2- Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

Egypt’s Ministry of Communications is amongst the first live web addresses

Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.

The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann). Read more »

(Reuters) – The further integration of Arabic language capabilities in internet and other technological architecture will grant millions access to the digital world, Microsoft and Google executives said.

One of the business sites of Internet search engine Google Inc is shown on a computer screen in Encinitas, California April 13, 2010.

As devices and applications become more ubiquitous in less developed countries, their content will grow and an embryonic e-economy should flourish, they said.

“(Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer and I a few years ago talked and believed Arabic would be an increasingly important language,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer. “And yet, because of the way the internet was evolving, it wasn’t a language that was getting a lot of use.”

But while Arab world internet use since 2000 has grown faster than anywhere else and access costs have shrunk, content still punches below its weight and ad spending remains tiny. Read more »

Arabic Chat Alphabet
The [Anglo-]Arabic chat alphabet, along with the analogous (Teuto-Arabic) Arabisch (in turn, anglicized “Arabish”)[citation needed], (عربيزي ‘Arabīzī [1], and Franco-Arabe (anglicized “Franco-Arab” or simply “Franco”), is used to communicate in the Arabic language over the Internet or for sending messages via mobile telephones when the Arabic alphabet is unavailable. It is mainly a character encoding of Arabic to the Latin alphabet (ASCII). Users of this alphabet have developed some special notations to transliterate some of the letters that do not exist in the Latin alphabet (ASCII).[2]
There are no strict rules for conversion into Arabic chat alphabet; the table below represents how Latin alphabets (ASCII) are primarily used. Usage varies greatly by accent and country.
It is an SMS language that allows SMS text messages to be sent in Arabic on a Latin-alphabet keypad. Arabic letters are replaced by letters that are phonetically equivalent, or nearly equivalent, in English or another western-European language. Arabic letters that have no Latin phonetic counterpart are represented by numbers, or numbers in conjunction with an accent mark. Read more »

There was a 338 percent increase in the study of Arabic as a primary major between 2002-2003 and 2007-2008, according to the Department of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics, released on April 7.
Because of U.S. economic and security issues, the U.S. government has played an active role in increasing interest in the study of Arabic over the past decade by providing funds for studies in that field.
Abeer Mohamed, a lecturer of Arabic at UCLA, said she believes the increased interest in Arabic began after the events of September 11, 2001. But she added that since then, the trend has changed into a genuine interest in the Arabic language and culture, not just in securing the U.S. economy and security.
Mohamed added that people want to be educated about the Arab people and their culture in order to understand and improve relations with the Arab world.
Mohamed said while interest in Arabic was sparked by the events of September 11, 2001, the growing interest in the field has yielded positive results. Students who study Arabic become interested in the culture and explore further studies in that field, which reveal various contributions to science, literature and exploration by Arab scholars.
“In my classes I teach language, but I teach culture through language,” she said.
Besides the increased interest in Arabic civilizations and cultures, another reason for the trend is the new career opportunities that have opened up to people with a background in Arabic, as a result of the tense relationships between the U.S. and the Middle East as well as new business endeavors in the area. Read more »