Spoken Arabic,  “The Third Language”

ARC book1

This book is an attempt to implement what Tawfiq al-Hakim called for in the middle of the last century, so that we may contribute to unifying the Arabic dialects to some extent, so that the Arabic language becomes more flexible and closer to its learners.

This is a collection of articles written in the past by Adbul Rahman Chamseddine as intellectual or sentimental thoughts resulting from confronting some daily life situations. The articles are influenced by the writings of Tawfiq al-Hakim as well, in which he narrates ideas, situations and/or events.

“When I wanted them to be published, I saw that they were very appropriate to implement Al-Hakim’s Third Language Project, a project I adopted and advocated for, and I always try to apply it in my classes and with my students. So, I suggested changes to texts of my authorship, so as not to intrude on the writings of anyone else. I put the MSA original text followed by the modified text, in the third language, and then appended them with a list of the modifications that were based on a linguistic explanation as simple and logical as possible.”

It must be recalled that it is among the first attempts and cannot claim to be a complete and final study, but it may be the first building block in a long-term project for those who are interested in it among students and scholars. It should also be noted that these texts are suitable for teaching Arabic in speaking skill classes, especially if they are based on the skill of reading first, as the teacher can benefit from the texts of the book in building exercises for speaking skill.

Abdul Rahman Chamseddine