a Speech Technology conference in New York. The purpose of our visit was to see if there was interest in developing Arabic language software versions. We found five companies who were developing their products for Arabic. Two were American, two European and one Israeli.

American and transnational companies are interested in developing their technologies to work with Arabic. There is an earnest interest in the Arabic speaking market. We fielded many questions about the language, the degree of difficulty involved in supporting the character-set and bi-directional capabilities and the market for their product as a whole.

Many of the companies we spoke with in the course of business believed that when they provide Arabic support for their products they have to “choose a country and localize to that dialect,” forsaking the markets of other Arab countries. They are often unaware of Modern Standard Arabic and the role that it plays.

The development of technologies to serve Arabic speakers is contingent on the use of M.S.A. and abiding by established terminologies put forth by linguistic bodies such as mujmaa al-logha al-Arabiyya whose duty is to standardize the language and coin new terminologies. Egypt has the capabilities and capacity to develop technologies for the whole Arabic speaking market if it doesn’t isolate itself by employing foreign or Egypto-centric colloquial terms in the process. To be taken seriously in science and technology, standards must be employed to help unify the pursuit of Arabic localization of technology.

Despite the involvement of linguistic bodies in standardizing the language and its new terminologies, there is a lack of common effort or agreement on how to adopt such new terminologies. Much of this stems from the tendency of business people in the region to work in a vacuum instead of collaborating with others. This attitude results in businesses reinventing the wheel and redefining technological vocabulary in multiple, often arbitrary ways. Many companies have their own glossary of technical terminology, proprietary to themselves rather than participating in a single repository of standards.

The false projected image of the Arabic speaking market as a submarket of the English speaking market can only be done away with when a strong Arabic Localized market has flourished. The major operators in the region must come together to adopt common standards based on openness and reusability. Businesses need to cooperate with regional standardization bodies to unify the Arab front instead of every organization adopting the local lingo. Such standardization will eliminate much of the uncertainty on the part of technology providers interested in exploring the Arabic market. It will eliminate fears of the costs associated with the imagined need for country specific technology localization, reducing the cost to market and increasing the value of the region as a place to invest.

American and other international companies see value in doing business in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Jordan, in the Gulf countries. We should see value in our own markets and take the cue of transnational companies to develop technology to serve us. Let’s follow the lead of the Chinese.

The Chinese Example

In many ways China is like the Arab world. China has a large population with regional variations in dialect, ethnicity and religion. It has a rich and long common cultural, social scientific, religious and political history, with a large rural population with industrial cities positioned in a politically and economically important region.

There are advantages in China’s favor. China’s population is one billion and they are politically and geographically united while the Arab world is roughly a quarter of that size and politically, and economically divided. Arabs have advantages over the Chinese such as a single unifying language and a wealth of natural resources, and the income level in some countries that nearly makes up for the differences in population.

The Chinese recognize that their one billion plus market holds value. Both Chinese and foreign companies are focused on developing technologies to serve and grow the market for Chinese language technologies in the face of numerous computational challenges. The Chinese language and its 5000+ character representations are far more difficult than Arabic’s 28. Resources are being devoted to build technologies in Chinese to the extent that computing methodologies were extended to accommodate the Chinese forms into two bytes rather than the international single byte representation.

The Chinese recognize that the market has several levels. It’s not only the elite who steer the market. In China, the monthly wages are below the wages of Egypt. However, the Chinese still value the market on all levels, manufacturing goods to serve all incomes. When people see a return on their investment, the technology will be invented to serve the market. This interest to serve themselves makes the rest of the world want to serve the Chinese.

The Arab Approach

In China, the consumer and business alike insist that foreign investors and service providers do business in their language. In the Arab world, people see prestige in conducting business in English. Some are even offended if you interact with them in their native language in a formal business setting.

The elites of the Egyptian society are often foreign educated and may have lived abroad. They are comfortable in English as well as Arabic. They are also the decision makers and business advisors to investors and marketers. Because the minority gives the false impression that English is widely understood and used in business, and that Arabic is technically difficult to employ, the wider Arabic speaking market is underserved. Why should they invest and build Arabic technologies if they can use English technologies? The view of this important minority favoring English over Arabic often has a detrimental effect on the return of foreign investments. Neglecting the Arabic language makes the actual market for goods much smaller and decreases the interest for further development of the market in Arabic.

About Alawy, LLC

Alawy is an American software development firm that provides Arabic language technology solutions to international companies doing business in the Middle East. For more information visit us at