Arabic

Arabic is notionally a Semitic language spoken by approximately 200–300 million people in an area from Oman and southwestern Iran to Morocco. In practice, when people say they are studying Arabic, they usually mean Modern Standard Arabic, a literary standard which is used in media, intellectual life, most printed matter, and diplomacy. Though this is true, it is important to note that each country of the Arab World has a dialectically variant form of Arabic (often referred to as Ahmea - lit. colloquial)

Modern Standard Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. While many speakers of local Arab languages are bilingual in Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic is also frequently used, even by non-Egyptians, due to its prominent role in Arab cinema. Levantine dialect is also understood by many Arabic speakers, due to its popularity in movies and pop music. Some Arab languages are somewhat intelligible (similar to French and Spanish), with the exception of the Maghrebi dialects of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Mauritania.

In the Five Colleges, Arabic his been generally offered at Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and UMass, as a well as through the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages, and Amherst began offering elementary Arabic in 2007. The most popular Arabic teacher was Smith's Mohammed Hassan, a prominent Arab linguist who is returning to his native Egypt this year. He will be returning to the Smith College in 2011.

This year, while Hampshire has not YET formally taught Arabic, the Student population of Arab speakers will be hosting events weekly, beginning on October 18th 2009.

Tentatively, they will be held on Sundays at 2:00pm in FPH 108 and are open to all five college students, staff, faculty, and the Hampshire College community. There will be lunch food at each meeting, subject to change but mostly pizza. The goal is to both speak in Arabic and to do studies of the countries of the Arab World. Each week, after the first meeting, we will be hosting a member of the five college community who will be doing a short presentation (in whatever form they so choose) on a country of the Arab World. We will attempt speaking in Arabic is much as possible but will accommodate all ability levels.

For More information please contact Leanna Pohevitz at ljp08@hampshire.edu

= Upcoming Meetings =

Arabic Students and Arab World Culture Upcoming Meetings and Explanations of proposed events for the day!

October 18th 2009
2:00pm FPH 108 A get to know the community day. We will begin with introductions in English, move on to introductions in Arabic (for those that deem it possible) and then discuss our plans for the rest of the semester, who wants to do presentations, who we should try to contact for the events, and any other information we need to share amongst the group. We will also take a look at the alphabet and spell each individual in the groups names (in calligraphy with MSA pronunciation).

The meeting was a definite success... While only five people could attend this meeting, two were from off Hampshire Campus which means the other Schools (Smith College and Amherst College) are getting the word out.

We decided at this meeting to first exchange e-mails, and discussed all kinds of future plans. We think the first goal is to have each of us do an introduction at next meeting, as well as have the three girls, Leanna, Lydia, and Alexa, who went to Turkey with Berna Turam, begin a discussion (both in Arabic and English) about Turkey. While it is not a predominantly Arabic speaking country, we believe it would be a nice start to the presentations!

Leanna will work on looking up facts and translating them to Arabic for next Sunday.

October 25th 2009
2:00pm FPH 105 This meeting got moved last minute so there was a little confusion but overall the dialogue was very good. We had a new member join who learned Palestinian dialect through her schooling in Israel, and so we ended up having a long discussion about some of the colloquial (for example, the addition of the b sound to the beginning of most verbs in Egyptian and Palestinian dialects) and other similarities. We also had discussions about our summer plans, and about Alexa going off to Syria next semester. We talked about her nerves and how excited we all are for her. We also discussed bringing a comedy The Three Musketeers in Arabic to the meeting on the 8th as it is an hour long show that can bring forth a lot of discussion. Alexa and Leanna will be presenting powerpoints on their summers on November 15th 2009! This is an assignment for their Amherst Arabic class but will be nice practice to have input from all those in the group!

November 1st 2009
Meeting was canceled for Halloween recouping!

November 8th 2009
2:00pm FPH 105

November 15th 2009
2:00pm FPH 108

November 22nd 2009
2:00pm FPH 108

November 29th 2009
2:00pm FPH 108

December 6th 2009
2:00pm FPH 108

December 13th 2009
2:00pm FPH 108