alugha speaks Arabic

What is a “world language”? What language should I speak or at least understand or be able to read to reach as many people as possible? Of course, when you speak English or Spanish you cover a wide range of speakers. Sure, with Chinese you reach 1,5 billion people, but they are rather “isolated” and mainly located in one country. So what language? German? French? Or maybe Portuguese? Now it’s getting complicated, we are, shockingly, getting a little political. At a time when the world seemingly breaks apart everywhere, where people have to live in and survive terrible conditions and eventually walk thousands of kilometers to flee and find refuge in other, safe countries. We are easily offended by a supposedly “aggressive”-sounding language whose emotional intonation we are not able to understand.

We are talking about the Arabic language. First of all, a few facts about it:

• With 295 million native speakers, Arabic is not a small player anymore.
• Over 424 million people are non-native speakers making this language one of the most spoken languages.
• Arabic is the official language of 28 countries on our globe, and with that of more countries than Spanish.
• One of the 6 official languages of the UN is, of course, Arabic.
• In Europe, Arabic is one of the most common NON-European languages.
• Arabic is written from right to left (RTL).
• The Arabic alphabet consists of 28 letters.
• Generally, letters in the same word are linked together on both sides by short horizontal lines, but six letters (و ز ر ذ د ا) can only be linked to their preceding letter -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet
• The Hindu numeral system is used in Arabic as it is used in Europe. Funnily enough, in Europe we call numbers “Arabic numerals”.
• Arabic also uses the digits 0-9.

For more information on this topic, we recommend this detailed article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic

Among others, Arabic is spoken in Egypt, Algeria, Ethiopia, Bahrain, Djibouti, Eritrea, Gambia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar, Comoros, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania, Chad, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Cyprus.

So what does all of this have to do with alugha? We are a multilingual video platform, and we have made it our goal that many people can reach us, our bloggers, our producers and subscribers, and we can only reach that goal when we are available in many languages. Unlike other platforms such as Vimeo, which is only available in 5 languages, we don’t want to put a ceiling on available languages. We make huge efforts in a more and more complex system so you can be “understood” starting from the interface. Since Monday, we have taken a huge step forward and we are very proud of alugha being available in Arabic with RTL support as of now.

In addition to English, German, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Hindi, Dutch and Chinese, Arabic is the next language we have made available for you.

Why do we do this? That’s simple! We want to set an EXAMPLE. The world is multilingual, alugha is multilingual, and we want that all of you understand each other. Language barriers mustn't be an obstacle or excuse for misunderstandings anymore.

However, our journey is far from over! It’s going to be exciting, we buckled down and much more is coming soon!

Your language is missing on alugha? You want to make some extra money? Then GO! We want YOU! You translate alugha and we pay you :) We look forward to every additional language.

A VERY SPECIAL thanks goes to Nabil Bakry for the great translation which worked excellently. Thanks to you, we get to open the doors to the world a little more.

Stay tuned.

#alugha

#doitmultilingual