School of Arts and Sciences graduate student Marie Brown sits at the front of her Arabic language class, repeating the professor's sentences. Brown, an American Christian, has studied the language in other settings before matriculating to Penn last fall, but this is the first time she's using a beginner's level textbook with a professor certified to teach the language.
College junior Audrey Farber sits a few seats to the left, constructing a sentence using vocabulary written on the board. As an American Jew, Farber was unfamiliar with the language before beginning it at Penn last fall but took an interest after hearing her mother's stories about the time she spent as an exchange student in Lebanon.
A few rows behind, Salah Chafik answers the professor's question in a Moroccan accent and repeats sentences a bit more comfortably than his X classmates. Chafik is Muslim, and though he was born in the US, he spent most of his summers in Morocco with his extended family, who taught him bits of Moroccan Arabic dialect but never subject-verb agreements or conjugations.
The class is Intermediate Arabic, the third level for Arabic beginners. Brown, Farber and Chafik, whose different religions seem more like the start of a joke than anything else, come to the almost-daily class for disparate reasons, but once they're inside, background and skill set are blurred and the three are brought together by a clear, common goal: to become a strong speaker of Arabic.
Since 9/11, the number of Penn students interested in the Middle Eastern language has increased dramatically and steadily, echoing nationwide upsurges in enrollment figures. Last year, 103 students enrolled in Arabic language classes at Penn in the fall semester, and 85 enrolled in the spring semester, a dramatic jump from the years before September 11, when the figures were "considerably smaller," says Roger Allen, chairman of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilization Department, which now administers three Arabic language courses per semester.
There used to be only one section per level; now some levels have four sections.
Across the country, more than 20,000 people enrolled in an Arabic-language higher-education program in 2006, double the number who signed up from 1998 to 2002, according to projections from a study the Modern Language Association expects to release this month. "Other languages will show an increase (in the fall report), but the only language that might be as dramatic as Arabic might be Chinese," says MLA executive director Rosemary Feal.
Enrolling is the easy part.
Arabic text reads from right to left but the numbers go from left to right, punctuated by a decimal that is actually a comma in English. The shape of each letter depends on its placement in a word and the characters bear no resemblance to their English equivalents: the letter for a "ba" sound looks like a bracket turned on its side. Some Arabic sounds have no English equivalent at all.
Once students develop a command of these idiosyncracies, it's still a while before they can actually hold a conversation. Modern Standard Arabic, typically taught in American classrooms, is roughly parallel to Medieval English - used in literature and the Qur'an but virtually useless on the streets of Morocco, which happens to employ a different colloquial dialect from its 22 Arab-speaking neighbors.
But one version isn't more important than the other, and to focus solely on the conversational form would be to miss the point.
"You don't just have this one thing called Arabic and now you know it," says Penn Arabic lecturer Jamal Ali. "People who want to get really, really good, they're going to learn all the different varieties of Arabic, but they're going take a few years doing that. You're not going to get that after two years, you're going to get that after five to 10 years. You're going to study colloquial Arabic and formal Arabic and Qur'anic Arabic, you're going to take it all but it takes work, it's going take a lot of time."
At Penn, the study of Arabic is four-pronged: speaking, writing, reading and listening in Arabic are all treated with equal importance. The beginning weeks of the first semester are devoted to learning the alphabet, and from there, it's a smorgasbord of grammar, videotapes and conversations. Once students fulfill the Arabic language requirement - four semesters of Modern Standard Arabic - they can continue with more classes in formal Arabic or begin a course entirely on conversational Arabic. Though learning the colloquial is generally easy for a formal Arabic speaker, it still comprises a new set of verb patterns, vocabulary and other linguistic rules.
Education experts agree that Arabic is a more difficult language to learn than the traditional alternatives, French and Spanish. Not surprisingly, the student dropout rate is high among most Arabic language programs. "We estimate that 20,000 students are studying Arabic at the collegiate level, but not even 5 percent are likely to graduate with functional speaking proficiency," says R. Kirk Belnap, director of the National Middle East Language Resource Center at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Brown, Chafik and Farber, the students from Intermediate Arabic, illustrate the variety, both religious and motivational, present in most, if not all, Arabic language classes.
Chafik, for one, grew up speaking Arabic to his Moroccan family, but never learned the language formally. These days, Chafik says that learning Modern Standard Arabic not only has improved his communication with other native-speakers but also has helped him understand the Qur'an and other literary texts.
"When I go to a mosque now, everything is done in [Modern Standard] so I can understand a lot more proceedings and activities that go on," like sermons that are often delivered in Arabic before a prayer, he says.
Chafik adds that knowing and utilizing formal Arabic, or fus-ha, as Arab-speakers call it, help connect all Muslims who do not necessarily speak Arabic, since imam (religious leaders) speak in Arabic when giving sermons before Arabic prayers. "It unifies all Muslims. Even in non-Arab speaking countries, it's still the same process of having fus-ha," he says.
But Muslims are hardly the only students who have found studying Arabic rewarding.
Aaron Rock, a 2007 College alumnus, spent his junior year abroad in Cairo after studying Arabic intensively at Penn. He first grew intrigued by the language in 1994, when he moved to Jerusalem at age 10.
"There was this huge part of the city that I couldn't understand and was hostile to me," he says of his Jewish background clashing with his Palestinian neighbors. "I wondered what was behind that barrier."
Thirteen years later, Rock is studying on a Fulbright Scholarship in Cairo, where he practices his nearly perfect Arabic on a daily basis. He hopes to pursue a career in academia and research on the Middle East. Today, he says, his Arabic prowess has had a profound impact on his life.
During a second-year Arabic class, "I just fell in love with it . with the sources that opened up to me, being able to read the news, being able to listen to what's being said in the Arab world and understand it. . It opened up to me . the ability to really bypass these traditional barriers that separated groups, whether at Penn or in the Middle East [and] to engage in dialogue," Rock says. "It's amazing how much just the respect of knowledge of Arabic can do to break the ice. One picks up not just the linguistic literacy but also cultural literacy, which allowed me to build a lot of personal relationship within the Muslim Students Association and the Penn Arab Student Society. And once you build personal relationships, it's a lot easier to engage in dialogue with people and understand what is coming out of Arabic world."
Now living in a predominantly Muslim environment, Rock says that, as a Jew, his experience has been particularly fulfilling. He talks about his friendship with Khalil, a Palestinian American, whom he says is like a brother: "We would walk around Cairo and just chat with Egyptians. . Sometimes it would make them tremendously happy, but a lot of times, people would just scratch their heads not understand, [wondering,] 'how does this happen, how can a Palestinian and a Jew be friends?' And it's this sort of face-to-face breaking down stereotypes that's really amazing."
The demand for Arabic at the student level reflects a larger national push to produce Arabic speakers. The military, the FBI and the CIA have been aggressively recruiting people who speak the language, and the government wants to have 2,000 advanced speakers by 2009. In 2006, President Bush implemented the National Security Language Initiative, a $114 million effort to increase the study of foreign languages considered critical to US security, including Arabic.
Students and their universities are responding to this call for arms, but by and large, they have personalized the challenge to study the complicated language. Though they all sit in the same classroom with the same textbook, each student has a unique reason for being there.
Some, like College senior Elyse Monti, do see Arabic as a stepping-stone to government work and view a related career as a viable option. Monti, a fluent Spanish speaker, came to Penn and "wanted to do something different." Exploring her options, "I thought [Arabic] would be the language to know after 9/11. I thought we'd be having relations with the Middle East for a while so that's basically why I chose Arabic."
She studied abroad in Cairo all of last year and interned this summer at the US Embassy in Qatar. "I really want to use my Arabic and maintain it," says Monti, who after taking the equivalent of four years of Modern Standard Arabic, is taking a class where she reads Arabic texts relating to social science.
Despite her progress, Monti acknowledges that the language can be frustrating, and says that having to learn two sides - formal and colloquial - can exacerbate the challenge. "I remember the first time I got into a cab in Cairo and I told [the driver] where I wanted to go in Modern Standard and he just laughed. He understood me, but he just laughed. It's sort of frustrating that no one speaks it."
Because of the necessity to know both components, almost any Arabic instructor will say that spending time abroad in an Arab-speaking city is crucial to mastery of the language.
"I don't think you can really get on top of a foreign language unless you spend time in the target culture because there are so many habits and features of every culture which you need to know about," NELC Chairman Allen says. "In the Arabic world, there are so many things you need to know about how to behave and how not to behave . [even] the way you nod your head has different meanings. If you shake your head in Arabic, it doesn't mean no - it doesn't mean anything. The way to say no is to raise the head with the eyes shut. . Studying abroad is where you learn about differences between your culture and others . and it becomes less of a problem for you to adjust your behavior to a culture whose language you're learning."
Beyond politics and religion, some students opt to study Arabic simply because it's different, and regardless of the difficulties, there is a strong sense of motivation and persistence that pushes these students to devote so much time and patience to the language.
Farber opted to begin Arabic courses at Penn because it seemed like a "cool" language; Lenka Snajdroba was looking for something "exotic." A Wharton junior, Snajdroba hopes to pursue a business career when she graduates, and she knows that "there will be lots of opportunities in the Middle East."
For students like Farber and Snajdroba, Arabic loses its offbeat reputation and becomes a language that demands attention and focus just like any other subject, perhaps bizarre to people who have never seen it, but not to those studying it.
"A lot of people are always like, 'Oh my God! That sounds really hard!'" says College sophomore Jillian Dent, who is in her third semester of Arabic. "But it's not that different from learning German or whatever."
Like many Arabic students, Dent was "really sick" of studying a Romance language and wanted to do something different. She had spent her senior year of high school writing about the oppression of women in the name of Islam, a project that ultimately led to her interest in Middle Eastern culture. "Things aren't black and white, obviously, so I decided you need to learn a little about [the] culture" by learning its language, she says. This interweaving of language and culture, academics say, is crucial to the development of international relations and peace efforts around the world.
Language study at Penn falls under the aegis of SAS, which, as directed by Dean Rebecca Bushnell, has been working "to create more stable positions for language teachers so that they have full-time jobs with full-time benefits," Bushnell said. NELC is currently in talks with SAS deans to raise or lift the cap on the number of lecturers in foreign language that can be hired. "The cost of hiring new Arabic teachers is governed by the market, and right now, that market is hot," Allen said.
While it's true that demand has surged since 9/11, and six years later that interest continues to result in larger classes, there's no telling how long this rampant curiosity in Arabic will last, or where Arabic language students will end up five years after they graduate.
Most students and professors scoff when asked if grappling with such a complicated language frustrates them, because even if that frustration does exist, it's viewed as a means to an end, not a deterrent.
"Frustration is part of the classroom atmosphere," says Penn Arabic lecturer Mbarek Sryfi. "I feel good about it when students get frustrated because then they ask more questions and are more curious."
Sryfi, who has been teaching at Penn for four years, sees "all kinds of students" taking his classes. "The outcome is the same: whatever reasons pushed them to come to Arabic, [students] all end up tolerant, more understanding of [the] culture, of what's happening in the world," he says.
"I think a lot of it comes with practice," Monti, the College senior, says. "I especially feel that with Arabic, I was much more reluctant to practice it than [I was with] Spanish. I don't know, I was afraid that I was going to mess up, but it's inevitable, and you sort of have to just throw yourself out there"
