Jump to content

Requests for comment/The WMF needs to support dialectal Arabic more actively

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This is a subpage; for more information, see the Requests for comments page.

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

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

Call to action

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)[reply]

Comments from the community

Below are the comments from the community. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 04:42, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
There's also similar gatekeeping at Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Hassaniya Kowal2701 (talk) 23:28, 22 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

We had talked previously with TheJoyfulTentmaker about this type of effort. I don't speak Arabic and don't really understand many of the dialect related things. But efforts like these seem really valuable to me and I would provide my help in reaching out to Lexeme related communities for these efforts, if they're ever supported some day. Egezort (talk) 11:47, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Çurukova variety would be in a separate project. Rest of Levantine Arabic will remain in a different proposed project, unless there is a support of converting Arabic text into Latin script. Hatay people would be interested in contributing Çurukova Wikipedia. Ahri Boy (talk) 16:29, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much for commenting on this! Unfortunately, the current language proposal policy does not allow a separate project for Çukurova Arabic, since ISO considers it to be a part of Levantine Arabic. A different writing system does not allow a separate project, it requires a script converter. But that converter is not available on the Incubator, so there is no way for Çukurovan speakers to start contributing. This is one of the points we would need more active WMF support. We don't even have the MediaWiki interface in Levantine Arabic in Latin Script that Çukurovan speakers could use. We can't even add such subtitles to videos right now. My requests about this went unanswered. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 17:11, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Why is the Levantine dialect considered a language while the Çukurova dialect is not? Almajidy (talk) 03:49, 12 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Almajidy: Because en:ISO_639-3 cover Levantine and Çukurova under the same 3-letter code (apc), since they are considered mutually intelligible. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 04:28, 12 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@TheJoyfulTentmaker Just note: The United States Department of State already suspended issueing Diversity Visas, so any mention of your proposal around the "diversity" are already Null and Void at a galance. ~2026-28959-99 (talk) 00:45, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
IP, the existence or lack of any USA immigration programs is really quite irrelevant to this discussion of Wikimedia's product design strategy. Bernanke's Crossbow (talk) 02:00, 23 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Oppose Why should we have dialectal Arabic if we already have the true original Arabic that our dialects originated from—Standard Arabic? Also, the Arabic community generally does not accept dialects as separate languages. I can go to an Emirati, Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan, or even a Gulf Pidgin Arabic speaker and ask, “Do you consider your dialect a language, and is it suitable for academic purposes?” They would almost certainly say no. In addition, dialectal Arabic has little to no government or community recognition. Dialectal Arabic is also extremely diverse. For example, as an Emirati, I do not speak like a Kuwaiti, even though we both speak Gulf Arabic. As a Hayari Emirati, I do not speak like a Bedouin Emirati, and as someone from an inland area, I do not speak the same way as people from coastal areas. There is no real standardization whatsoever. If we treated every dialect as its own language, we would end up with over 100,000+ wiki languages.Almajidy (talk) 09:12, 10 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Also, we understand each other, and dialectal Arabic speakers can often understand Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) even without proper education. There are many uneducated people who still understand MSA, so what is the point of having a dialectal Arabic Wikimedia project?
    In my opinion, some users who want dialectal Arabic Wikimedia projects simply want a Wikipedia with their own rules. Almajidy (talk) 09:23, 10 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Oppose Per above, the proposer is only letting users hate each other speaks, is only spreading hates, and is only propagandaing their Arabic splittism, no need to categorize it, since that's the fact. --~2026-28533-20 (talk) 12:20, 12 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Vote struck, please log in to vote here NDG (talk) 12:15, 18 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Oppose Per above, Arabic should be re-unifyed, not continue splitted. --~2026-29936-18 (talk) 11:24, 18 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Vote struck, please log in to vote here NDG (talk) 12:15, 18 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    @NDG: RESTORED, THEY ARE COMMENTING, NOT VOTING, SIR. --~2026-30192-96 (talk) 03:06, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Struck as nonconstructive. Bernanke's Crossbow (talk) 02:02, 23 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Oppose I don't know why @NDG: wanna struck those who are against splitting, is this so-called user still a good adminship? If NDG still think they have rights to struck, then believe me, [threat redacted]. --~2026-30192-96 (talk) 03:06, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Requesting page protection. Ahri Boy (talk) 05:16, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Pinging @NDG and @NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh for immediate response Ahri Boy (talk) 06:59, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Done. //shb (t • c) 10:39, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    The three "oppose" !votes above have been stricken and the accounts blocked for creating illusion of support. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 11:15, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not sure how applicable this is but to me this reminds me of the Literary vs. w:Written vernacular Chinese debate. The Question Question: here, then, is whether dialectical wikis would not allow more people to contribute. i.e. whether almost every Arab can write Standard Arabic. If that is true, then I would oppose. (I would also not consider Wikipedia "academic purposes" but an effort to democratize knowledge, or in more normal words, put what we know in a single place that everyone can understand. Academics are a bunch of elite people who research and find new knowledge themselves, which is not what we do.) Aaron Liu (talk) 20:27, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Arabic dialects have different vocabulary and spelling, this is why democraticization of Arabic is crucial for the survival of dialects. Ahri Boy (talk) 22:53, 24 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    I realize that the Arabic dialects are distinct dialects. My question is whether almost every Arab can write Standard Arabic. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:56, 24 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    @Aaron Liu They can have varying degrees of proficiencies, and there are many dialectal Arabic speakers who can not understand Standard Arabic at all, depending on where they grew up or where they went to school. The situation of Levantine Arabic speakers in Çukurova is a great example of this. TheJoyfulTentmaker (talk) 23:36, 24 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    In that case, I am in Conditional Support. I'd appreciate more statistics on this but I'll take your word. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:54, 24 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  • This comment section reminds me strongly of Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia 2 which presented only a LLM regurgitation of misunderstood or falsified arguments. w:Wilhelm von Humboldt once said Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language and preventing various Arabic dialect speaking groups from having their wikiprojects (granting they pass new project policies) goes against every vision by the WMF. Overly nationalistic editors with their overly vulnerable ego being hurt by opening a dialectical project help no one and especially not the diverse overall Wikimedia community. --A09|(pogovor) 10:55, 6 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_comment/The_WMF_needs_to_support_dialectal_Arabic_more_actively&oldid=30643078"