Requests for comment/The WMF needs to support dialectal Arabic more actively
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TL;DR: The people who shape Wikimedia's work in Arabic mostly come from only one side of the "dialects vs. Standard Arabic" debate, and that causes a representation problem. The other side of the debate exists but is significantly underrepresented here. This is especially true among people who have experience with WMF grants.
Well-represented side's view: "All encyclopedic and written work under the Arabic macrolanguage should be produced exclusively in Modern Standard Arabic. Other varieties of Arabic should not be used or supported as written languages."
Underrepresented side's view: "Arabic varieties such as Egyptian, Levantine, Moroccan, and Mesopotamian Arabic are living, indigenous languages. For many people, they are the only languages learned from their parents and the only ones they speak and understand comfortably. As such, they merit recognition and support through Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia editions, just as other languages around the world are supported."
(Also related: "diversity divides us" vs. "diversity makes us stronger" debate.)
Moving on to the details:
Linguistic diversity is a key message the Wikimedia Foundation shares with its donors and volunteers. However, I believe one can confidently say that, this is not reflected when it comes to Arabic. For instance, en:Levantine Arabic is the 33rd most spoken language in the world, yet we still do not have a Wikipedia in this language, while we proudly highlight that Wikimedia supports around 350 languages. Even the 2023-2024 annual report opens by emphasizing the number of languages we serve (see page 4 here).
It is true that Levantine Arabic is a low-resource language, but this alone does not explain why it is missing from our projects. Among the roughly 350 languages we already support, Levantine Arabic is in a far better position in terms of available linguistic and digital resources than a typical language we could pick randomly from the list. The absence of this Wikipedia edition cannot be explained by resource scarcity alone. The actual reason, unfortunately, is an unintended and long-standing skew within our very own community.
I understand that among our fellow Arabic-speaking Wikimedians there is a strong tendency to be "anti–dialectal Arabic," in the sense that many view dialectal varieties as a threat to the Arabic language. I would like to assure the global community that this is not how the situation looks outside of Wikimedia. Every year, new books are published in various Arabic dialects, new academic papers are written, new YouTube channels emerge, and new software applications are released that use dialectal Arabic without hesitation.
To remain consistent with these values, the Wikimedia Foundation needs to take active steps to reduce the significant support and funding gap between Modern Standard Arabic and the many widely spoken Arabic dialects. MSA already benefits from strong institutional support, visibility, and established infrastructure.
One of Duolingo's major competitors, Mango Languages, has supported languages such as Levantine Arabic, Egyptian Arabic and Mesopotamian Arabic for years. Google's NotebookLM platform now supports Egyptian Arabic to auto-generate educational presentations, videos, and podcasts in this language. Meta's No Language Left Behind initiative includes various variaties of Arabic, including Levantine Arabic, Tunisian Arabic and Mesopotamian Arabic. As seen from these examples, in the broader world, organizations and individuals are increasingly embracing dialectal Arabic as legitimate and valuable.
The Wikimedia Foundation is known for embracing linguistic diversity, but I have to say that we are now falling behind many other organizations in this area. This gap is not consistent with the messaging we present to our volunteers and donors, who expect us to lead when it comes to supporting the full range of the world's languages.
What we see outside of Wikimedia
[edit]Outside of Wikimedia, one can come across many authors, who are native Levantine/Egyptian/Moroccan etc. speakers, who do not hold such a strict stance against writing in dialectal Arabic. These people have a strong interest in culture and language, and one would expect to find people like them within Wikimedia as fellow editors. However, unfortunately, they are extremely underrepresented here for various reasons that need to be identified and fixed.
- Multi-Parallel Corpus of North Levantine Arabic. [1] In this work, the authors compiled a parallel corpus to support research in written Levantine Arabic; several of the authors are native Levantine Arabic speakers and used their linguistic knowledge to audit the translations.
- The Little Prince, translated into Levantine Arabic by Manar Aid, a native speaking author. [2]
- Syria, My Land. Video by Rana Makhlouf. [3] The author is a native Levantine Arabic speaker. The content is informational, focuses on Syria, and is presented in Levantine Arabic with its subtitles as the written component of the piece. (Note that the author has many similar videos with proper subtitles in Levantine Arabic.)
- Writing an Teaching Arabic with a Latin-based Alphabet -- The Example of Çukurova Arabic by Muna Yuceol-Ozezen.[4] The author is a native Levantine speaker and proposing a latin-based writing system for the Cukurova Arabic, which is a variaty of Levantine Arabic.
- The Syrian Encounters : The Experiential Journey to the world of Syrian-Arabic culture, food, history and language, by Hala Alzeat.[5] The author is a native Levantine Arabic speaker, the book introduces the readers to Syrian culture with Levantine Arabic pages with the corresponding English translations.
- (List to be expanded over time)
Gatekeeping within Wikimedia
[edit]Call to action
[edit]To fix this representation problem, I would like to end with a call to action: I urge the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, as well as the broader community, to work toward actively closing this gap. Meaningful progress will not be possible through volunteer effort alone. We need institutional support, targeted reach to external communities or individuals who can and are willing to help, and a commitment to ensure that dialectal Arabic receives the same support that many other languages already enjoy on Wikimedia projects. Even a small reduction of this gap would mean a lot.
Thank you for your consideration. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 03:31, 4 December 2025 (UTC)
Comments from the community
[edit]Below are the comments from the community. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 04:42, 7 February 2026 (UTC)
- The main reason why many people oppose branches of Arabic projects is because these dialects are spoken only. Modern Standard is the formal language used in books, news, etc.. Children learn MSA from school so virtually every Arab understands MSA in addition to the dialects. The links shown above only relates to the spoken language, not the written language. Since Wikipedia is written in a formal tone, I therefore oppose, although weakly, this ambiguous WMF call to allow the many Arabic dialect which will only cause fragmentation to the Arabic projects in general. ToadetteEdit (talk) 08:13, 5 December 2025 (UTC)
- Hi ToadetteEdit, thank you so much for responding to my RfC. What you wrote is clearly the dominant perspective among Arabic speaking Wikimedians. But the point of the RfC is that, the other side of the debate exists among native Arabic speakers, and they are heavily underrepresented within our community. And the ones within our community have no experience or interest in writing grant proposals. This causes a severe funding imbalance. When such a representation problem occurs, a non-profit like the WMF needs to actively try to fix it, not just leave it to its own course. Especially if the imbalance is against its very own mission statement and messaging. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 15:17, 5 December 2025 (UTC)