Modern Standard Arabic Attrition and State Stability: Why Prescriptive Arabic is Losing Ground to Arabī CSSA

Abstract

Recent quantitative research has established a statistically significant association between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) attrition and rising state fragility across Arab League countries. Using the SPH-LENS framework and an Arabic Attrition Index (AAI), Ahmed and Shadi (2025) demonstrate that declines in Arabic’s institutional role in education, science, and media precede increases in the Fragile States Index. However, their study inherits a conceptual ambiguity: it treats Arabic as identical with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA / al-ʿArabiyyah al-Fuṣḥā اللغة العربية الفصحى). Classical Arabic linguistic theory distinguishes lisān (language) from lughah (dialect), identifying Fuṣḥā as a historically privileged dialect rather than the Arabic language itself.

Drawing on Vernacularism, classical philology, and historical linguistics, this paper reinterprets the empirical findings by relocating the site of attrition from Lisān al-ʿArab to al-lughah al-fuṣḥā. We argue that what is measured as “Arabic language attrition” is, in fact, the institutional retreat of an artificially fossilized written dialect imposed by medieval grammarians. Classical authorities — particularly Ibn Jinnī and Ibn Khaldūn — recognized the legitimacy of all Arabic dialects and anticipated grammars derived from living vernaculars.

Reframing Ahmed and Shadi’s results through Vernacularism transforms the language-security narrative: the decline of Fuṣḥā does not indicate Arabic’s death but rather the re-emergence of natural vernacular plurality. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, where computational systems learn from naturally occurring linguistic data, artificially maintained registers lack long-term viability. The future of Arabic vitality therefore lies in Arabī / Contemporary Standard Spoken Arabic (CSSA) as the authentic modern Lisān al-ʿArab.