Derived from the Greek word διγλωσσία, which is defined as bilingualism, diglossia is a linguistic phenomenon in which a language has two varieties...
2 min read
30/10/2018
Things to consider regarding the Arabic language: 22 countries, 420 million speakers, 2 continents and 1 language. It may come as a surprise to learn that there is a shortage of Arabic content on the seemingly infinite world wide web.
Arabic vs. other languages
If you take into account the fact that there are around 260 million native English speakers worldwide, you will be stunned to see that searching for "How to make ice cream?" in Arabic only comes up with a set of 99,100 results, while the same search in English generates an astonishing set of 37,600,000 results. As infinite as the internet may seem, it is only as big as the user's language.
The first language used on the internet was almost certainly English. A couple of decades ago, it was estimated that English accounted for 80% of cyberspace. As time went by, other languages such as French, German, Spanish, and Chinese gained access to a huge part of this linguistic elite. Where was Arabic when this expansion took place?
How connected is the Arab world?
It was estimated that in 2013, only 37% of the Arab world was connected to the internet. This means that Arabic speakers represented 4.8% of the internet population. If you take a look at the article "Top 10 uses of the internet" published by EDN Network, you will find that most internet users spend their time checking their e-mails, downloading files, making friends and dating, job-hunting, or shopping. If we look closely, these uses mostly involve extracting content from the internet, as opposed to uploading it. If the already scarce number of Arabic users on the internet are engaging in these activities, it is no surprise that there is a striking imbalance between the number of its speakers and the amount of content available.Samples of Arabic language on the internet
The issue is particularly contentious when the search engine returns content that is irrelevant to the user's search or, even worse, in a different language. For example, I did a bit of research and I typed "Benefits of meditation" into Google in Arabic. Not surprisingly, I came across some content in English, despite my search words being in Arabic.
Another surprising result Google returned was "Things to be aware of in Britain," while my search words were "Things to do in London."
Conclusion
The behavior of the search engine demonstrates that Arabic is very under-represented in the digital world. When we perform a search using Google, we are actually searching Google's index of the web. Based on the relevance of the search words, Google serves you the best way it can. Because Google is not well-equipped with Arabic content, it delivers loosely related topics that contain about 25% of the words of the query. This, of course, is not at all Google's fault.
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But it's not all bad news. The Middle East is a huge market that has not been largely tapped into. Companies and businesses that do not provide their content in Arabic are missing out. Some major companies, such as Amazon and Canon Middle East have penetrated the Middle Eastern market and are focused on accommodating Arabic consumers by providing digital content in their language.
There has also been a series of initiatives in the Middle East to boost Arabic content available on the internet. Although slow-paced, these initiatives will hopefully help the Arabic content to expand in order to bring more symmetry between the size of the Arab population and the volume of content available to its speakers. After all, the language you speak can deeply shape your experience of the internet. Are you looking for more Arabic-related topics? Find more about Arabic on the internethere.