Valletta, the capital of Malta. Malta speaks a language that is basically an Arabic base with a ton of Italian influence, and a lot like the Arabic spoken in Tunisia.
An idea I've had for some time now fleshed out in some more detail:
Ever since September 11th 2001 you can see every once in a while about how the military or the CIA or some other part of the government is having troubles creating fluent Arabic speakers within its ranks. The main problem here is a simple one: Arabic is hard to learn. It's easy to give up on Arabic, not because it's impossible to learn, but it can give that impression to people for the first few months before everything begins to click as eventually languages do. Here's
one article from the New York Times yesterday about this:
Three years ago, the Defense Department set out to increase sharply the number of military personnel who speak strategically important languages. Progress has been slow, and the military has not determined how to reach its goal — or what exactly that goal is.
Figures from the department indicate that only 1.2 percent of the military receives a bonus paid to those who can speak languages judged to be of critical importance for the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other areas of strategic concern.
...
He noted that after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the United States urgently worked to develop a cadre of Russian speakers and scholars. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, neither the military nor other government agencies executed a similarly ambitious program for Arabic speakers.
The services have adopted a number of programs that have had some success. The Army developed a program to recruit native speakers of strategically important languages to serve as translators; so far, more than 600 have graduated.
In short, there's some progress but progress is slow. The other problem with Arabic is that it's
not really one language either:
The proficiency test was extremely rigorous -- the one thing people don't understand about Arabic is that it is not one language, but rather several different mutually unintelligible dialects resting under a literary language which is completely divorced from all of them. The literary language alone takes up to ten years to fully master. To gain even a passive understanding of these dialects takes several more years of intensive study.
In addition to this, the difficulty of conducting background checks on people that have Arabic as a first language
makes it harder than would be expected to find good translators:
Many of these applicants still have relatives abroad, often in countries that raise alarm among security officers. Former intelligence officials say that besides the problems of conducting thorough background checks in those countries, the agency also worries that recruits could be blackmailed if their families were vulnerable.
So what is needed then is some way to make Arabic easier to learn for those that don't have it as a first language, and at the same time it can't just be standard Arabic either, and thus should incorporate learning regional varieties at the same time, a tall order.
So here is an idea to make this process somewhat easier. One four-year Arabic language training program for the military could be devised as follows:
- First four to six months: train the students in Interlingua for the first month or two, then spend the next months going over relevant texts about the Middle East to give the students a good background knowledge of what they are about to get into. Why Interlingua? Because the next step is to:
- Learn Maltese. Maltese is basically Arabic plus a huge amount of Italian influence (some 52% of the vocabulary comes from Romance sources) in the same way that English is a Germanic language plus a huge amount of influence from Latin and French, and is similar to Tunisian Arabic. The students, having already learned Interlingua (Interlingua is a constructed language that is a lot like Italian without any complicated grammar) will now be familiar with most of the vocabulary that comes from Romance languages (thus almost 50%) and will have a head start in learning it. Note that it also doesn't use the Arabic alphabet so there's no problem there. They then study Maltese for six months in class and then are sent to Malta for a year of intensive training. Malta is an island and a part of the European Union, which also makes it safer and less of a culture shock (it's 98% Roman Catholic for example) for the students who will still only be starting their second year.
An example of Maltese from the Wikipedia article on the demographics of Valletta:
Demografija
Il-populazzjoni tal-Belt Valletta naqset drastikament matul is-snin, u illum il-ġurnata l-kwota naqset għal madwar terz mill-perjodu bl-aktar popolazzjoni. Dan il-proċess aċċelera aktar wara t-Tieni Gwerra Dinjija hekk kif żvilupp ġdid fis-subborgi ra lill-popolazzjoni timxi 'l barra mill-belt kapitali, però l-Belt xorta baqgħet u għadha bħala ċ-ċentru amministrattiv u kummerċjali ta' Malta.
From this paragraph alone can be recognized the words demographics, population, drastic, quota (?), mill-period (probably millennium), process, accelerate, capital, centre, administrative, commercial. Some Italian words in there too like sviluppo (development).
- Now the students are familiar with a semitic language, and have a strong practical foundation that will enable them to understand through actual experience how regional varieties of Arabic differ from standard Arabic. Now they come back to the U.S. and learn standard Arabic, in an immersion setting like this one perhaps. The students will already know Maltese and will adapt very quickly to standard Arabic. Do this for a year or more. Then finally:
- Give the students training in one other regional version of Arabic, depending on which area they will be expected to start working in. By this time they should already have an idea of where they could make themselves most useful, and a decision will be made in accordance with that and which region has the largest need for them. Depending on the facilities available this could be done in the U.S. or may require sending them abroad.
These four years won't be enough to make the students capable translators from the start (translators need years of cultural experience anyway and this can't be rushed), but it will accomplish two things:
1) Make the language less intimidating by gradually moving towards standard Arabic only after Interlingua and Maltese instead of starting from day one with standard Arabic, complete with a different script and grammar and culture and everything else that combines to give the student the impression that "Wow, I'm seriously never going to learn this; time to give up and think about working in another field".
2) Give the students a better background in regional varieties of the language. There are a ton of articles that explain the problem agencies have with recruiting people that know Arabic but have no familiarity with any regional varieties, and are less useful than expected when listening to recordings / translating and analyzing documents.
Finally, Persian/Farsi is not as much of a problem considering
how much easier it is to learn. The only problem there is the impression that Persian is as hard as Arabic, so this fact just needs to be made more clear when thinking about trying to train more people in the language in the long term. Persian is basically a language of no great difficulty, masked in a difficult-looking exterior.
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