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Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society

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There is a great deal of value in this report. However, it does not squarely face the profound problems caused by Arabic diglossia i.e. using Modern Standard Arabic for writing and formal speech and the numerous Arabic "dialects" for normal conversation.

Modern Standard Arabic is based on the Arabic of the Quran and has the same relationship to the spoken forms of Arabic as Classical Latin has to modern French or Italian. The prestige of the language of the Quran in Islam, and the fact that Modern Standard Arabic is similar throughout the Arab world, have combined to support the opinion among many Arabic speakers that their native spoken language is "bad Arabic". Of course, Modern Egyptian or Moroccan Arabic is no more "bad Arabic" than the language of Madrid is bad Latin. The tremendous barrier to education and modernization of diglossia is described in "Language Education and Human Development Arabic diglossia and its impact on the quality of education in the Arab region" http://literacy.org/products/ili/pdf/OP0002.pdf.

An analogous situation was overcome in Europe during the renaissance by the development of the vernaculars as literary vehicles. In all likelihood, something similar will have to happen in the Arab world by either adopting educated spoken Egyptian Arabic as a universal standard or by the development of a few regional standards based on the educated speech of major regional cities.