Free Republic

Leftward-leaning German politicians have lauded the decision to erect the nation’s first street sign in Arabic script as a “a symbolic expression of social inclusion.” This month, the North Rhine-Westphalian state capital of Düsseldorf has begun exhibiting the name of Ellerstrasse in Arabic letters: شارع إلَرْ. Touted as a campaign to underscore the diversity and international flair of Düsseldorf, the Arabic street sign has been placed in Oberbilk, a district with a particularly large number of people with Moroccan roots. According to a decision by the city’s “integration council,” there will eventually be bilingual street signs in ten different places...

Gibraltar finally joined the official list of British cities on Monday (Aug 29), after 180 years in which its status, granted by Queen Victoria, had been overlooked due to an administrative error. The British overseas territory bid to become a city earlier this year as part of the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee, but research in the National Archives established it had in fact been granted city status in 1842. "It is excellent to see official recognition given to the City of Gibraltar, a huge accolade to its rich history and dynamism," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in...

ACI MENA will operate from the campus of Erbil’s Catholic University.EWTN Global Catholic Network has launched an Arabic-language news service headquartered in Erbil, Iraq, Michael P. Warsaw, EWTN's chairman of the board and CEO, announced March 25, on the Solemnity of the Annunciation. The Association for Catholic Information Middle East and North Africa, or ACI MENA, will publish original news content in Arabic using a network of correspondents across the region. The news agency will operate from the campus of Erbil’s Catholic University (CUE). A ceremony marking the occasion was held in Erbil, which included Archbishop Bashar Warda of the...

I don't speak Arabic -- though I recently ordered the beginner module from Rosetta Stone which still sits in its wrapper on my desk shelf. (I am in the Arab world a lot however and learning more each trip) Perhaps after the conventions.But a friend, Foued Mokrani, speaks Arabic just fine -- and reported on his Facebook page the following after watching a film during a flight to Paris:I watched the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and noticed they translate the word ''gay" to ''pervert" in the Arabic subtitles!! Very dumb.Mokrani responded:Somehow there is no decent word to say...

In April, the language-learning app Duolingo added its 40th language to its program arsenal: Yiddish. A couple of decades ago, it would have been unthinkable for a mainstream non-Jewish language program to offer an expansive, comprehensive course in Yiddish. But Duolingo’s Yiddish addition only serves to reflect the increased global interest in learning a language that once had as many as 12 million speakers. Ladino, a Romance language of Sephardic Jews still spoken by hundreds of thousands worldwide, has also garnered much interest in recent years. Ladino classes, both online and in-person, are widely available to prospective learners. But while...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Two years ago, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns about the platform being used as a tool to trade and sell maids in the Mideast. After publicly promising to crack down, Facebook acknowledged in internal documents obtained by The Associated Press that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abusive activity” that saw Filipina maids complaining on the social media site of being abused. Apple relented and Facebook and Instagram remained in the app store. But Facebook’s crackdown seems to have had a limited effect. Even today, a quick...

With Ramat HaSharon approaching its centennial year, archaeological evidence indicates the Tel Aviv suburb’s history goes back much further than previously thought. “The excavation unearthed evidence of agricultural-industrial activity at the site during the Byzantine period – about 1,500 years ago. Among other finds, we discovered a large winepress paved with a mosaic as well as plastered installations and the foundations of a large structure that may have been used as a warehouse or even a farmstead,” said Dr. Yoav Arbel, who directed the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “Inside the buildings and installations, we found many...

Donovan Barnes, a first year student at Georgetown University, recently published a “viewpoint” article in the school’s student newspaper titled “Develop Gender-Neutral Language in Arabic.” Barnes’ March 25 op-ed in The Hoya expresses the opinion that “to aid the fight for gender inclusivity in the Arabic language, Georgetown students and instructors have the responsibility to work toward language that includes all gender identities, not just identities within the cisnormative male and female binary.” The student explained that he is studying Arabic at Georgetown and had “valid concerns” coming into the program because he is learning a language that is “radically...

With most of the votes counted and no decisive outcome as far as who the next Prime Minister will be, or if Israel will be headed to an unprecedented fifth national election in less than three years, one thing is clear, the big winners in Israel’s national election this week were Israeli Arabs. One might have said that a year ago, after Israel’s third national election in (what was then) a year. Then, the “Joint Arab List,” a faction made up of four Arab political parties running together, won a striking 15 seats in Israel’s Knesset (parliament). This made the...

And so today on the show, we are going to pause for a break, and we're going to re-air a really fun episode, one of our all-time favorites from the early days of THE INDICATOR a few years back. It's about the origins of the Sicilian Mafia. Here it is. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON, BYLINE: NPR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GARCIA: The year's 1872, and the landlord of a lemon farm just outside of Palermo in Sicily is having trouble with a local Mafioso. STACEY VANEK SMITH: The landlord is a surgeon named Gaspare Galati. And the Mafioso...

Berlin’s first Arabic-language radio station will have the potential to reach more than 100,000 Arabic speakers living in the German capital. The MABB media council for Berlin and the surrounding state of Brandenburg announced the approval of Radio Arabica on Thursday. Radio Arabica’s programming will cover life in Berlin, culture, news, comedy and sport. It will also play a mix of Arabic folk music, pop and modern music. Hansjürgen Rosenbauer, the head of the MABB media council, praised the expansion of “diversity” in the radio landscape. …

Full title :Exclusive — Ret. Lt. Gen. Flynn: Terror-Linked Nations ‘Cutting Deals’ with Mexican Cartels to Enter U.S. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), tells Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM that countries that are known to support radical Islamic terrorism are "cutting deals" with Mexican cartels for access to human smuggling routes into the United States. Citing photos from the U.S. Border Patrol component of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency on Friday, Gen. Flynn also told Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle, host of Breitbart News Daily, that there are signs...

<p>Moroccan lawmakers have unanimously approved a bill that confirms the Berber language’s official status, eight years after it was preliminarily recognized in a new constitution.</p> <p>The new law is designed to cement use of Berber – alongside Arabic – by government administration, local authorities, public services, schools and in cultural life.</p>

There has been no official mosque in Athens since Greece was liberated from the Ottoman Empire in 1821, though historical mosques survive as museums. However, nearly two decades of debate and planning are set to culminate in the opening of a new mosque in April, reports TASS. The mosque is being built on the territory of the former central parking lot of the Greek navy in the Athenian district of Votanikos. The imam will be elected by the administrative council and appointed by the Ministry of Education. Sermons will be mainly in Greek, though perhaps sometimes in English, the Secretary...

For over 800 years, Finnish has been Sweden’s largest minority language, but, thanks to the recent influx of asylum seekers from predominantly Arab-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Arabic has now replaced Finnish, Stockholm University researcher Mikael Parkvall argued in an opinion piece published in Svenska Dagbladet. The estimated number of Arabic speakers in the Scandinavian country of 10 million is “over 200,000.” According to this calculation, the number of Arabic speakers has doubled over the past decade, while the aging Finnish population has been shrinking. Parkvall highlighted the lack of official statistics on this matter, which...

BANGKOK, Thailand -- China's government sent more than one million majority ethnic Han Chinese to live uninvited in the homes of minority Uighur families in Xinjiang province and report if the Muslims display Islamic or unpatriotic beliefs which need to be forcibly reformed. "Had a Uighur host just greeted a neighbor in Arabic with the words 'Assalamu Alaykum'? That would need to go in the notebook," and reported to China's authorities, said American anthropologist Darren Byler. "Was that a copy of the Koran in the home? Was anyone praying on Friday or fasting during Ramadan? Was a little sister's dress...

A 25-year-old woman has been gang raped by Africans in a playground in central Stockholm. The woman contacted the police herself on Friday, who then arrested the three men the same evening. The arrest warrants show that the men are 18, 20 and 29 years old. Two are citizens of Somalia and the third in Eritrea. One of them needs interpreting in Somali and another in Arabic. Which means that they most likely are newly arrived migrants. Two of them are previously convicted. The 18-year-old has committed assaults and drug offences. The 20-year-old is convicted of several cases of theft...

The Sudanese government has cleared a shipment of Bibles believed to have been held in Port Sudan for six years. The Arabic-language Bibles were released two weeks ago and transported to the capital, Khartoum, after years of appeals by church leaders, a local source told World Watch Monitor. “Since 2011, government customs officials have delayed the clearing of several shipments of Arabic Bibles via Port Sudan, without explanation,” the source said, adding that it had left Bibles decaying in shipping containers at the port while the approximate 2 million Christians in the country were facing a serious shortage of Bibles...

Rowan W. Dorin, assistant professor of history, with the miscataloged parchments whose mystery he is working to solve. Credit: L.A. Cicero __________________________________________________________________________ When historian Rowan Dorin first stepped onto the Stanford campus in early 2017, he made it a habit to visit Green Library every week to dig through its collection of medieval documents and objects. After a few months, Dorin, an assistant professor of history specializing in medieval Europe, discovered something out of the ordinary. Three leaves of ancient parchment were labeled as a Hebrew translation of text about grammar, but its margins had Latin words like fish, capers...

The duchess was just two-years-old and her sister Pippa was eight-months-old when their parents decided to upticks and move to Amman in May 1984. As a manager for British Airways at the time, Kate’s father Michael Middleton jumped at an opportunity to work for the company in the Jordanian capital. There Kate would spend more than two years in the Middle East from the age of two to four-years-old, where she attended an English-speaking Al Saheera nursery. Here she would pick up the country’s language before learning her own mother tongue. Mr Middleton continued to work for BA and Carole...