From teaching non-Arabs Arabic to Arabization in 1950s Sudan

The study illustrates the early debut of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) discipline by discussing the Sudanese experience and its often-untold history. It represents a unique example in the TAFL field, for it is strongly connected to Arabization policies. In this context, the research narrates the establishment of the Maridi Institute, where Ḫalīl Maḥmūd ʿAsākir directed a group of experts between 1954 and 1960. This study reports on how a script shift project was devised in order to rewrite nine South Sudanese local languages in a modified Arabic script (Zande, Dinka, Bari, Moro, Lotuko, Shilluk, Nuer, Morli and Anuak), therefore to teach Arabic to non-Arab speakers, train prospective instructors and face the Arabization challenge within language transfer areas.

This study illustrates the early debut of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) as a discipline by discussing the Sudanese experiment and its often untold history. It represents a unique example in the TAFL field, for it is strongly connected to Arabization policies. In this context, the research narrates the establishment of the Maridi Institute, where Ḫalīl Maḥmūd ʿAsākir directed a group of experts between 1954 and 1960. This study reports on how a script shift project was devised in order to rewrite nine South Sudanese local languages in a modified Arabic script (Zande, Dinka, Bari, Moro, Lotuko, Shilluk, Nuer, Morli, and Anuak) and thus to teach Arabic to non-Arab speakers, train prospective instructors, and face the challenges of Arabization within language transfer areas.