Arabic as a macrolanguage
Article published three days ago in The Economist: "Arabic, a great language, has a low profile: Part of the reason is that it is not really a single language at all", Johnson (10/18/18).
The article begins:
AMONG THEIR many reverberations, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 had a linguistic side-effect. Between 2002 and 2009 the number of university students in America learning Arabic shot up by 231%, making it a more popular subject than Latin and Russian. This was a "Sputnik moment": like the Soviet satellite, it shocked Americans into studying their adversaries.
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