Dh1.3m international award to promote Arabic language

Dubai - The award will honour winners in five fields, with $70,000 (Dh256,900) each.

Personalities, artists and authors who contribute to the spread of the Arabic language will be rewarded as part of the fifth Mohammed Bin Rashid Arabic Language Award this year, officials have announced.

The Dh1.3 million award will also be linked to the Mohammed Bin Rashid Library (MBRL) once it opens next year to encourage teaching Arabic language to young generations and honour contributions in serving the language spoken by over 100 million people.

Bilal Al Budoor, secretary-general of the award and former UAE Ambassador to Jordan, said the Arabic language needs support as it became absent in the lives of young generations.

The award, which attracted over 1,300 nominations from 80 countries around the world since its launch, will honour winners in five fields, with $70,000 (Dh256,900) each. It will recognise outstanding initiatives and exceptional contributions to support the Arabic language in the fields of education, media, Arabisation, technology and the preservation and dissemination of Arabic linguistic heritage.

The award encourages exceptional contributions in serving the Arabic language, honours its pioneers and highlights successful and distinctive experiences in its dissemination and teaching.

The board of trustees will soon announce the time schedule for receiving submissions, the final evaluation and announcement of results.

A number of initiatives and campaigns will be developed in the coming period to promote awareness of the award and its branches.

The award includes 10 categories that are honoured annually. The first category will be allocated to the best project in the field of Arabisation and translation work in Arabic. In the field of information, the award will honour the best works in traditional media, such as television, Press or radio news programmes. In interactive media, the best creative design carried out on social networking sites will be honoured. In the field of technology and smart apps, the award will recognise the best smart app for teaching Arabic through computer programmes or smartphones and the best website for promoting Arabic.

Under the Arabic Linguistic Heritage branch, a category is dedicated to honouring the best initiatives that contribute to the preservation of Arab linguistic heritage through its collection, dissemination and making it accessible and easy to scholars and specialists through Arabic manuscripts, libraries and publishing houses.

Education received a large share of the award categories to include higher education and public school education, as it honours the best initiatives, projects and programmes designed and implemented by institutions of higher education to encourage the use of Arabic in colleges or universities.

It will honour the best initiatives that help to teach the Arabic language in terms of curricula or teaching methods, apart from celebrating centres and programmes specialised in teaching Arabic to non-native speakers, as well as assigning a category of initiatives that encourage reading in Arabic and raise awareness of its importance and facilitate access of books to readers.

sherouk@khaleejtimes.com

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