By Mohammad El Sahily | Staff Writer
Lebanon has never been worse off than it is today. Economic collapse, cultural chaos, political corruption & paralysis, are now staples of the Lebanese public space. People have reached unprecedented levels of desperation and have mostly given up on the hope of reform or development, thus becoming extremely depoliticized and even dehistoricized. This has led to a vacuum, in which all sorts of reactionary and radical ideologies on the left and the right have emerged and now have a forum. The latest series of such assumptions is the so-called Lebanese language, believed to be a part of the “Lebanese identity”.
This language is being pushed as an alternative to the Arabic script which has been in use for almost a millennium in the Levant. In their belief that Lebanon is a historical entity with roots in ancient antiquity, proponents of a Lebanese language constantly argue for it as a delineating factor which protects Lebanon’s national identity. One argument used to justify this supposed language is that it symbolizes a break with Lebanon’s “forced Arabization”, which is attributed to the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634 AD, and the resulting alteration to the “indigenous” character of the region’s previous inhabitants.
Now, let’s take a look at this language. It is composed of Latin characters which substitute the spelling of the words we use in colloquial Lebanese. Such a use of Latin letters in our spelling is common, and it’s known as “arabizi” or “internet language”, mostly used on social media platforms, especially WhatsApp. However, this language wants to completely substitute the Arabic letters because they are “not indigenous”, and add letters and notations which are completely foreign to the everyday Lebanese citizen, even those who use “arabizi”. So why try to change the way we speak using a difficult spelling?
Lebanese nationalism is not patriotic: we have seen how chauvinists and irredentists throughout history have resorted to the claiming of some long-lost language, past, polity, or tradition as a solution to the problems present today. Historically, there was never a unique Lebanese language, and Aramaic and Syriac are not stand-alone systems of speech and thought which are employed today. I find it hard to believe that Lebanese language proponents are bent on any national or patriotic instance, but rather on an imaginary country with a specific ethno-nationalist character – one that is exclusionary to certain national groups or different traditions.
Those who are concerned with Lebanon’s national identity should perhaps pay attention to more current problems. People might think advocating for a different spelling system is an innocent nuisance, but it is absolutely not that. By trying to frame our problems as being caused by “Arabist corruption”, those Lebanophiles are diverting blame from a problem that’s actually real: our political class is the cause of our demise, and it has played on historical sectarian tendences to further its control. How about you solve the problems affecting our economy and political climate instead of (sometimes disingenuously) imagining yourselves solving a problem? Get out of your bubble and smell the coffee, the country is drowning and you think our most urgent problem is a language.
And by the way, who did Lebanophiles vote for in the past parliamentary elections? I bet I (and many others) can predict the answer to that question, disappointing but not surprising.