Amman, Dec. 21 (Petra) – The Ministry of Culture on Sunday organized a scientific seminar at its headquarters to mark World Arabic Language Day, observed annually on Dec. 18, under the title "The Future of the Arabic Language in Light of the Growth of Artificial Intelligence Technologies."

Minister of Culture Mustafa Rawashdeh said Arabic is one of the world’s oldest living languages and one of the five most widely spoken globally, containing more than 12 million words.

He noted that Arabic is not merely a means of communication but a repository of history and knowledge that expresses the voice of Arabs and serves as a mirror reflecting their identity. He said the language is distinguished by its beauty, eloquence, clarity, precise expressions, rhetorical and metaphorical characteristics, and its derivational capacity, as well as its ability to absorb technological developments, keep pace with the language of the age and of science, and serve as an official language of the United Nations.

The seminar was attended by Ministry Secretary-General Nidal Al-Ahmad and featured participation by Professor of Modern Linguistics at the University of Jordan Abdullah Al-Anbar, University of Jordan engineering professor Mohammad Zaki Khader, and Arabic language computing researcher and member of the Arabic Language Academy Mamoun Hattab, and it was moderated by Director of Studies and Publishing at the ministry Salem Daham.

During the seminar, Rawashdeh said Arabic served as the key vessel for conveying the message of Islam and the Muhammadan call to all humanity.

He said the language also formed a vessel for Arabic poetry, which preserved Arab values, customs, and knowledge, earning it the title "Diwan of the Arabs," and described it as the language of eloquence, contrast, metonymy, and metaphor.

Rawashdeh pointed to Arabic’s historical contribution to preserving global and human heritage through the translation of sciences, knowledge, and philosophy during the Abbasid translation movement, and to its enrichment of global knowledge through the contributions of Arab and Muslim scholars across sciences and humanities. He said Arabic dominated for centuries as a language of politics, science, and literature.

He added that Arabic has directly or indirectly influenced many other languages, including Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, Malay, Indonesian, Albanian, several African languages, and European languages, particularly Mediterranean ones such as Spanish, Portuguese, Maltese, and Sicilian.

Rawashdeh stressed Arabic’s ability to engage with modern technologies and underscored the need to increase Arabic cultural content in the digital space, noting that the ministry has launched several platforms aimed at expanding cultural content, including Thaqafa, Wathiq, Turathi, and other platforms linked to enriching national cultural content.

He said the greatest challenge facing Arabic today is the weakness among younger generations in using the language and their shift toward foreign languages.

In his remarks, Al-Ahmad said no one can stand apart from the rapid development in the digital world, calling for adapting work and research to keep pace with this vast and accelerating transformation.

Al-Anbar said language is inseparable from identity and represents the fortress to which people retreat amid mounting challenges to preserve cultural identity, stressing the importance of rallying around the nation’s identity, language, and cultural heritage.

He pointed to global concern over the debate surrounding modernity and artificial intelligence, stressing the need for language planning, future foresight, and intellectual effort to protect Arabic amid rapid digital developments, and for planning related projects through collective reasoning, linguistic landscape engineering, and confronting encroachment on the Arabic language.

Hattab said language is no longer merely a mirror of thought but, under artificial intelligence, has become part of the mechanism of thinking and its reconstruction, noting that the questions raised are no longer technical but existential in their civilizational meaning.

He said adapting artificial intelligence was once a reasonable concept when technology executed but did not learn, operated but did not infer. He explained that the world now faces intelligent language models that learn language, reproduce it, and contribute to shaping meaning, ordering what is acceptable, and forming the horizon of public thinking, adding that discussion of adaptation belongs to a historical phase that has passed.

He said the language model is no longer a neutral intermediary but has become an artificial intellect operating at the core of the relationship between word and meaning and between language and thought. He added that those who do not own the intellect do not possess the authority to retrain it, correct its biases, or direct its learning paths, and that reliance on others’ models, regardless of how rational it appears, keeps the language in a position of structural dependency.

Hattab said ownership of language models is no longer a technical option or a research luxury but a necessity of cognitive sovereignty, which he said rests on three interlinked pillars: ownership of the data that feeds knowledge and shapes its horizon, ownership of the model that learns from and reproduces that data, and ownership of the standards by which linguistic integrity, precision of meaning, and cultural impact are measured.

Khader said the digital revolution began about 70 years ago but has surged dramatically over the past three years through artificial intelligence, adding that the future holds even faster and greater developments and increased interaction among languages.

He reviewed the advantages and disadvantages of the digital revolution, noting that it has, in some respects, served language, and said the speed of change requires continuous adaptation.

Khader said learning Arabic in the West, China, and other regions has seen a notable increase, calling for preparing tools that enable non-Arabs to learn Arabic by keeping pace with technological science and artificial intelligence.

He stressed the need to address gaps between Arabic dialects and standard Arabic and to work on translating them through artificial intelligence and urged attention to terminology, most of which originates from countries producing digital and artificial intelligence sciences.

Khader affirmed that Arabic will endure but needs sustained support, stressing the need to expand and develop Arabic digital content, which currently does not exceed 0.5 percent of global content.

At the opening of the seminar, Daham said the event comes amid major challenges, particularly with the surge of artificial intelligence, stressing that Arabic is the identity and vessel through which people think. He said the language unites around 400 million speakers across a geographic area larger than the European continent.

He added that Arabic has preserved the connection of the nation throughout its history, encompassing Arabs and other peoples living together across this geographic space.

//Petra// AF

21/12/2025 22:31:22