According to the BBC, Arabic is spoken by about 360 million people around the world as an official language, but it’s also the language of the Muslim religion in many other countries, as well as the first language of about half a million residents of Italy. In a cultural and linguistic landscape that gets more multifaceted every day, Arabic is the language with which Festivaletteratura 2024 began its series of events dedicated to the "other" mother tongues of Italian authors.

At Politecnico di Milano's Mantova Campus, Ravenna-based Tahar Lamri, writer, translator, and editor for the intercultural newspaper Città Meticcia, creates an interactive learning experience for a small crowd who were not put off by the impending rain. He starts by asking participants to share their names, promising that by the end of the class, he will write all of them on paper using the Arabic alphabet and give it to each person as a souvenir. He then proceeds to explain about the birth of alphabets and how the Arabic one works. In-between, he adds facts and anecdotes about what being Arab and reading and speaking Arab means, and answers participant’s questions about his experience learning Italian as an adult.

What emerges is a discussion about language, religion, and identity. It’s certainly easy to generalise about “Arab people” and “the Arab world”, but Lamri describes a situation that not only is multicultural, but also multilingual. He himself, born in Algeria in the 1950s, spoke his mother tongue, a Berber dialect, at home, and French and Arab in school as foreign languages (Algeria was a French colony until 1962). His own dialect includes loanwords from Italian, French and Turkish, reflecting the influences and relationships his country had with other Mediterranean countries. On the other hand, Arabic is the language of inscriptions, politics, and most importantly, the Quran, written 14 thousand years ago and still perfectly legible to every speaker of Arabic. Language is so important in the Quran that there are specific phonetic rules for pronunciation and Muslims feel a special, direct connection to the Creator through language.