Languages: Arabic, Mandarin
Spoken in Middle East & North Africa, China & Chinese territories
Haya is a Syrian-American living in WA. She attended school in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E and spent senior year at Skyview High School in Vancouver, WA. She will be a college freshman in 2019.
To become completely immersed in the inner workings of linguistics, to gain a genuine love and a profound appreciation for semantics, one must not disregard the cultures that thoroughly influence the foundations of the language itself. I'm a firm believer in realizing an intersectional scope of the world. For this reason, I would like to highlight the thread that ties society and privilege to the comprehension of language. While some might see this as an unorthodox approach to the study of linguistics, I think it is a long and overdue conversation that we must have with ourselves and our neighbors far and wide.
Growing up in the Middle East exposed me to the West’s modernized imperialism that disguised itself in the music, film and pop culture that set impossible standards for the Arab youth. From Disney Channel to Barbie, I was conditioned to believe that speaking English and succumbing to the Eurocentric ideal of being a White, blue-eyed woman is the only way for an Arab-American girl to truly be considered 'American’. Consequently, I hated that Arabic was my first language. In school, I would walk around my fourth-grade class telling everyone that I carried an American passport and shamelessly undermined my ability to speak my mother tongue. It was — and still is — a norm among the Arab youth to pretend that they are not bilingual as a form of self-degradation. The better you got at pretending, the easier it became to forget the shame that our White-washed TV shows and the unattainable, elite-adoring, Western standards brought to us — almost as a punishment for being Arab.
Contrary to popular belief, English is taught as a first language in this corner of the globe. Arabic comes in second, and French is our third. Thanks to France's illegal colonization of the Levant post World War I, the modern Arabic language consists of thousands of French derivatives: my favorite is 'بنطلون' (pronounced as bantalon) which translates to pants, derived from the French word 'pantalon'. From Urdu to Swahili, Arabic has a profound influence on more than forty different languages worldwide. This language has proved its tremendous power to the international community with its capability of withstanding the test of time by outlasting the rise and fall of numerous empires, and with its significant influence on the establishment of the Islamic religion. However, Arabic's intricate cursive alphabet is what seems to appeal to most non-Arabic speakers. When my American friends ask what my Arabic-engraved necklace means, they often confess their desire to learn the language because of how "pretty" the characters look. Arabic literature and its immeasurable impact on several Asian languages, the thousands of dialects within dialects that coexist stunningly, and the fragility that accompanies the pronunciations, are not considered valid reasons to learn the language. In a way, I am thankful for the misconceptions and the stereotypes that I've had to live with abroad because eventually, my frustration began flowering into pride for a language that I was taught to hate by the same people that now desired to learn it.
This sudden epiphany brought a form of healing that could not have come at a better time. My life-changing move to the United States at the age of seventeen, alone yet driven, opened up a door for self-reflection. In a socio-political climate that preys on the disenfranchised, and in a country where white people dare to challenge grocery shoppers who speak in Arabic as well as proudly harassing African-American children selling bottled water, I had to force myself to give up my privilege of living in a Western-enforced blissful ignorance. What genuinely put things into perspective for me was the NSLI-Y scholarship that I received for the summer of 2018. I was chosen to study Mandarin in Xian, China all the while living with a host family for six weeks. To my complete astonishment, Xian happened to be one of the Muslim-majority cities that existed delicately in a country which boldly established internment camps for the sole purpose of exterminating the Chinese-Muslim community. It hadn't taken me long to draw comparisons between Mandarin and Arabic; the 'Kh' and 'J' phonetic sounds, for example, were extensively used in both languages. Not to mention the comprehensive pronunciations that determine the meaning of a word and the accuracy that is required to precisely dictate the Arabic alphabet and Mandarin's characters. What stunned me the most was the Muslim Quarter that existed in central Xian. In an area that could not have extended farther than four blocks wide, thousands of ethnically Hui and Uyghur Chinese built a tiny metropolis that catered to the public an image of the Islamic influence that had engulfed the city for thousands of years. Verses of the Qur'an in Arabic were plastered on restaurant walls, and Middle Eastern antiquities were on full display. How remarkable it is, to be able to witness how one of the oldest languages in the world transcended borders to coexist in such a fragile balance.
One of my favorite memories from my language-intensive program in China occurred during my last week. I was visiting my host grandmother where I spent the afternoon making dumplings with the women. I was discussing the propaganda that Chinese schoolchildren are exposed to with my host brother when my host grandmother walked in with a stack of journals. She sat next to me and placed about twenty notebooks on her lap, where she opened a page that overflowed with tracings of Arabic letters. You could only imagine how surprised I was to learn that my sixty-four-year-old Chinese host grandmother spent hours of her day studying Arabic so that she could read the Qur'an. She asked if I could recite the religious text with her to compare our pronunciations. Just like that, the whole family gathered in the living room to listen to my reading of the Qur'an in Mandarin, while my host grandmother read her passage in Arabic, and together we corrected one another's diction.
This encounter made me appreciate what I had taken for granted all my life: my ability to speak Arabic. The same language that I was taught to loathe was the language that countless Americans could only wish to learn because of its beauty, and the language that the Chinese-Muslim community strove to learn because of its religious value. For this first time in my life, I was proud of my identity as a bilingual, first-generation Syrian-American.
Meet the Writer / Photographer: Haya Bitar
My name is Haya and I'm a first generation Syrian-American immigrant. I spent the first 8 years of my life in Saudi Arabia, then I moved to the United Arab Emirates, and finally for my senior year of high school I graduated in the U.S. Growing up with a Syrian family, Arabic was my mother tongue. I began to learn English in first grade and am now proudly bilingual. I was also taught French as a third language since Arabic is comprised of words and phrases that are derived from French (Turkish, Armenian, and Farsi also have quite the influence on Arabic). I had the incredible opportunity of studying in Xian, China for the summer of 2018 where I spent six weeks taking part in a language-intensive course in Mandarin, in addition to Chinese history and culture. I love to learn and travel!
Thanks for checking out New Semantics' FIRST piece of Volume 2!!! Be sure to check in next week for more fascinating insights on language and culture!
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