Dr. Wijdan Muhammadah: It is necessary to pay attention to the Arabic language as one of the components of identity

Damascus-Sana

The eighteenth of December, which falls today, was chosen by the United Nations to be the International Day for the Arabic language, one of the main languages ​​adopted in it, which for centuries remained a mouthpiece spoken by hundreds of millions and an incubator for a unique cultural heritage shared by many peoples of the world.

On the international trend to consecrate the celebration in our Arabic language, the researcher and Dr. Wijdan Muhammadah, in an interview with SANA, believes that reality and the language of numbers confirm the importance of the language of dissent. The fourth belongs to the list of official world languages, which includes only six languages. Therefore, it was natural for Arabic to receive this attention.

However, the celebration of our language by international institutions is not shared by many Arab societies, according to Muhammadah, which believes that these societies do not consider our language with appreciation, so that the Arab family today prides itself on the mastery of foreign languages ​​in the first place and does not deal with language as one of the most important components of identity and invokes it out of nostalgia. Not from the angle of its activation and belief in its permanent vitality.

Muhammadah believes that the relationship with the Arabic language today is shrouded in a lot of waning and a fading passion for its components and its historical cultural charm, noting that Arabic has become nourished from its history and its cultural heritage and invests its characteristics in survival and its ability to withstand because it suffers at the present time from neglect of its speakers.

Muhammadah warned that openness to the world's cultures and languages ​​should not make us neglect the most important component of our identity, which is the language, with the necessity to avoid the shortcomings resulting from our absence in the fields of scientific contribution in our mother tongue and to confront the attempts to show that it does not keep pace with time and that it is outside history and lives in the time of the past.

Also, being open to foreign languages, mastering them and using them does not mean, as you can see, Muhammedah, to compromise our language, because whoever neglects his language will threaten his identity and culture.

Muhammadah concluded her speech by referring to the need not to allow the Arab reality and the crises our region is going through to affect the pillars and components of our culture and lead us to voluntarily assimilate into the culture of the other to the point of dissolution.

Dr. Wijdan Muhammadah holds a Ph.D. in Arabic literature from Damascus University and is a critic who has a group of scientific papers published in refereed journals, including comparative literature in the literature of modern literary criticism in Syria and the image of the country and other peoples in the literature of comparative literature and modern literary criticism in Syria in addition to A group of lectures she gave in cultural centers, including Graphic Studies in Arabic Narrative Literature, Hanna Minh, Memory of a Nation.

Miss Ani