Arabic Language being murdered in Qatar

My Xhosa is very very rusty.... haven't spoken it in about 10 years. 5 years in Qatar and another 5 or so years before that since I moved away from my province where Xhosa is the main african language...

At least you can pronounce kh , many can't,so technically you have an advantage and you shouldn't complain :).

Colloquial expressions may vary within one country sometimes, take United Kingdom for example.

Some tribes in Qatar have distinct accents,but classical Arabic is understood and spoken almost everywhere in the Arab world.

BTW do you speak Xhosa ?

Maybe they are pretending not to speak either so that they have an excuse not to fix your problem properly :-)

the gutteral sounds in Arabic are very hard for most English speaking languages to say.

Dutch, German and South Africans find it easier since their languages all hat the same gutteral G's and Gh or Kh's...

Even when English people speak arabic, it sounds very different to what it should.

Baring in mind too, that Qatari's have their own dialect of Arabic. I know many words in the Qatari dialect, but when speaking to other arabic speakers, they have no idea what I am talking about until I tell them in English, and they will give me the correct arabic words.

language is being murdered here...

I live in an independant villa.... and the electrician and plumber and painter in the villa that we will be moving to soon, cannot speak arabic or English.. I have no idea where they are from. Communicating with them is a nightmare.. I do speak Arabic and English.. I may need to learn new languages here ;P

All the ones I meet speak English and a few speak Arabic (but also English). But then I am on compound where the primary language is English regardless of nationality. All of the staff and maintenance crews speak English, and some speak Arabic.

Every carpenter/plumber/electrician I came across speaks Arabic.

Do you speak Arabic?

Arabic is indeed struggling.. sad but true.. everyone wants to go with the flow and learn English.. because they want to be in good colleges and find good jobs.. the first thingcompanies ask about in the middle east is "ENGLISH"!

what's really frustrating... (which is happpening to me right now).. is when your carpenter/plumber/electrician..etc.. etc.. CANNOT speak Arabic nor English!!!

why the hell would anyone hire someone who can't comprehend what anybody is saying in this country!!????

All the best wishes, don't give up, Arabic is easy, however there aren't enough learning resources :(

You can always tune your car's FM radio to 102.6 , Aljazeera channel broadcasts in a classic and refined Arabic.

Maybe Arabic and English will produce a hybrid language for the region.

HamadaCZ said "Arabic is dying."

How sad. I'd love to learn the language. Only got past my ABCs n need those kiddie books with the harakats, so I can pronounce words properly. :0(

Thank you for the statistics hamadaCZ. Very interesting.

Arabic language is going through a bad divorce, in other words Arabic is in crisis. Aljazeera channel once hosted an Arab publisher and he stated something like “for each title we print merely 3,000-3,500 copies” ,what a shame.

Literacy rate is around 60~70 % in the Arab countries plus most of the Arab countries suffer from “brain drain” ,I don’t know the IT literacy rate ?

In Qatar and in most of the Arab countries , “quality” education is usually available in English.

There is an old Arab dictum “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads”, but I don’t think it applies anymore, Arabic is dying.

I agree with you , to understand the culture and the mentality, Arabic is a must.

Urinus, go drink coca and eat humbergers, u'll feel better then

Who cares what the french think

Don't feed the troll!

hum hum, uranus feels shot by my words..

dont be angry, but u know that american ppl who think themselves the best are hated in arab world and in France!!

but it is not ur fault, it's ur government fault: they do not want to invest a lot to teach u standard education, no money to teach u other languages, as well as how to live in a modern world!

Result: most of americans are less smart than others!

More hatred and attempts to stir from frenchiegirl/dodgy/dodgey (same user who bashes Islam and Christianity to stir and is deleted). This is a decent conversation for decent people. Why try and ruin it. Please ignore him everyone, I am finding this thread very informative and would hate to see it turn into a bashing session.

Don't fee the troll!

Tented--thank you. I agree that Arabic is fascinatingly complex language, and beautiful when written with a talented hand. As it is both a sacred and living language it is interesting to learn about the push and pull between the preservation of the old Arabic and the evolving Arabic that expands to reflect the diversity of speakers and our changing world. Because the languages of the early Christian texts were in old Greek and Latin (both dead languages) there is no such debate for Christians (and of course much debate about translations!).

there are many ppl here living for years , and yet, they did not think to learn a word in arabic!

just because they are egoist and think that the world turn around them and their ''universal'' language!

Can't learn a foreign language? Not true, say scientists

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8200956/Cant-learn-a-foreign-language-Not-true-say-scientists.html

My understanding is that Arabic literacy is particularly problematic amongst younger Arab speakers, who speak Arabic in the home but use English in the school. The result is that they read and write relatively little in Arabic. But then they have very little choice if they want to pursue higher education, where English is by far the dominant language of the top universities worldwide, and even in the Arab-speaking world. I have been told that ASD even offers special Arabic literacy classes for Arab students.

The reality, as sad as it may be for some, is that English in the lingua franca here and that is likely to become more so as Qatar expands, the native population becomes proportionately smaller, and children of Arabic-speaking children pursue their education.

Some expats try and learn Arabic, and all should learn basic survival phrases, but the reality is that it is hard to learn Arabic when so many Arab speakers speak excellent English or want to practice their English on you. It is like trying to learn Dutch--the Dutch all speak English perfectly and so it is often just easier to speak in English. I've been learning Arabic not so much for its use in every day life, but as a way to better understand the culture in which I am residing. Like all languages it reflects the region and people (just as Inuit has several dozen words for snow and English has at least a dozen for rain).

Which part ? a large part of the society in Qatar consists of expats from different countries and cultures, either Qatar provides them with bilingual/trilingual (English/Arabic/Urdu) civil servants or you hire people with at least basic Arabic language or offer them free language training centres.

Often I receive phone calls to translate from acquaintance who have been living here for long time, I mean really long time...

I like it when I say shukran to someone and they say have fun in return. What a fun culture the Arabs have....

so when i've been saying hi to someone, "salmon ali come" isn't correct???

Welcome to Disneyland indeed.... You lose your language you lose part of your culture with it

I never understood this, some people have been living in Qatar for more than 10 years, yet they can't communicate with public officials (Traffic Dep for example) due to language barrier, welcome to Disney land.

Most of the people in Qatar speak Arabic? Don't make me laugh. Most people in Qatar are not Muslims!

as i heard but these words are being approved by Ashgal Dept. and for the names, they are trying to apply the qatari spoken language.

Aladdin--the majority of people currently living Qatar do not speak Arabic fluently, and even fewer can write in it. That's why everything has to be in the international language of English (although that is routinely massacred here too). My favourite is to see how many different ways sewage is spelled on the trucks.

Does anyone speak Arabic in Qatar?

You get what you pay for..

Also, I suppose arabic varies slightly from nation to nation.

I write Arabic! But using Google Translate hahaha

Regardless the nationality of the boss or the draughtsman, a linguistic reviewer is a basic control.

But the guy who uses AutoCad is not!

I know the company that makes road signs. The boss is Lebanese.