5 ms·

There is a difference between literacy and fluency. Literacy is ability to understand a writing system. I am literate in the Latin alphabet. Fluency is abilit

There is a difference between literacy and fluency. Literacy is ability to understand a writing system. I am literate in the Latin alphabet. Fluency is ability to understand a language. I am fluent in English. Neither implies the other. You can be fluent but illiterate (the default until modern universal education), and literate but not fluent (I am literate in the Latin alphabet but I am not fluent in Italian). The claim that there's ~2 billion people who are literate in Arabic script and will laugh at you if you get it wrong, is more or less true. It's of course referring to the large number of people who can read from the Quran in Arabic but without understanding all the words.

AdamN 4y ago
2B still seems like a stretch. Can 2B people read (even with low comprehension) a basic paragraph in Arabic? My SWAG would be 1B people.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  If it's Quranic Arabic then the orthography includes vowel markings so vocalising it is considerably easier. The number of people who can vocalise Arabic without the vowel marks (e.g. a newspaper) is considerably less. But you don't need to be able to do that to notice any of the errors in the article.
- jmopp 4y ago
  A quick Google search seems to indicate that there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. It makes sense to assume they know enough Arabic to recgonise at the very least common religious set-phrases like the Bismillah or the Shahada. In my book this counts as "some degree of Arabic script literacy"
  - AdamN 4y ago
    You'd have to exclude everybody under 7 or so, everybody who is illiterate (in this very expansive sense), and those that are Muslim but do not read Arabic and do everything in translation. That might be a small group though and probably outweighed by all the non-Muslim Arabic readers (for instance I work with 2 Egyptians, one is Coptic and one is ex-Muslim and both can easily read Arabic).

AdamN 4y ago

2B still seems like a stretch. Can 2B people read (even with low comprehension) a basic paragraph in Arabic? My SWAG would be 1B people.

zarzavat 4y ago
If it's Quranic Arabic then the orthography includes vowel markings so vocalising it is considerably easier. The number of people who can vocalise Arabic without the vowel marks (e.g. a newspaper) is considerably less. But you don't need to be able to do that to notice any of the errors in the article.
jmopp 4y ago
A quick Google search seems to indicate that there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. It makes sense to assume they know enough Arabic to recgonise at the very least common religious set-phrases like the Bismillah or the Shahada. In my book this counts as "some degree of Arabic script literacy"
- AdamN 4y ago
  You'd have to exclude everybody under 7 or so, everybody who is illiterate (in this very expansive sense), and those that are Muslim but do not read Arabic and do everything in translation. That might be a small group though and probably outweighed by all the non-Muslim Arabic readers (for instance I work with 2 Egyptians, one is Coptic and one is ex-Muslim and both can easily read Arabic).