Debates in arabic media on arabic language (Within the scope of Al-Jazeera television programs)

Arabic language has been the subject of many TV programs and debates in the Arabic media over last twenty years. Since it is the language of the Qur'an, Arabic is not only a local/national language spoken by Arabs but also an international/universal language that interests all Muslims from religious as well as cultural aspects. Moreover, it was used as a language of science and philosophy in the middle Ages for a long time as a means of expression of the scientific and philosophical accumulation of humanity and played an important role in transferring this accumulation to European nations. More to the point, from the 19th century onwards, during the process of European states' invasion and colonization of the Arabic and Islamic lands, it gained significance both in socio-political and literary terms. Pertaining to such a broad spectrum in historical and cultural terms, Arabic language has been a subject of fervent debates in Arabic television programs. The focus of those debates, for pre-modern period, was mostly about dialects, fairgrounds, the relation of Arabic language with Quran, the change the language experienced with the Islamic conquests, purity of the language, the richness of the language in terms of included vocabulary, its role as a scientific language with the effect of translation efforts. As for the modern period the focus was the claims on the difficulty of its syntax and the related studies on tajdid, taysir and tareb, the efforts of improvement of Arabic language and related legal regulations, the link between native language and Arab nationalism, the effect of colonization on fushâ, the effect of Francophone on North West African countries and the efforts in those countries for the enlivenment of Barbary language, the effect of education in foreign language and media on Arabic language, the issue of education in native language, the mistakes in the approaches for teaching Arabic and the problems in schools for teaching fushâ, the relationship between fushâ and Quran, the relationship between fushâ and science, the relationship between fushâ and Arabic cultural heritage, the convergence of fushâ and ammiya (colloquial Arabic) and the efforts to reconciliate them, the dominance of foreign languages on Arabic, the efforts by Arabic language academia and the quality of those efforts, the efforts on creating a scientific dictionary and a common dictionary of fushâ and ammiya, the view that Arabic language is a holy language and the corresponding problems, the issue of Arabîzi, and the sympathy of developed foreign countries on native languages. In this study, 31 programs from the Al-Jazeera channel on Arabic language are analyzed in detail. These analyses showed that the major focuses of all those debates, one way or another, related to the issue of fushâ-ammice dichotomy and the issue of diglossia. Keywords: Arabic Language, Fushâ-Ammiya, Diglossia, Tareb, taysir, Arabic Language Academies, Arabîzi