On February 21, 2012, the Department of Modern Languages and Translation within the Faculty of Letters at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK) celebrated International Mother Language Day; a celebration of the theme, proclaimed by UNESCO, “Discovering the Other, the Elsewhere, the Self”.

Following the welcome speech by Dr. Samar Hage, Rev. Fr. Karam Rizk, USEK Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Letters, elaborated the major achievements of the Faculty and explained the connotations of the ‘Mother Language’ term. He stressed the importance of it “… considering that the mother is the source of life and language is the source of expression. And life without expression would rather be like a voiceless statue”.

The first session started with a speech by Prof. Tanios Njeim, Head of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature, who presented the results of a survey on Mother Language, which had been conducted on a number of students. He concluded that “The Lebanese can naturally combine his [her] Lebanese patriotic belonging, his [her] national belonging to the Arab world, and his [her] civilizable meeting with other human beings”.

The second speech was delivered by Dr. Rosie Ghannage, Head of the Department of English Language and Literature, who shed light on a study she had conducted on a sample of 100 people who had not learnt English and had not successfully pursued their university studies. She presented some of their daily conversations as examples and concluded that these people borrowed terms from the English language. She stated that this was due to the fact that English was an international language, which prevailed in a number of areas, particularly those of trade, education, sciences, the Internet, cinema and television.

Afterwards, Dr. Sandro Cappelli, Professor of Italian Language, discussed the problems of similarity between the Italian language and its various dialects.

Dr. Talal Wehbe, in his speech, cited extracts from the book The History of Ages by Estephan Douaihy; shedding light on the various grammatical, syntactical, lexical and phonetic structures, which are not considered permissible in traditional syntax. He showed that treating these structures from the perspective of sociolinguistics revealed the relationship between Patriarch Douaihy and his cultural and historical environment.

The second session began with a speech by Dr. Andree Affeich, who stressed the importance of developing and updating the teaching strategies of Arabic language within the Arab world, in order to more easily facilitate the communication process for those who seek to learn this language.

Dr. Nader Siraj, then discussed the language of young people. In his speech he presented his experience in studying the development of the language of young people throughout the last decade, and how it had been affected by the impact of media and information technology, including social media and e-chats.

Dr. Youssef Eid in turn stressed that, despite its dynamic history, the Arab language has never before experienced such a distinguished and fast development as it is experiencing nowadays. He stated that this is due to the revolution in the field of communication, which has imposed itself on language with all the related interaction and exchange.

At the end of the second session, Dr. Joseph Chraim, Head of the Department of Modern Languages and Translation, in his speech, explained that language is essentially a group of coherent and interconnected systems, such as the phonetic system, the syllabic system and the communication system. He also underlined that “… colloquial Arab language aims to simplify the Arab language system and borrow foreign terms, according to its needs, in order to facilitate the communication process among speakers”.