To Make the World a Better Place, Teach Arabic

By Brian T. Edwards. Seventy-four years ago, Henry Luce published "The American Century," an essay that argued that American culture would play a starring role in creating a global environment in which the United States could thrive. Chief among his examples was American language itself; not just English, but an American-inflected argot that would be carried around the world via music, movies, comics, and popular culture. This was for Luce the sign of an internationalism that Americans themselves hadn’t yet acknowledged.
Today few would doubt that the reach and power of American culture is global, nor that the country is an international power. Colleges take a significantly different approach to teaching about the world than they did in 1941, and American studies has sought to be more global in its outlook. More foreign languages are taught than in Luce’s time, and study abroad has become a rite of passage for many students.
Yet a creeping monolingualism is overtaking higher education, despite the efforts of so many in the trenches. The signs are everywhere: Major universities are closing German departments and cutting Russian and French programs; general foreign-language requirements are easing up. Over all, college language enrollments tumbled 6.7 percent between 2009 and 2013, according to the Modern Language Association. Despite the growth of study abroad, it is increasingly easy for college students to take their courses in English in such countries as Jordan, the Czech Republic, France, and Turkey. The widespread sense that English has become a global lingua franca contributes to an unfortunate sense that learning other languages doesn’t matter.
Arabic is one of the languages that suffers in this climate, both because of its difficulty and the resistance of many language programs to embrace its spoken colloquial forms. Although it has been the fastest-growing language of study since 2001, enrollments fell 7.5 percent between 2009 and 2013. Given the enormous military and political focus on the Middle East, it is urgent that Americans learn Arabic. If the United States is going to try to understand, rather than bomb, invade, and occupy part of the world that has been our government’s central obsession for almost a decade and a half, then more colleges need to teach Arabic and do so in a vibrant way. Higher education has never had a more crucial role to play in achieving peace.
Arabic is the fifth most common native language in the world, with at least 295 million native speakers. And it is spoken in 60 countries, a number second only to English. That means there are jobs out there for those fluent in Arabic, a multitude of opportunities in both the private and public sector, including prospects we have not imagined. But this is not the only reason — or even the primary one — to support the study of Arabic. More...