Manifesto for Modern Standard Arabic, Not Egyptian, in Our Children’s Media and Media in General (Netflix, Disney, etc)

 

Manifesto for Modern Standard Arabic in Our Children’s Media and Media in General (Netflix, Disney, etc)

We, Arabic native speakers of North Africa, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Arabia—more than 400 million strong—reject the wasteful and divisive practice of dubbing children’s programs into local dialects, especially Egyptian.

We demand one voice for our children: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

Why Dialects Fail

1. If you insist on dialects, then standardize them.
   Turn Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi, or Gulf speech into full written languages with grammar, spelling, and academies. But you will fail. Why? Because:

   • Heritage: Islamic heritage is inseparable from MSA, unlike Christianity’s detachment from Latin.

   • Culture: Our culture is not Aristotelian–Cartesian, obsessed with codification. It is Ghazalian-Ibn-ʿArabian, imaginal, symbolic, deeply rooted in Semitic culture, Islamic spirit, and MSA.

   • Reality: No dialect can withstand competition with MSA, English, and French at once.

2. Why standardize a child-accent when the parent-language still lives?
   Latin was dead, so French and Spanish were born. MSA is alive—in schools, universities, mosques, literature, news, and shared culture. To replace it with dialects is absurd. Indeed, to replace a living parent-language with fragmented child-accents is not progress. It is absurdity and betrayal.

Why MSA is the Only Rational Choice

• Pedagogical: MSA builds literacy and prepares children for education. Dialects do not.

• Cultural: MSA unites Arabs across borders, dialects divide.

• Religious: MSA is the language of revelation, heritage, and identity.

• Economic: One MSA version is cheaper and more efficient than five or six dialect versions.

Our Call

We challenge streaming platforms—Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and others:
Stop wasting effort and money dubbing into dialects. Give us what unites us. Give our children Modern Standard Arabic.

Anything less is a betrayal of education, culture, and unity.

MSA or Nothing

This is the true heart of a civilization that still has a living language, a living heritage, and a living responsibility to its children.

MSA or nothing.