Subtitles section Play video
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Translator: khalid marbou Reviewer: Anwar Dafa-Alla
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Good morning!
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Are you awake?
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They took my name tag, but I wanted to ask you,
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did anyone here write their name on the tag in Arabic?
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Anyone! No one? All right, no problem.
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Once upon a time, not long ago,
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I was sitting in a restaurant with my friend, ordering food.
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So I looked at the waiter and said,
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"Do you have a menu (Arabic)?"
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He looked at me strangely, thinking that he misheard.
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He said, "Sorry? (English)."
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I said, "The menu (Arabic), please."
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He replied, "Don't you know what they call it?"
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"I do."
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He said, "No! It's called "menu" (English), or "menu" (French)."
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Is the French pronunciation correct?
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"Come, come, take care of this one!" said the waiter.
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He was disgusted when talking to me, as if he was saying to himself,
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"If this was the last girl on Earth, I wouldn't look at her!"
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What's the meaning of saying "menu" in Arabic?
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Two words made a Lebanese young man judge a girl as being backward
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and ignorant.
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How could she speak that way?
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At that moment, I started thinking.
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It made me mad.
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It definitely hurts!
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I'm denied the right to speak my own language in my own country?
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Where could this happen?
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How did we get here?
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Well, while we are here, there are many people like me,
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who would reach a stage in their lives, where they involuntarily give up
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everything that has happened to them in the past,
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just so they can say that they're modern
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and civilized.
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Should I forget all my culture, thoughts,
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intellect and all my memories?
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Childhood stories might be the best memories we have of the war!
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Should I forget everything I learned in Arabic, just to conform?
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To be one of them?
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Where's the logic in that?
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Despite all that, I tried to understand him.
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I didn't want to judge him with the same cruelty that he judged me.
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The Arabic language doesn't satisfy today's needs.
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It's not a language for science,
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research,
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a language we're used to in universities,
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a language we use in the workplace,
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a language we rely on if we were to perform an advanced research project,
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and it definitely isn't a language we use at the airport.
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If we did so, they'd strip us of our clothes.
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Where can I use it, then? We could all ask this question!
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So, you want us to use Arabic. Where are we to do so?
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This is one reality.
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But we have another more important reality that we ought to think about.
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Arabic is the mother tongue.
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Research says that mastery of other languages
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demands mastery of the mother tongue.
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Mastery of the mother tongue is a prerequisite for creative expression in other languages.
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How?
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Gibran Khalil Gibran,
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when he first started writing, he used Arabic.
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All his ideas, imagination and philosophy
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were inspired by this little boy in the village
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where he grew up, smelling a specific smell,
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hearing a specific voice,
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and thinking a specific thought.
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So, when he started writing in English, he had enough baggage.
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Even when he wrote in English,
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when you read his writings in English, you smell the same smell,
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sense the same feeling.
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You can imagine that that's him writing in English,
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the same boy who came from the mountain. From a village on Mount Lebanon.
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So, this is an example no one can argue with.
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Second, it's often said that if you want to kill a nation,
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the only way to kill a nation,
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is to kill its language.
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This is a reality that developed societies are aware of.
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The Germans, French, Japanese and Chinese, all these nations are aware of this.
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That's why they legislate to protect their language.
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They make it sacred.
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That's why they use it in production, they pay a lot of money to develop it.
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Do we know better than them?
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All right,
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we aren't from the developed world,
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this advanced thinking hasn't reached us yet,
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and we would like to catch up with the civilized world.
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Countries that were once like us, but decided to strive for development,
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do research,
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and catch up with those countries,
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such as Turkey, Malaysia and others,
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they carried their language with them as they were climbing the ladder,
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protected it like a diamond.
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They kept it close to them.
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Because if you get any product from Turkey or elsewhere
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and it's not labeled in Turkish,
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then it isn't a local product.
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You wouldn't believe it's a local product.
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They'd go back to being consumers,
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clueless consumers, like we are most of the time.
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So, in order for them to innovate and produce, they had to protect their language.
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If I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (Arabic),"
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what does this remind you of?
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It doesn't ring a bell, does it?
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Regardless of the who, how and why.
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Language isn't just for conversing, just words coming out of our mouths.
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Language represents specific stages in our lives,
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and terminology that is linked to our emotions.
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So when we say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence,"
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each one of you draws a specific image in their own mind,
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there are specific feelings
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of a specific day in a specific historical period.
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Language isn't one, two or three words or letters put together.
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It's an idea inside that relates to how we think,
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and how we see each other and how others see us.
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What is our intellect?
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How do you say whether this guy understands or not?
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So, if I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (English),"
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or if your son came up to you and said,
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"Dad, have you lived through the period of the freedom (English) slogan?"
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How would you feel?
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If you don't see a problem,
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then I'd better leave, and stop talking in vain.
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The idea is that these expressions remind us of a specific thing.
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I have a francophone friend who's married to a French man.
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I asked her once how things were going.
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She said, "Everything is fine,
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but once, I spent a whole night asking and trying to translate
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the meaning of the word 'toqborni' for him."
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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The poor woman had mistakenly told him "toqborni,"
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and then spent the whole night trying to explain it to him.
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He was puzzled by the thought: "How could anyone be this cruel?
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Does she want to commit suicide?
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'Bury me?' (English)"
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This is one of the few examples.
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It made us feel that she's unable to tell that word to her husband,
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since he won't understand,
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and he's right not to; his way of thinking is different.
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She said to me, "He listens to Fairuz with me,
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and one night, I tried to translate for him
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so he can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairuz."
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The poor woman tried to translate this for him:
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"From them I extended my hands and stole you --"
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(Laughter)
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And here's the pickle:
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"And because you belong to them, I returned my hands and left you."
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(Laughter)
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Translate that for me.
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(Applause)
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So, what have we done to protect the Arabic language?
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We turned this into a concern of the civil society,
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and we launched a campaign to preserve the Arabic language.
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Even though many people told me, "Why do you bother?
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Forget about this headache and go have fun."
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No problem!
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The campaign to preserve Arabic launched a slogan that says,
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"I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West."
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We didn't say, "No! We do not accept this or that."
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We didn't adopt this style because that way, we wouldn't be understood.
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And when someone talks to me that way, I hate the Arabic language.
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We say--
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(Applause)
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We want to change our reality,
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and be convinced in a way that reflects our dreams, aspirations and day-to-day life.
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In a way that dresses like us and thinks like we do.
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So, "I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West"
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has hit the spot.
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Something very easy, yet creative and persuasive.
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After that, we launched another campaign
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with scenes of letters on the ground.
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You've seen an example of it outside,
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a scene of a letter surrounded by black and yellow tape
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with "Don't kill your language!" written on it.
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Why? Seriously, don't kill your language.
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We really shouldn't kill our language.
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If we were to kill the language, we'd have to find an identity.
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We'd have to find an existence.
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We'd go back to the beginning.
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This is beyond just missing our chance of being modern and civilized.
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After that we released photos of guys and girls wearing the Arabic letter.
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Photos of "cool" guys and girls.
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We are very cool!
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And to whoever might say, "Ha! You used an English word!"
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I say, "No! I adopt the word 'cool.'"
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Let them object however they want, but give me a word that's nicer
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and matches the reality better.
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I will keep on saying "Internet"
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I wouldn't say: "I'm going to the world wide web"
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(Laughs)
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Because it doesn't fit! We shouldn't kid ourselves.
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But to reach this point, we all have to be convinced
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that we shouldn't allow anyone who is bigger
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or thinks they have any authority over us when it comes to language,
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to control us or make us think and feel what they want.
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Creativity is the idea.
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So, if we can't reach space or build a rocket and so on,
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we can be creative.
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At this moment, every one of you is a creative project.
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Creativity in your mother tongue is the path.
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Let's start from this moment.
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Let's write a novel or produce a short film.
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A single novel could make us global again.
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It could bring the Arabic language back to being number one.
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So, it's not true that there's no solution; there is a solution!
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But we have to know that, and be convinced that a solution exists,
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that we have a duty to be part of that solution.
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In conclusion, what can you do today?
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Now, tweets, who's tweeting?
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Please, I beg of you, even though my time has finished,
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either Arabic, English, French or Chinese.
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But don't write Arabic with Latin characters mixed with numbers!
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(Applause)
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It's a disaster! That's not a language.
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You'd be entering a virtual world with a virtual language.
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It's not easy to come back from such a place and rise.
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That's the first thing we can do.
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Second, there are many other things that we can do.
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We're not here today to convince each other.
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We're here to bring attention to the necessity of preserving this language.
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Now I will tell you a secret.
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A baby first identifies its father
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through language.
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When my daughter is born, I'll tell her, "This is your father, honey (Arabic)."
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I wouldn't say, "This is your dad, honey (English)."
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And in the supermarket, I promise my daughter Noor,
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that if she says to me, "Thanks (Arabic),"
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I won't say, "Dis, 'Merci, Maman,'" and hope no one has heard her.
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(Applause)
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Let's get rid of this cultural cringe.
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(Applause)